Arthouse

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Katja, Sascha, Benni, Laila and Schöller. These five young people have more in common than just the fact that they are living in provincial Germany free of parental interference. They have one last winter together before they finish school, then they are supposed to know what they want to do: stay or leave. In between homework and smoking dope, martial arts training and gossiping about deflowering people, they explore their feelings in all kinds of different relationships, searching for each other, hiding, kissing and fighting. They want to live, to conquer the world and find out who they really are. They are young and exude an enviable naturalness when it comes to gender identities and roles, above all Katja, played by Marie Tragousti with a lot of new female power. Melanie Waelde’s feature debut is tremendously intense and vibrant. Going beyond cuteness, she draws these “naked animals” with a raw, sensual and sensitive openness rarely seen in German cinema. On the cusp between the end of childhood and burgeoning maturity, body and soul are still more or less united. Just like loneliness and intimacy. We are vulnerable – and that’s a good thing.Read More »

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This second series ended with even more questions unanswered than the first, and a third series was planned. However, due to the death in 1998 of Ernst-Hugo Järegård (who played Stig Helmer) and the subsequent deaths of Kirsten Rolffes (Mrs Drusse) and Morten Rotne Leffers who played the male dishwasher, the likelihood of a third series is now very remote. Von Trier actually wrote the third and final season, but the production was not picked up by DR. At that point, five regular cast members had died and it seemed impossible to continue the series. The abandoned scripts were sent to the producers of Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital, but it is unclear whether they used the scripts or not.Read More »

PLOT:
Jan fights impotence (literal and symbolic) and anguished childhood memories in a decadent Swedish castle where risqué parties and daring scenes defy 1960s’ movie censorship, reaffirming the ground-breaking role of Swedish films in helping advance adult, sexually concerned themes in international cinema.Read More »

In NYC’s Chinatown, recluse math genius Max (Sean Gullette) believes “everything can be understood in terms of numbers,” and he looks for a pattern in the system as he suffers headaches, plays Go with former teacher Sol Robeson (Mark Margolis), and fools around with an advanced computer system he’s built in his apartment. Both a Wall Street company and a Hasidic sect take an interest in his work, but he’s distracted by blackout attacks, hallucinations, and paranoid delusions.Read More »

PLOT:
For her feature film directing debut, actress Mai Zetterling turned to Agnes von Krusenstjerna’s controversial masterpiece of Swedish feminist literature, “The Misses von Pahlen,” an intense and personal seven-part novel that has been likened to the great works of D.H. Lawrence. As three pregnant women from different backgrounds wait to have their babies in a hospital in Stockholm at the outbreak of the Great War, they relive their childhood and youthful experiences via individual flashbacks. Drawing on the classic Ingmar Bergman style of Swedish filmmaking and collaborating with many of his favorite actors as well as the great cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Zetterling had produced a powerful fusion of personal emotional drama and a commentary on the role of women in a society in moral decline.Read More »

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The day-to-day routines of a seemingly ordinary Austrian family begin to take on a sinister complexion in Michael Haneke’s chilling portrait of bourgeois anomie giving way to shocking self-destruction. Inspired by a true story, the director’s first theatrical feature finds him fully in command of his style, observing with clinical detachment the spiritual emptiness of consumer culture—and the horror that lurks beneath its placid surfaces. The Seventh Continent builds to an annihilating encounter with the televisual void that powerfully synthesizes Haneke’s ideas about the link between violence and our culture of manufactured emotion.Read More »

A 19th century French aristocrat, notorious for his scathing memoirs about life in Russia, travels through the Russian State Hermitage Museum and encounters historical figures from the last 200+ years.Read More »

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Ostensibly framed as a postwar melodrama that loosely evokes Leo McCarey’s Love Affair in its story of a shipboard encounter between two emotionally unavailable people, Joseph Morder’s L’Arbre mort is also a tone piece that seeks to reconcile the space between love and death, history and memory, documentary and fiction. This duality is suggested in the diffused opening image of Jaime (Philippe Fano) abstractedly looking out into the open waters from the deck of a ship that plays out against an asynchronous, voiceover narration describing his long-awaited return to South America after completing his medical studies in Europe.Read More »

A comedic urban fantasy which graphs the foibles of a young Manhattan resident, Donna, who’s under seige in her own neighborhood. Laid off from her museum job, harassed by her love-obsessed landlord, and simply uninspired to leave her own apartment, Donna’s already complex life takes a turn for the worst when she inadvertently witnesses a murder. She then begins to doubt her own sanity as she encounters prophetic street poets, dysfunctional would-be boyfriends, and love-deranged friends.Read More »