2001-2010

Melancholia (Lav Diaz, 2008)

Lav Diaz’s Melancholia is an eight-hour meditation of sorts on the maddening persistence of sadness in this world, can logically be divided into three parts and an epilogue. The first part details the experiences in Sagada of Julian (Perry Dizon), Alberta (Angeli Bayani) and Rina (Malaya Cruz) as they refashion themselves into different drastic identities as part of the radical process that Julian created in order for them to cope with the losses of their loved ones. The second part is set in Manila, with Julian and Alberta living their real lives and addressing the scenarios and situations that accompany their melancholic predicament. Read More »

“Very sweet, wryly funny in spots, but always haunted by war (described sparingly but never shown). It was based on a stage play and betrays its theatrical roots in some of the pacing and staging. It’s slow, perhaps too slow for action film fans, but it’s not boring. Rather, it’s delicate and precise like tea ceremony.Read More »

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Abouna is a gently heartbreaking look at the lives of two boys growing up impoverished and fatherless in Chad. Filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun mixes in telling bits of documentary realism with his story of the two boys’ lackadaisical search for their father. The filmmaker takes his time with the tale, lingering on details, like a long shot of the two boys meandering across a field, roughhousing and walking on their hands. Haroun also pointedly displays posters for Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, Idrissa Ouedraogo’s Yaaba, and Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise outside the little movie theater that the boys visit.Read More »

A man turns to violence after losing those he loves most in this taut drama from Iran. Ali (Rafi Pitts) is a reformed criminal who lives in a small flat in Tehran with his wife Sara (Mitra Hajjar) and their young daughter Saba (Saba Yaghoobi). While he’s grateful for the chance to support his family honestly, Ali doesn’t much care for his job as a night watchman or the noise and stress of city life; Ali heads off to the woods and clears his mind by hunting as often as he can. One day, Ali comes home from work to an empty apartment; he has no idea when his family has gone, and when they don’t return, he goes to the police. Read More »

Made for Milton Keynes Gallery’s 10th anniversary using images from its archive and language from its press releases and catalogues.

“This is an attempt to capture the atmosphere of a classic British institution with rudimentary pictures. Its formal qualities coincidentally reference the gridded Master plan of the host city Milton Keynes”Read More »

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Oscar winning director Sydney Pollack takes a sharp sideways turn with SKETCHES OF FRANK GEHRY, a documentary about the noted architect. Usually known for making grandiose productions such as THE FIRM and OUT OF AFRICA, Pollock adds a genuine curio to his filmmaking resume with this movie. Although the two men have been friends for years, Pollock thankfully bypasses the opportunity to pay a fawning tribute to Gehry, instead presenting a well-balanced portrait that offers both positive and negative commentators the chance to etch their thoughts into celluloid.Read More »

Set in a tight-knit, extremely conservative island community off the Southern coast of Iran where all women wear burkas, this film begins as an investigation into the suicide of a woman named Samireh. Her husband callously says that while he cares about the lives of his kids, women’s lives are cheap. However, the women the director Oskouei interviews – many of whom were married off at age 12 or 13 – stand up for themselves and discuss their difficult existences. Oskouei relies mostly on close-up or medium-shot interviews, and as usual, displays his gift for framing people dynamically in tight spaces.Read More »

Two brothers, both military, come to a kind of campus, where their third brother is kind of ill : he keeps in his room, not speaking anymore.
Why ? What can one do for him ?

One can think of Bresson with humor, or a poetic musical. The less you know about the movie before watching it, the better it is. It is too simple and too fragile to resist too much description.Read More »

Synopsis:
Serious boffin Ivan (Fedor Lavrov) arrives in unnamed town from Novosibirsk to take up a post at institute run by Sergey Sergeyevich (Pavel Lubimtsev) and is immediately put in charge of Unit 7 where the particle flux experiments are taking place. Maximum reading a subject can produce is 977, hence title, and fetching waif Rita (Klavdia Korshunova) does just that, but seems to disappear mysteriously from the sealed observation rooms every time the experiment is conducted. Overtones of Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” and “Stalker” are bolstered by hints, so subtle those just reading the subtitles won’t get them, that action takes place in the ’70s.Read More »