2001-2010

from allmovie:
A serial killer dispassionately discusses the nuts and bolts of his grisly avocation, as well as the youthful traumas which helped to mold him into a psychopath, in this disturbing independent drama from Germany, based on a true story. Young Jurgen Bartsch (Sebastian Urzendowsky) was raised in a family where his father (Walter Gontermann) barely acknowledged his existence and his mother (Ulrike Bliefert) displayed an inappropriate degree of affection toward him. When he reached puberty, Bartsch (played as a teenager by Tobias Schenke) was a young man confused and bitter about his growing sexual maturity, and possessing a deep hatred of those around him. Read More »

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sensesofcinema article :
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(…)the 1990s have witnessed the unprecedented development and modernization of the South Korean film industry, encouraged by multi-faceted efforts from the government. The creation of the Chonju/Jeonju Film Festival in 2000 matched the desire of involving South Korea in a cutting edge international film culture. In addition to homages to Asian (Hou Hsiao-hsien) or European (Chantal Akerman) auteurs, the Festival hosted a number of events devoted to digital filmmaking(…)Read More »

A mother who has recently been incarcerated refuses to give up on her young son, no matter how fragile their connection may now be.Read More »

Two filmmakers leave to Macao in an adventure of discovery of a city-labyrinth, multicultural and mysterious, where the memories of the childhood – featured memories by the lived reality in Macao – have a dialog with the memories of the East built by the codes of the cinema and the literature – memories lived on a featured reality-, creating a testimony which tries to raise the veil on the past and the present time. A personal album of physical and emotional geography, structured as an investigation disguised as a thriller, where the puzzle of the history challenges the reality.Read More »

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lotwise, a young husband appears to be cheating on his wife. He thinks she is having an affair with her cousin. She retreats to a large upstairs room covered in cobwebs and is trying to will herself into becoming an insect, just like the character in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

House of Bugs is an impressively constructed tale, flashing forwards and backwards in time as well as dodging between different characters’ viewpoints. It’s beautifully acted and slowly builds to a creepy dream-like climax.Read More »

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João Vuvu, a widower with no family, except for a son who is doing time for a double murder and an armed bank robbery, lives alone in his own, large, sunny house in an old wealthy neighborhood of Lisbon.
Filmed as he was terminally ill, Come and Go is Monteiro’s minimal goodbye to a cinema—and a city, Lisbon—he loved. “João Vuvu” (Monteiro) is an elderly libertine who spends his days riding the creaking trams up and down Lisbon’s streets, feeding birds the wrong things in leafy-green parks, speaking alternately poetically, philosophically, and illicitly to the poorly paid women who clean his apartment, and discussing art, literature, politics, and more with various strangers and apparitions. Read More »

In 1944 falangist Spain, a girl, fascinated with fairy-tales, is sent along with her pregnant mother to live with her new stepfather, a ruthless captain of the Spanish army. During the night, she meets a fairy who takes her to an old faun in the center of the labyrinth. He tells her she’s a princess, but must prove her royalty by surviving three gruesome tasks. If she fails, she will never prove herself to be the the true princess and will never see her real father, the king, again.Read More »

Summary by Paul Gaita:
The premise behind the Up series is deceptively simple: take a cross-section of children at age 7, ask them about their hopes for the future, and then return every seven years to mark their progress. However, the results of these experiments, launched in 1963 by Britain’s Granada Television, are anything but mundane, and their revelations about society, maturation, and the human condition were compiled into seven extraordinary films.Read More »

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Hermann Nitsch was born in Vienna in 1938. While studying graphic illustration, he became interested in religous art. He made copies from Rembrandt’s 100 Gulden Blatt and Christ Crucified, and from other religious themes by artists such as Tintoretto and El Greco. Other drawings Hermann Nitsch made at this time were strongly influenced by Cézanne, Klimt and Munch, amongst others. From around 1957 onwards, the depiction of Dionysian revelry and ceremonies began to feature in his work.Read More »