Nhum is a construction foreman working in Bangkok. The political instability in Thailand has made its presence felt in all business sectors. Nhum suddenly finds himself out of jobs. He decides to leave Bangkok to go back to his hometown in the northeast of Thailand to attend his high school friend’s wedding during the Thai New Year in April — which also happens to be the hottest month of the year.Read More »
The story: Cornelia, a middle-aged high society architect, is informed by her sister-in-law that her son Barbu has killed a child in a traffic accident, and both immediately proceed to the police station where he is being held for questioning. They barge into the interrogation, all the while phoning useful contacts, and manage to change Barbu’s statement, after which they take him back to his parent’s house. In the following days, Cornelia develops various schemes to get Barbu off the hook of a trial, receiving unexpected support from Barbu’s wife (or girl-friend) Carmen, even though they thoroughly hate each other.
The accident itself is not the main story. It serves as a backdrop for highlighting the blatant disregard of the rich for the poor, the pervasiveness of corruption in Romanian society, and to illustrate how possessive and self-serving Cornelia is. Most screen time is devoted to Barbu’s ‘cutting of the post-natal umbilical cord’, his sometimes desperate, mostly half-hearted attempts to gain independence from his overprotective mother.Read More »
Cleaners, emigrants from all over the world, work in night shift at studio sound stages where Italian soap operas are filmed. Once they find unlocked one of the doors to rooms where cameras and shooting equipment is stored. And Hindu Dilip stumbles on a great idea: to film his friend’s wedding ceremony as a gift to him. Quite soon this idea becomes the second source of income for the whole shift team of cleaners and changes their lives forever. After many ceremonies and guest nights they decide to use the empty sound stages at night to film the real stories of real people. The TV «soap» during the day and the real life stories at night… A small screw in the huge television machine. But how long will it last?
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“Intimate Parts” is an ironic melodrama about middle-class Muscovites. Each of them has a personal secret, hidden from others – the “intimate part”. The main character, a scandalous photographer Ivan, juxtaposes himself to others. He is convinced that people are born to be happy; and happiness is freedom to stay true to one’s self. The real question is: how safe is it to let your inner self out?Read More »
PLOT:
A woman catches her husband cheating and in a fit rage brings a knife into his bedroom, slips under the covers and tries to castrate him. He awakes and thwarts her impetuous plot but still wracked with anger she then visits her teenage son’s room and dismembers him instead.
The above plays out over mere minutes but to say any more about the events that unfold would only dilute its impact. Safe to say, things only get worse and more bizarre as the film’s protagonists are pushed to delirious extremes. It’s not exactly a restaging of the Oedipal Complex (though some of its elements are evident) but it does borrow a lot from Greek tragedy, though it’s a bit more extreme than what you would find in the Classics.
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SYNOPSIS: Ethan (Joe Swanberg) is a director who aims to make meaningful art films, but is struggling with a creative slump and disengagement with his work. His girlfriend Claire (Kate Lyn Sheil), is an actress whose career is beginning to take off. She has accepted the lead part in a werewolf movie being directed by talented young horror filmmaker Ben (Ti West). Ethan’s depression leads to jealousy over both Claire’s success and her increasingly close relationship with Ben.Read More »
From IndieWire:
CANNES REVIEW: Why Walter Salles’ ‘On the Road’ Adaptation Is Better Than You Think
Red flags go up when a filmmaker embarks on adapting a beloved classic. Walter Salles’ long-gestating big screen treatment of “On the Road” spent years in development and the nearly-two-and-a-half hour treatment of Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel of the Beat Generation invited immediate skepticism. Kerouac’s autobiographical look at his friends and their journeys around the country in the late 1940s has become so closely identified with his prose that any attempt to replicate it would automatically create a certain distance from the material — or it seemed. As it turns out, Salles’ “On the Road” does the trick well enough. Overlong and unfocused in parts, Salles’ adaptation nonetheless holds together about as well a movie can when the odds are so heavily stacked against it.Read More »
Age Is…
by Stephen Dwoskin (2012)
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Exploring the texture, the beauty and the singularity of aging faces and silhouettes, Age Is meditates through tiny details, a gesture, a pause, a look, on the subjective experience and cultural concepts of ageing.
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Synopsis
The story of an aging writer who bitterly recollects his passionate, lost youth. A portrait of today’s Rome.
imdb.com
Reviews
Rome in all its splendor and superficiality, artifice and significance, becomes an enormous banquet too rich to digest in one sitting in Paolo Sorrentino’s densely packed, often astonishing “The Great Beauty.” A tribute to, and castigation of, the city whose magnificence has famously entrapped its residents in existential crises, the pic follows a stalled author gradually awakening from the slumber of intellectual paralysis. Very much Sorrentino’s modern take on the themes of Fellini’s “La dolce vita,” emphasizing the emptiness of society amusements, “Great Beauty” will surprise, perplex and bewitch highbrow audiences yearning for big cinematic feasts…
Jay Weissberg, Variety
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