2001-2010

José Araújo, an attractive, happy traveling salesman, arrives at the little town of Jardim dos Caiacós where he meets “Turco,” owner of the grocery and Dualiba’s father, a virgin forty-year-old woman. Excited at the pretty woman, Zé Araújo does what nobody else had ever dared to do. Dualiba tell her daddy what happened, and he looks for Zé Araújo to make an irrefutable proposal: marry his daughter. Years later, apparently resigned to his fate, Zé Araújo discovers he’s the joke in town. Unexpectedly, there’s a change from an attractive traveling salesman into a fearless Ojuara, who rides into the Northeatern Brazilian backlands to fight for the unprotected along a journey full of adventures and love conquersRead More »

Review from IMDB:

The Title, Sadly, Says It All, 23 October 2006
10/10
Author: gradyharp from United States

‘La Femme de Gilles’ (‘Gilles’ Wife’) began as a novel by Madeleine Bourdouxhe and was transformed for the screen by Philippe Blasband, Marion Hänsel and Frédéric Fonteyne who also directs this stunning and controversial art piece. Certainly one of the most visually magnificent films of recent years (cinematographer Virginie Saint-Martin) ‘Gilles’ Wife’ succeeds on every level: the story is unique, the direction is liquid and languorous, and the cast is superlative.Read More »

A man creating a cautionary tale about drug abuse finds himself and his lover drawn into the deadly web of heroin in this drama. Francois Mauge (Mehdi Behaj Kacem) is a filmmaker who is still dealing with the death of his wife, a well-known model and actress who succumbed to drugs. Determined to make a statement about his loss through his work, Francois decides to direct a film about a woman struggling with addiction called “Wild Innocence,” and casts an attractive young actress named Lucie (Julia Faure) in the leading role. Francois soon falls for Lucie and they become lovers, but Francois loses financing for his project, and in order to continue filming, he approaches a less-than-scrupulous financier, Chas (Michel Subor), who was friends with Francois’ late wife. Chas offers to back the movie, but under one condition — Francois has to help him smuggle a large quantity of heroin into France. As if this ugly irony were not enough, Lucie develops a curiosity about drugs while researching her role, and tries snorting heroin; before long, she’s devolved into a full-blown addict. Philippe Garrel’s film was inspired in part by his romance with Nico, the noted model, musician, and actress who herself developed a very serious drug habit during the course of their relationship.Read More »

It has been two years since Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers revisited the incendiary events in Paris over May of 1968. Philippe Garrel recasts his own memories of this momentous period when students and workers almost toppled a government in a film that will have critics and audiences searching for superlatives. Les Amants réguliers is masterly in every respect. Garrel shot the film in black and white and very much in the film style of the day; we can literally feel Godard, Rohmer and Bresson looking over his shoulder. It has an unadorned sense of verisimilitude that captures the spirit of the sixties and the lives of the students who form the narrative’s core, balancing the contradictory idealism and nihilism of a generation trying to grapple with its restless ambitions.Read More »

Synopsis

reassurance.blogspot.com wrote:

La vie nouvelle, with its schizophrenic camera and piercing audio frequency, provokes a dangerous sensation. It pulsates like a tremor, as if we’re entering a universe after some unnamed, unmentioned nuclear disaster. While it’s easy to make visual association to familiar images of horror like Night of the Living Dead when the film opens on a dark pasture with zombie-like peasants, Salò; or The 120 Days of Sodom while a group of Russian criminals strip a group of beautiful youths naked or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me as characters malevolently scream into the air, Grandrieux’s vision is wholly unique.Read More »

Christoffer Boe studied at Copenhagen University before being accepted at the Danish Film School’s director’s course in 1997. He has directed three short movies. One of them, Anxiety, received the Prix Découverte de la Critique Française and was screened in Critics’ Week in 2002.Read More »

NY Times:
The notion that our sexual behavior is the purest expression of our deepest selves is delicately explored in “9 Songs,” Michael Winterbottom’s lyrical, graphically explicit chronicle of an ordinary love affair between two attractive people. The movie isn’t the first art film to show real as opposed to simulated sex, but it’s the first to scrutinize at length one couple’s bedroom etiquette in a search for their identities. If anything, “9 Songs,” conceived and directed by Mr. Winterbottom, the British filmmaker responsible for movies like “In This World” and “Welcome to Sarajevo,” that boldly enter the topical fray, proves that showing what people do in bed may not reveal all that much. The truth lies hidden in their minds.Read More »

This film was seen at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Film Comment Selects series, February 2006

Sloppy, silly, and incoherent writing mars writer/director Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s moodily detailed atmosphere in Loft, a story of mummies, cloying book editors, a haunted archeologist, and a hodgepodge of other, random horror paraphernalia. The film starts out with prize-winning novelist Reiko (Nakatani Miki) suffering not only from writer’s block but also from hallucinations and fits that involve coughing up viscous black mud. To help his famous protégé write a “popular romance novel,” Reiko’s editor rents her a house in the countryside, one that borders a creepy concrete building housing the local university’s head mummy researcher, Yoshioka (Toyokawa Etsushi). Reiko is not the only one suffering pressures of work and spirit. Yoshioka himself is experimenting on preserving a 1000-year old female mummy dredged up from the local lake, but is hounded by a colleague who wants him to present the find, and a spooky ghost-girl clad in black who peaks around corners at the most inopportune times.Read More »

~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide wrote:
Kiyoshi Kurosawa grabbed worldwide attention with his 1997 masterpiece Cure, a horror film that was actually horrifying. Sandblasting away all the campy cliches of 1970s quickies, Cure employed intelligent camera work, lighting, sound design, and a good story — and very little special effects — to prove that horror flicks can also be art. Kurosawa shows that he has lost none of his abilities to scare in this film. The first 30 minutes of Kairo is perhaps some of the most unnerving, frightening sequences to come down the pike in a long time. And Kurosawa accomplishes this with admirable economy, using little dramatizing music or flash camera trickery.Read More »