2001-2010

Today Iranian cinema is one of the most highly regarded national cinemas in the world, regularly winning festival awards and critical acclaim for films which combine remarkable artistry and social relevance. Iran: A Cinematographic Revolution traces the development of this film industry, which has always been closely intertwined with the country’s tumultuous political history, from the decades-long reign of Reza Shah Pahlevi and his son, the rise of Khomeini and the birth of the Islamic Republic, the seizure by militants of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and the devastating war with Iraq.Read More »

AllRovi
The true story of a handful of Mormon movie buffs and their efforts to clean up Hollywood hits (and make money doing it) are chronicled in this documentary from filmmakers Andrew James and Joshua Ligairi. In Utah, a state where a significant number of residents are members of the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints, a number of video store owners found it difficult to find popular films that their customers would find suitable for family viewing. One shop stepped forward with the notion of creating edited versions of recent hits, with nudity, adult language, drug use and violence clipped out using digital editing software. Calling their product “Cleanflix,” the sanitized versions of titles such as Titanic, The Big Lebowski and The Matrix were an immediate success, and a number of other Utah video stores followed suit. However, when Cleanflix and similar services began making their product available via mail order and the internet, not everyone was happy about it. The studios that owned the copyrights on the original films filed suit against the edited video services, asserting they were selling films that were not rightfully theirs, and a number of leading filmmakers (including Steven Spielberg, Steven Soderbergh and Martin Scorsese) launched a well-publicized campaign against movies being edited by outside parties for commercial use. Some of the edited movie dealers continued to operate in defiance of legal injunctions, though one found himself involved in a most unexpected scandal. Cleanflix was an official selection at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. Read More »

Fate brings together two unhappy people in this drama from Turkish filmmaker Tayfun Pirselimoğlu. Hamdi makes and sells wigs from a small shop in Istanbul. Hamdi isn’t much of a businessman, and doesn’t care much about his shop — or anything else for that matter since he was diagnosed with cancer. One day, a middle-aged woman named Meryem comes into Hamdi’s shop; she has long and beautiful hair, and informs him that she wants to sell it. Hamdi is struck by the woman’s barely concealed anger and sadness, and he wants to know more about her.Read More »

A liberal interpretation of Henrik Ibsen’s play Little Eyolf. When their only son dies from a sudden accident, a rift breaks Alfred and Rita’s seemingly trouble free marriage, and they rush headlong into catastrophe. As they do so, theirs and their friends’ lives are changed for forever.Read More »

Synopsis: Director Ken Loach and writer Paul Laverty team up again for the romantic drama Ae Fond Kiss. The filmmaking team’s third film set in Glasgow, this story involves a mixed-race relationship that causes problems for all involved. Casim Khan (Atta Yaqub) lives with his Punjabi-born Muslim family in Scotland. He wants to open a nightclub with pal Hammid (Shy Ramsan), but his parents have arranged for him to marry his cousin Jasmine (Sunna Mirza). Then he meets Irish schoolteacher Roisin Hanlon (Eva Birthistle), whom he quickly falls for. After calling off his family-approved engagement, Casim is ostracized by his father, Tariq (Ahmad Riaz). Meanwhile, Roisin runs into a concerned priest (Gerard Kelly) when she tries to get a job at a Catholic school. Ae Fond Kiss won several prizes at the Berlin Film Festival in 2004. -Andrea LeVasseur (AMG)Read More »

IMDB:
Nina, an end-of-teenage orphan with mental problems, starts a new job as a garden cleaner when she meets Toni. They fell in love with each other, but soon Toni starts betraying Nina. In the meantime, Francoise is picked up at a psychic department of a Berlin hospital by her husband, Pierre. After seeing Nina, Francoise believes that she has found her kidnapped daughter Marie, but neither Toni nor Pierre believe her. Nina is unsure about what to think… Read More »

Quote:
The phrase ‘Catching Out’ describes the act of hopping a freight train. In the documentary film “Catching Out,” the adventure begins on the porch of a grainer hurtling through the arid expanse of the Mojave Desert. The journey continues into the unconventional terrain of an American sub-culture. The film features a seasoned eco-activist named Lee, a young nomad named Jessica, and a tramp couple named Switch and Baby Girl. In three interwoven stories, “Catching Out” follows these contemporary trainhoppers as they navigate between the constraints of society and the freedom of the road.

In the opening sequence, as passing scenery floats and blurs across the horizon, Lee describes the visceral experience of hopping a train. Switch and Baby Girl enjoy the view through the door of an open boxcar. Jessica recounts the thrill of her first freight trip and asserts, “It changes your perspective completely.” Her boyfriend, Dan, recalls, “I just absolutely fell in love with the lifestyle and with the trains and with the misery that accompanies it all.”Read More »

A documentary on the relationship between fashion designer Yves Saint-Laurent and his lover, Pierre Berge.Read More »

In “Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”, Linda Williams put moving-image pornography on the map of contemporary scholarship with her path-breaking analysis of the most popular and enduring of all film and video genres. Now, fifteen years later, she showcases the next generation of critical thinking about pornography and signals new directions for study and teaching.”Porn Studies” resists the tendency to situate pornography as the outer limit of what can be studied and discussed. It moves beyond futile feminist debates and distinctions between a ‘good’ erotica and a ‘bad’ hard core. With revenues totalling between ten and fourteen billion dollars annually – more than the combined revenues of professional American football, basketball, and baseball – this volume acknowledges that visual, hard-core pornography has emphatically arrived as a central feature of American popular culture. It is time, Williams contends, for scholars to recognize this and give pornography a serious and extended analysis. The essays in “Porn Studies” exemplify this effort. The contributors examine varieties of pornography from the tradition of the soft-core pin-up through the contemporary hard-core tradition of straight, gay, and lesbian videos and dvds to the burgeoning phenomenon of pornography on the internet.They explore, as examples of the genre, individual works as divergent as The Starr Report, the pirated Tommy Lee/Pamela Anderson honeymoon video and explicit Japanese ‘ladies comics’ consumed by women.Read More »