Arthouse

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So the story goes: Having completed only two (Duelle and Noroît) of the proposed four films in his quick-succession series Scenes from a Parallel Life, Jacques Rivette found himself hounded by investors and teetering on the edge of sanity. The result: Merry-Go-Round—a fascinatingly nonsensical ramble through the director’s own inland empire, featuring a scruffy Joe Dallesandro, as American abroad Ben Phillipps, and a sleepy-eyed Maria Schneider, as mystery woman Léo Hoffmann, wandering the French countryside in search of the elusive Elisabeth (Danièle Gegauff), the former’s girlfriend and the latter’s sister. Read More »

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A portrait of five brothers living on a farm on the Kazakh plains, where the sudden intrusion of the modern world brings corruption, temptation and deceit.Read More »

Pet Shop Boys Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant embark upon a journey across England – but which England? Is it the half-remembered England of their childhoods, or the brutal reality of Mrs Thatcher’s late-eighties England? Along the way they come across many familiar (and sinister) faces. The movie also features some of the Pet Shop Boys’ most popular records.Read More »

In this experimental film, Isidore Isou, the leader of the lettrist movement, lashes out at conventional cinema and offers a revolutionary form of movie-making: through scratching and bleaching the film, through desynchronizing the soundtrack and the visual track, through deconstructing the story, he aims to renew the seventh art the same way he tried to revolutionize the literary world.Read More »

Well into middle-age, but still grasping at the reckless pleasures of his youth, Roque is locked in a pattern of self-destruction. His parents cast him out from their home in Caracas and Roque returns to the Amazon and the derelict tourist lodge he built and ran in a previous life. His aim is to rebuild both the lodge and himself, quitting alcohol for good in the process. But temptations are strong in the jungle. A feverish voyage of discovery through the hinterland between madness and salvation, La Fortaleza is a superb second feature from Venezuelan director Jorge Thielen Armand. What makes it all the more fascinating is the fact that Roque is played by Armand’s own father, Jorge Roque Thielen, and that the screenplay is inspired by his stories of building the lodge and battling alcoholism against a tinderbox backdrop of sparking violence and unrest. Wendy IdeRead More »

Eight characters dialogue in a surreal way in limited environments. They talk a lot but without raising their voices. They threaten each other but do not make any sudden gestures. Like puppets trapped in a room, they express their frustration without finishing anything.Read More »

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OK End Here is Frank’s 1963 short film about inertia in a modern relationship. The film alternates between semidocumentary scenes and shots composed with rigid formality, and appears to have been directly influenced by the French Nouvelle Vague and Michelangelo Antonioni’s films. The characters are often only partially visible or physically separated by walls, doors, reflections, or furniture, and the camera relays the story with little rhyme nor reason, a roaming gaze, which seems to lose itself in things of little importance, while at the same time capturing the dominant atmosphere of routine, alienation, and apathy.Read More »

The story of a man lost in a labyrinth.

Six months before his death, Kafka wrote “The Burrow”. In this short story, a half-human, half-animal narrator describes the labyrinth he has built for himself to live apart from the world. He multiplies the strategies to protect himself from an invisible enemy who is perhaps only himself. Or death approaching in the darkness of a neighbouring gallery. The film “Axolotl” is a variation on this theme. The main character accepts a job as a janitor in an old building. He discovers a network of galleries that allow him to observe the tenants. But is it really the tenants that he observes in this way?Read More »

Synopsis : 1959. Guilty of a double-murder, a man is beheaded. At the bottom of the basket that just welcomed it, the head of the dead man tells his story: everything was going so well. Admired priest, magnificient lover, his earthly paradise seemed to have no end.Read More »