2001-2010

-Synopsis-
Arty film-within-a-film revolves around seven people with little in common whose lives collide.

A day in the life of a group of men and women in Hollywood, in the hours leading up to a friend’s birthday party.Read More »

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Shot on a digital video camera by the then 14-year-old Hana Makhmalbaf, Joy Of Madness is, in the words of its precociously talented young director, “a documentary on the surface but a feature film in essence.”
Partly it’s an idiosyncratic account of Hana’s elder sister Samira attempting to cast her own film, At Five In The Afternoon, with non-professionals in war-scarred Kabul in autumn 2002. It’s also a revealing portrait of a shattered society still traumatised by its experiences under the terrifying rule of the Taliban.Read More »

synopsis
Jan Dara grows up in a house lacking in love but abundant in lust. He quickly picks up the sinful way of life of the man who married his mother after she became pregnant from being raped. His ‘father’s’ mistress welcomes the young boy into her literal bosom. Wanting badly to know his real father, Jan leaves the house, only coming back after Khun Luang’s daughter falls pregnant out of wedlock. Jan does a favor to his ‘father’ by marrying her, even though he is deeply in love with the mistress. The truth about his birth, as Jan will later learn, is as confusing and messed up as his present life and the lives of those around him.Read More »

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A handful of lackadaisical crooks are on a wild goose chase across Europe in this comedy. Carlos (Jeremy Strong) is an underworld kingpin who has lost a leather shoulder bag while traveling through Poland and wants it back, the sooner the better. Carlos orders one of his underlings, Harry (Detlev Buck), to find it, but Harry is too busy with his sexual fantasies about the good looking blonde that works at his car repair shop, so he calls up Schorsch (Georg Friedrich), a second-rate thief who resembles a down-market version of Edgar Winter, and hands the assignment over to him. Schorsch is ambivalent about the request, and tries to pass it along to Mao (Pia Hierzegger), who is the first person down this chain of criminal slackers who has a good reason for not looking for the bag — she’s busy looking after her daughter. The search for the bag finally falls to Max (Michael Ostrowski) and Hans (Raimund Wallisch), two guys who run a hot dog stand; Max also sells drugs on the side, while lightweight Hans gets high of the fumes from Max’s marijuana and eats a large percentage of their wares.Read More »

Trainee designer Kasumi has married her employer in Tokyo, the manager of a design workshop, and has had a two-year affair with one of his clients. She and her unsuspecting husband are vacationing in Hokkaido with her ex-lover and his wife when their five-year old daughter Yuka disappears without a trace. Distraught, Kasumi clings to the idea that Yuka is somewhere alive and safe. She returns to the spot every year, hoping to find a clue. Meanwhile her marriage nearly collapses, and her ex-lover’s marriage does collapse. On her fifth visit to Hokkaido, she is shadowed by Utsumi, a detective who has his own ominous reasons for wanting to be involved…Read More »

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Daniel Eisenberg’s quiet, voyeuristic portrait of Chicago shrouded in darkness draws us back to the beginning of cinema: to the Lumieres and Albert Kahn’s “Archives of the Planet” to long takes by a fixed-camera with a fixed-lens to images that unfold in durational time. Confronting one-hundred years worth of cinematic conditioning, accomplished through montage and editing that has accelerated the way we experience time, Eisenberg meticulously edited his footage to avoid the chronological thrust of a narrative while evoking the rhythms of a city at night, long a fascination of filmmakers. Eschewing the conventions of fiction and non-fiction, SOMETHING MORE THAN NIGHT embodies the heightened sensual experience of place, time and memory.Read More »

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After claiming to be visited by his dead father’s ghost, a young man with sleepwalking problems (Hugo Arana) enters into a sexual relationship with the neighborhood hottie (Anotella Costa), a spiritual-mystical type who’s all too willing to be his guide through the Kama Sutra, as well as to teach him how to hold in his wad past 81 thrusts. Eventually, Arana discovers he can materialize in far-off lands when he bones — as though sex were the spice from Dune. (Sample post-coital line: “Venice is incredible!”) This, mind you, is basically played for giggles, with writer-director Eliseo Subiela maintaining a gentle dreamy-absurdist tone that feels like Buñuel minus the anticlericalism (if that makes any sense). Cheerfully inscrutable, with a deftly sustained, calmly deranged performance from Costa, it unfortunately can’t figure out an ending and so just stops. There’s a sexual metaphor for that condition, right?Read More »

A drama set in the days leading up to the 2008 Presidential election, and centered on a high-end Manhattan call girl meeting the challenges of her boyfriend, her clients, and her work.Read More »

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We all know that the white-bread cookie-cutter suburban lifestyle has its own dirty secrets, but when his camera explores the limits of this seemingly serene and ubiquitous American lifestyle, Larry Clark gives us a horrifying yet touching glimpse of what happens behind finely paved driveways and cute lawns.

The film itself portrays so many “unshowable” taboos—a threesome between three adolescents, a teen who masturbates on camera while asphyxiating himself, a tough-love alcoholic father attempting to give his son a blowjob—that you are tempted to delegate the film to nothing more than a provocation film. Yet, frighteningly, Larry Clark is able to pull off filming these morally antagonizing subjects with so much perception, light, and even humanity that he leaves the viewer stunned—stuck between laughter and disgust, horror and compassion, not knowing what we should feel or what we are.Read More »