2001-2010

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Rare is a film like Eugène Green’s Le Monde Vivant (The Living World), one of such humor, wit, whimsy, and spirit told in a mode so strict, formal, and minimal. It is a fable, or a fairy tale, or a certain way of looking at reality if you like, but it is impossible not to suggest a child-friendly and cheerful homage to Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac. The Bresson comparison is inevitable, what with Green’s frank simplicity in framing, his deliberating speaking and minimally performing actors (resembling Bresson’s “models”), and most importantly his respect not just for each individual shot, movement, and line of dialog, but in the accumulation of these things.Read More »

Stanislavski has nothing on Sergio, who leads experimental acting workshops for the grade school set. This comedy will forever change the way you look at child actors.Read More »

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A fable of innocence: thirteen-year-old Aviva Victor wants to be a ‘mom’. She does all she can to make this happen, and comes very close to succeeding, but in the end her plan is thwarted by her sensible parents. So she runs away, still determined to get pregnant one way or another, but instead finds herself lost in another world, a less sensible one, perhaps, but one pregnant itself with all sorts of strange possibility. She takes a road trip from the suburbs of New Jersey, through Ohio to the plains of Kansas and back. Like so many trips, this one is round-trip, and it’s hard to say in the end if she can ever be quite the same again, or if she can ever be anything but the same again.Read More »

Non-ko (36-sai Kaji Tetsudai), 7th film directed by Kazuyoshi Kumakiri. Stars Maki Sakai and Gen Hoshino (Shakerock). Nobuko commonly called Nonko who is 36 years old and a once-divorced woman returns Shinto shrine that her family runs, to help out around the house. There is no drive and no place to belong, just a backwards little country town. The only thing she does is riding her bicycle and going to the bar to drink with the owner, an another divorcee. She cannot remember the last time she had sex. One day, Nonko encounters a young man named Masaru who has great expectations about selling chicks at shrine’s festival. Masaru is rather naive and pitiable, but this earnest and straightforward younger man puts a smile back on her face, and she gradually becomes more emotionally and physically receptive…Read More »

Friendship and principles are put to a test in the circle of Jakarta’s social elite which can be as turbulent as the city’s slums.Read More »

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With the death of a billionaire engaged in illegal practices, his billion-dollar fortune is up for the grabs. As his art collection is being prepared to be sold at an auction, two Turkish thieves from Germany are hired to steal valuable paintings from the art collection. Meanwhile, Seckin the fashioner designer – also the brother of Binnur, wife of the late billionaire – prepares for a fashion show in the same hotel that the robbery is going to take place. With the intervention of police, the beautiful model and her ex-lover, a hip papparazi, the two “Laz” mafia bosses seeking revenge, and the getaway driver straight out of Selcuk Erdem caricatures, the robbery is bound to go wrong. Prepare for a twist at the end as the plot unfolds towards a climactic ending…Read More »

Film about Sakamoto Ryōma. The focus is on Oryo, the maid who became Ryoma’s wife and lived with him for one year before his death. Directed by Jun Ichikawa.Read More »

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Ex-Los Angeles cop turned private eye Kline travels to Hong Kong in search of Shitao, the missing son of a powerful pharmaceutical conglomerate boss. Enlisting Meng Zi a friend and a former colleague now working for the Hong Kong Police, Kline follows a faint trail left by the ethereal Shitao. The path leads to local gangster Su Dongpo and his beautiful, drug addicted girlfriend Lili. But Kline is distracted from his search, haunted by memories of the serial killer Hasford whose ‘body of work’ was the reason Kline quit the police force. Will Kline once again need to lose his mind to find his latest quarry?Read More »

Is being hit by lightning a random natural occurrence or a predestined event? Accidents, chance, fate and the elusive quest to make sense out of tragedy underpin director Jennifer Baichwal’s captivating new work, an elegant cinematic meditation on the metaphysical effects of being struck by lightning. To explore these profound questions, she sought out riveting personal stories around the world–from a former CIA assassin and a French storm chaser, to writer Paul Auster and improvisational musician Fred Frith. The philosophical anchor of the film, Auster witnessed his friend get struck dead by lightning as a teenager, and has been wrestling with its import on destiny ever since. In a neurological experiment, Frith improvises with his guitar to demonstrate the ubiquity of electricity in our bodies and the universe. Visually dazzling and aurally seductive, Act of God singularly captures the harsh beauty of the skies and the lives of those who have been forever touched by their fury.Read More »