Filmed on location in Las Vegas, QUEEN revolves around the life of an alienated blackjack dealer. Starring Tinka Menkes as the intense, damaged dealer, the film was named one of the Year’s Ten Best by the Los Angeles Times and Film Comment.
“QUEEN OF DIAMONDS may become for America in the 90’s what JEANNE DIELMAN was for Europe in the 70’s—a cult classic using a rigorous visual composition to penetrate the innermost recesses of the soul.” –Berenice ReynaudRead More »
There’s a distinct madness to Georgian auteur Eldar Shengalaia’s method when it comes to blending political satire and humour. He deploys madcap comedy with ease to both disguise and expose the nuanced complexities of individual and societal living during the Soviet era. The 1973 surrealistic satire Eccentrics is Shengalaia’s second feature-length comedy, in which he rekindles the thematic pneuma of his earlier diploma films such as Legend of the Frozen Heart and Fairy Tale in Snow (1958-60) by juxtaposing fantasy and reality in a fable-like love story, described variously by critics as “poetic”, “grand and eternal”, “a parable of grotesque realism” and “vaudeville-like.”Read More »
Loosely inspired by Dostoevsky’s CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, ‘DISSOLUTION’ combines an almost surreal fairy-tale energy with brutal black and white realism to explore the condition of violence which permeates contemporary Israeli society. Shot in Jaffa-the predominantly Arab area of Tel Aviv- the movie follows the moral collapse and first glimmer of redemption of a young Israeli Jew, played brilliantly by non-actor, Didi Fire. This is a deeply personal work about one man’s inner journey, but can also be read as an allegory about Israel’s moral responsibility…as well as a portrayal of male violence towards a devalued feminine.Read More »
Summary on IMDb:
Juan (Joan Estrada) and Ana (Anna Sales) suffer a marriage crisis. Ana’s pregnancy should harmonize her future, but John’s sterility will cause a whirlwind of unexpected emotions.Read More »
Quote:
PHANTOM LOVE is a surreal, highly visual drama about an enmeshed family, in which violence and trauma are steadily percolating, just beneath the surface.
The lead character is LULU (Marina Shoif): a very beautiful, but angry and isolated woman, who lives alone, and works in a casino in Korea-town, Los Angeles. Lulu’s lover is much younger than herself-the relationship is charged but emotionally disconnected. Lulu’s younger sister, NITZAN (Juliette Marquis), is in the midst of a psychotic breakdown, caused in part by prescription medication. Lulu feels emotionally invaded by her mother, who wants to come to town and stay in Lulu’s apartment in order to try and help the younger sister-but this feels like a further intense invasion, and Lulu refuses.Read More »
The stories of three lonely people surviving a sweltering summertime in Athens are interwoven in this gentle romantic drama. Nikos used to be a merchant seaman, traveling around the globe to exotic places and testing his wits and his mettle in different situations. Now he is retired, living in Athens with his wife whom he no longer loves. While at the train station, he encounters a woman who faints more or less into his arms. From her, he learns that this day has already been special to her for two reasons: her husband just died, and it is her birthday. Curiously, this meeting sparks new life in him. Another man suffering through the hot Athens summer is a bank employee who gets calls every day at four p.m. from a woman who seeks to arouse him. What succeeds in doing is rousing his curiosity, which he is likely to regret giving in to. Finally, an elderly woman lives in near isolation, lost in dreams of bygone love. Her new neighbor is a young woman who makes a good connection with her. ~ Clarke Fountain, RoviRead More »
Ousmane Sembène was one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived, as well as the most renowned African director of the twentieth century—and yet his name still deserves to be better known in the rest of the world. He made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl. Sembène, who was also an acclaimed novelist in his native Senegal, transforms a deceptively simple plot—about a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white family and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a prison, both figuratively and literally—into a complexly layered critique of the lingering colonialist mind-set of a supposedly postcolonial world. Featuring a moving central performance by M’Bissine Thérèse Diop, Black Girl is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement—and one of the essential films of the 1960s.Read More »
The only film by the visionary dancer and choreographer Uday Shankar is a utopian dream of cultural renewal and a celebration of Indian dance in all its variety. Unfolding as an epic film within a film, Kalpana tells the story of a dancer (the director himself) who is determined to open a cultural center and breathe new life into India’s traditional artistic forms. Meanwhile, the visible adoration between him and his lead dancer arouses the jealousy of his enterprising companion. A riot of ecstatic imagery—including swirling surrealist dance spectacles—is interwoven with anticolonial, anticapitalist commentary, making for a radical, proto-Bollywood work that is one of the most influential films in Indian cinema.Read More »
Review from TimeOut:
Shot in Paris, it chronicles a couple of distracted days in the life of Orlando (Miranda), an American sports journalist, during which her near-incestuous obsession with her late brother finally prompts her French lover to pack his bags and split. Little else happens: she misses a deadline (Scott Thomas cameos as her editor), meets a basketball team in their locker room and replays some of her brother’s old smell-o-vision software (designed by Chris Marker). But Shamberg uses digital editing to seamlessly integrate her memories/fantasies and larger reflections on the film’s themes into the minimal narrative, generating images of uncommon density and beauty and turning the film into a kind of nervous rhapsody. The ending consolidates the various levels of paradox, bringing us back to earth with an elegiac bump.Read More »