2001-2010

A commercially realistic but artistically conflicted playwright lends his Berlin apartment to a young actress friend so she can rehearse her drama school audition while he goes off to save his doomed production in New York.Read More »

Synopsis: Teen romance film based on a manga (Japanese comic book) series by Fujoshi Rumi.Read More »

Synopsis: In a world with an alternate history, a great war finally comes to an end leaving the earth diseased and polluted. The geneticist Dr. Azuma vies for support from the government for his neo-cell treatment that he claims can rejuvenate the body and regenerate humankind. The government leaders, guarding their own deeply entrenched powers, turn down the professor. Driven to complete his work, Dr. Azuma accepts a secret offer from a sinister faction of the powerful military. After an incident occurs in Dr. Azuma’s lab, a race of mutant humans known as the Shinzo Ningen are unleashed upon the world. Now only the warrior known as Casshern, reincarnated with an invincible body, stands between the Shinzo Ningen and a world on the brink of annihilation.Read More »

Variety’s Robert Koehler:
Martin Rejtman takes a break from his droll contempo comedies and applies his sharp eye to the docu form with “Copacabana,” a largely non-verbal film about Bolivian emigres living in one of Buenos Aires’ poorest districts. Expectedly for Rejtman watchers, pic (helmer’s first in HD) is exquisitely composed and paced, but what surprises is work’s strong ethnographic qualities — docu records Bolivian folkloric dance performed for the annual Virgin of Copacabana celebration. With a prestigious fest and awards tally, doc’s content, under-hour playing time and Rejtman’s rep makes it a natural for tube play worldwide.Read More »

Quote:
Bicycles are as synonymous with Beijing as cabs are with Manhattan, and when the hero of Wang Xiaoshuai’s superb and harrowing “Beijing Bicycle” joins the swarm of cyclists who crowd the city’s streets, he stands for countless young people who have made the journey from the country to China’s capital in search of a better life.

Cui Lin’s shy yet stubborn Guei considers himself lucky. He has a place to live–with a friend in an old compound with small quarters for working people. Even better, he has landed a job as a messenger that provides him with a uniform and an impressive silver mountain bike that will become his once he has earned 700 yuan, which is about $85.Read More »

Hartley’s conscientious assistant in Berlin receives weekly letters from her boss and sends him the books he needs as he struggles in Amsterdam to create the staging for Dutch composer Louis Andriessen’s opera, “la Commedia.”Read More »

Different black-and-white animation techniques tell several scary stories. There’s a story of a teenage boy who meets the wrong girl. Another tale deals with a small community where people disappear and are never seen again. Then there’s the narrative of a little Japanese girl who suffers from horrible nightmares followed by a tale where a man doesn’t get the rest he hoped for in an old not-so-abandoned house. These stories are connected by the story about a man with a devilish smile and four enormous dogs from hell and by a woman’s monologue about her fears.Read More »

Gina Befellafante New York Times
To many Americans — millions, really — the name Fran Lebowitz doesn’t mean much. But in certain precincts, vital to the cultural functioning of both coasts, she is famously a friend, a crank, a climber, a cautionary tale, an iconoclast and a mouth. In “Public Speaking,” Martin Scorsese’s enormously enjoyable and perceptive documentary about her, Ms. Lebowitz’s endearing narcissism is a study in the notion that arrogance and insecurity are largely two sides of the same cocktail coaster.Read More »

Written, directed and produced by René Féret, MOZART’S SISTER is a re-imagined account of the early life of Maria Anna “Nannerl” Mozart (played by Marie Féret, the director’s daughter), five years older than Wolfgang and a musical prodigy in her own right. Originally the featured performer, Nannerl has given way to Wolfgang as the main attraction, as their strict but loving father Leopold tours his talented offspring in front of the royal courts of pre-French revolution Europe. Approaching marriageable age and now forbidden to play the violin or compose, Nannerl chafes at the limitations imposed on her gender. But a friendship with the son and daughter of Louis XV offers her ways to challenge the established sexual and social order.Read More »