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Award-winning director Fatih Akin takes us on a journey through Istanbul, the city that bridges Europe and Asia, and challenges familiar notions of east and west. He looks at the vibrant musical scene which includes traditional Turkish music plus rock and hip-hop.Read More »
Joyce Chandler (Trish Goff), a young divorced woman and recovering alcoholic, moves into a Manhattan apartment that seems a bit too secluded to be true. It is: Upstairs lives Charlotte Bancroft (Ally Sheedy), a woman with a wall of obliviousness who can turn even an ‘apology’ into a guilt trip, Charlotte persists in making Joyce’s nighttime hours a living hell. As the torture continues, Joyce starts to lose her grip on her job, her health and her sanity. It’s a heck of a price to pay for having your own place.Read More »
“Down In The Valley is the ideal project for Jacobson, who has already shown his affinity for marginalized, outlaw figures in Criminal (1994) and Dahmer (2002). His Harlan – part rootless romantic, part self-reliant individualist, part gun-toting fantasist, part self-appointed hero, part deluded psychotic – is the embodiment of the American Dream in all its schizophrenic contradictions; and by serving all at once as critique of, homage to, and requiem for, the nostalgic values that Harlan tries to uphold, Jacobson’s film dramatises the powerful hold that the cowboy myth continues to exercise, both as a genre and as a wider ideology, over the modern American psyche.Read More »
Synopsis
Today the North Pole is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. The Arctic ice cap is less than half the size it was 50 years ago. This radical climate change has thus begun to open the ice-packed Northwest Passage between Europe and Asia, and some scientists predict that the transoceanic maritime route will soon be permanently ice free during its ever-longer summers.Read More »
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Something of a hybrid between the sardonic humor of a talkative Otar Iosseliani or Béla Tarr and the vérité-like, social realism of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is a thoughtful and incisive slice-of-life comedy on the impersonalization (and desensitization) of institutional health care. Exploring similar issues of entrenched bureaucracy as Moussa Bathily’s Le Certificat d’indigence that serve to impede the proper dispensation of proper medical care (and, more importantly, lose sight of the face of humanity behind human suffering), the film unfolds as an absurd subversion of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych in which the isolative process of dying becomes occluded in the pettiness, moralizing, helplessness, and coincidental distractions that invariably occupy everyday life as the lonely widower and retired engineer, Larazescu, is scuttled from one hospital to another throughout the evening after suffering from a bout of migraine and nausea. As in Tolstoy’s novella, the process of death does not alter the process of living, but rather, becomes only a momentary distraction in an eternal – and seemingly interminable – human comedy.Read More »
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You cannot help but think of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre during a shot in The Ordeal where the camera spins across the leering, giggling faces of a twisted inbred family and their blood-covered, shrieking victim, and you really cannot help but think of it when they cut to an extreme close-up of the victim’s eye darting nervously back and forth. We’ve seen this movie before, where an innocent (played here by Laurent Lucas) has his car break down in the middle of nowhere. He is taken in by an eccentric innkeeper (Jackie Berroyer), and for a while The Ordeal is an intriguingly freakish character study of an older man falling in love with a younger man, believing him to be his dead wife. But their insinuating dialogue eventually gives way to a sadistic (and familiar) torture tale. Read More »
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A young photographer and his girlfriend discover mysterious shadows in their photographs after a tragic accident. They soon learn that you can not escape your past.Read More »
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Winnie Leung is a lonely woman that likes to make puppets and write her diary, and she misses her boy-friend Seth Lau, who left her after breaking up their relationship. Winnie leaves messages in his mail box and unsuccessfully tries to contact him in his job. When she meets Ray Fan, she tells him that his resemblance with Seth is amazing. Ray moves to her place and when Winnie’s next door snoopy neighbors calls the police because of the smell in her apartment, a dark secret is disclosed in her diary.Read More »
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The rise and fall of a family in Shanghai. Once wealthy and capitalist, the family unraveled during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. Their home, once a French concession mansion, was converted into a multi-family dwelling. Years later, the matriarch of the family announces that she is dying. When her four grown children return, it becomes the first time the family has been under one roof in decades.Read More »