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Deep fractures within a family dynamic begin to surface during a getaway to the Isles of Scilly.
…As much as a downbeat comedy of bourgeois mores, Archipelago is a sort of claustrophobic horror story, set in a place of no easy escape. This is Hogg’s Shutter Island, if you like, although the madness is more discreet, in the English style…Read More »
The Sobibor uprising in 1943 in Poland was investigated by Mr. Lanzmann many years ago when he was filming “Shoah” and his interviews with a participant named Lerner date from then. The director felt that the Sobibor uprising, which led to the closure of the extermination camp by the Nazis after many escaped, was too important to be a small part of his epic documentary. Now he has returned to this little known story.Read More »
Synopsis;
A troubled and perverted family find their lives intruded by a mysterious stranger who seems to help find a balance in their disturbing natures.
A father, who is a failed former television reporter tries to mount a documentary about violence and sex among youths. He proceeds to have sex with his daughter who is now a prostitute and films his son being humiliated and hit by classmates. “Q”, a perfect stranger somehow gets involved and enter the bizzare family who’s son beats his mom, who in turn is also a prostitute and a heroin addict…Read More »
This is a great documentary about the North Korean soccer team that staged a series of improbable upsets as they advanced through the 1966 World Cup. More than just a sports documentary, it’s a fascinating look at the hermetic nation of North Korea, as well as 1960’s England fascination with their little known or understood guests.Read More »
Summary: “The politics of slavery and the follies of nation-building highlight Danish director Lars von Trier’s thought-provoking follow-up to the director’s 2003 drama Dogville, featuring The Village’s Bryce Dallas Howard in the role originally played by Nicole Kidman, and shot in the same stage-bound style as its predecessor. Shortly after leaving Dogville, Grace (Howard) and her father (Willem Dafoe) wander into a gated Alabama community still operating under the tenants of slavery. Appalled to stumble across a brutal scene in which a white master is viciously lashing his slave (Isaach de Bankolé), Grace hastily intercedes and pleads with the abusive man to treat his workers with respect and dignity. When merciless matriarchal plantation owner Mam (Lauren Bacall) dies shortly thereafter, the remaining slaves, who have never tasted freedom and only known life under “Mam’s Law,” implore the sympathetic Grace to help ease their turbulent transition toward democratic rule, with disastrous results.” (All Movie Guide)Read More »
Kanichiro Yoshimura is a Samurai and Family man who can no longer support his wife and children on the the low pay he receives from his small town clan, he is forced by the love for his family to leave for the city in search of higher pay to support them. In his search he joins a notorious clan, known as the Shinsengumi where he does as much as possible to get money. Looked at as a money grubber,Yoshimura proves his strength physically and mentally by being loyal to his honor. During the dramatic period, with the rise of the Emperor and the fall of the Shogun. Yoshimura shows us the struggle of life in a personal way, by changing the lives of the people he meets and the way life is looked at.Read More »
Raúl Ruiz is one of the great cinematic self-perpetuators, like Louis Feuillade and Jacques Rivette—a film like this gathers a motion and a rhythm that makes it feel like it could on and on, self-generating new stories and new characters ad infinitum. Based on the novel by Camilo Castelo Branco (whose writing has been the source for Oliveira’s similarly fatalistic romance, Doomed Love), Mysteries of Lisbon is, to paraphrase a line from one of its many characters used to describe a disastrous relationship he had, a game that turns into a bourgeois romantic drama, to which I would add, that turns into a game. It starts—as all stories must?—with an orphaned boy questioning his parentage and falling into a fever, and out of that starting point the film evolves less as a story than a cartography of characters crossing points in space and time.Read More »
A homeless musician finds meaning to his life when he starts a friendship with dozens of parrots.
In San Francisco, there are at least two flocks of largely wild parrots who flock around the city. This film focuses on the flock of cherry-headed conures (and a lonely blue-headed one named Connor) who flock around the Telegraph Hill region of the city and their closest human companion, Mark Bittner . Through his own words, we learn of his life as a frustrated, homeless musician and how he came to live in the area where he decided to explore the nature around him. That lead him to discovering the parrot flock and the individual personalities of it. In a cinematic portrait, we are introduced to his colorful companions and the relationship they share as well as the realities of urban wild life that would change Bittner’s life forever.Read More »
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Very often films which are defiant of genre categorisation can easily come across as messy and imprecise, but in Ira Sachs’ “Married Life,” he blends dark comedy, suspense and stylish melodrama into a contemporary throwback, conceptualised from a male perspective, to the film noir facet of the glamour of the 40’s in a wholesome package that keeps the viewer on their toes every step of the way. Audiences will either revel in the manner in which the film strays from a singular course or they will find annoyance in the seemingly directionless film, with an insubordinate mixture of tones and principles, in a way that very much resembles reality. What the film does not manage to do is balance its daring concept will an entirely fulfilling outcome, and perhaps “Married Life” is too modest for its own good.Read More »