2001-2010

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A rich woman hires an elite prostitute in order to verify her husband’s faithfulness. Before long the experiment gets out of control.Read More »

After years of living abroad with her American missionary father, Lana (Michelle Williams) returns to the United States to begin her studies. But instead of focusing on her education, Lana sets out to find her only other living relative – her uncle Paul, her deceased mother’s brother. A Vietnam veteran, Paul is a reclusive vagabond with deep emotional war wounds. A tragic event witnessed by the two unites them in a common goal to rectify a wrong, and takes them on a journey of healing, discovery, and kinship.Read More »

Wim Wenders muses on love, death and his perennial bugbear, the ‘Crisis of the Image’ in The Palermo Shooting, a metaphysical thriller cum philosophical essay that marks another step on the downwards slope for this once-vital film-maker. Unwisely cast, leadenly written and ultimately farcical in its earnestness, The Palermo Shooting is a glossy travelogue-thriller with metaphysical pretentions, and one of the low points of this year’s Cannes Competition. Unlikely to fare well in the market, the film may also find festivals preferring to tactfully take a rain check.Read More »

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Habit is an autobiographical documentary that follows the current history of the AIDS epidemic along dual trajectories: the efforts of South Africa’s leading AIDS activist group, the Treatment Action Campaign, struggling to gain access to AIDS drugs and the daily routine of the videomaker, a veteran AIDS activist in the U.S. who has been living with AIDS for more than ten years. The videomaker moves through his day, attending to mundane errands, eating, taking pills, having conversations with friends (some of whom have diseases such as AIDS and Breast Cancer, and others of whom are healthy), as recurring memories of a recent trip to South Africa interrupt the routine. Habit presents a rigorous working-through of ideas concerning privilege, ethics, responsibility, futility, solidarity, hope, and struggle.Read More »

“Once” is the inspirational tale of two kindred spirits who find each other on the bustling streets of Dublin.

One is a street musician who lacks the confidence to perform his own songs, and thus works part-time helping his father, who runs a small, vacuum cleaner repair business, whilst he dreams of landing a record deal. The other is a young mother trying to find her way in a strange new town. She works as a house cleaner in an upper-class residence and is struggling financially, yearning for a piano she cannot afford.

As their lives intertwine, they discover each other’s talents and push one another to realise what each had only dreamt about before. Once is the inspiring story of their budding love for one another.Read More »

Lena Dunham got her start making YouTube videos, but she emerged as a major talent thanks to the breakthrough success of this exceptionally sharp comedy, which garnered the twenty-four-year-old writer-director-actor comparisons to the likes of Woody Allen. Dunham plays Aura, a recent college graduate who returns to New York and moves back in with her mother and sister (played by the filmmaker’s real-life mother and sister). Though Aura is gripped by stasis and confusion about her future, Dunham locates endless sources of refreshing humor in her plight. As painfully confessional as it is amusing, Tiny Furniture is an authentic, incisive portrait of a young woman at a crossroads.Read More »

Description:

Perhaps the most highly regarded French filmmaker after Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson created a new kind of cinema through meticulous refinement of the form’s grammatical and expressive possibilities. In thirteen features over a forty-year career, he held to an uncompromising moral vision and aesthetic rigor that remain unmatched. Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film is the first comprehensive study to give equal attention to the films, their literary sources, and psycho-biographical aspects of the work. Concentrating on the films’ cinematographic, imagistic, narrative, and thematic structures, Pipolo provides a nuanced analysis of each film-including nearly 100 illustrations-elucidating Bresson’s unique style as it evolved from the impassioned Les Anges du péche to such disconsolate meditations on the world as The Devil Probably and L’Argent. Special attention is also given to psychosexual aspects of the films that are usually neglected. Bresson has long needed a thoroughgoing treatment by a critic worthy to the task: he gets it here. From it emerges a provocative portrait of an extraordinary artist whose moral engagement and devotion to the craft of filmmaking are without equal.Read More »

[SPOILER]

Ryu is a solitary girl whose fragile appearance is in stark contrast with the double life she leads, working nights at a Tokyo fishmarket and sporadically taking on jobs as a hit-woman.

Mr Nagara is a powerful impresario mourning the loss of his daughter Midori, who has committed suicide. He blames David, a Spaniard who runs a wine business in Tokyo.

Mr Nagara’s employee, Ishida, was silently in love with Midori and hires Ryu to murder David.

A sound engineer, obsessed with the sounds of the Japanese city and fascinated with Ryu, witnesses this love story which searches the shadows of the human soul, reaching deep into places where only silence has the power of eloquence.Read More »

“Two months ago, his girlfriend left him. One month ago, he lost both of his jobs after a nervous breakdown. He can’t work in his mom’s flower shop because he’s allergic to pollen and paperwork. Single, lonely, and jobless, Aaron expends his time and energy nurturing a long standing crush on his best friend Sara. Meanwhile, his other best friend, Erik, sells pot to his kid sister Erin (behind his back, naturally). If he manages to get out of bed, Aaron may mow the lawn, or he may reconstruct Stonehenge with a set of encyclopedias. To avoid embarrassing himself, he makes sure to rehearse all of his conversations in advance. Aaron sees something approaching on the horizon. Whether it’s his future or his doom, apparently it drives a white SUV ” Written by Frank V. Ross ( IMDB)Read More »