Arthouse

Once upon a time, back at the turn of the century, the milkmaid Gosia is caring for her cows on an idyllic rural countryside. The afternoon is hot, so she bathes naked in the river. The next day, a stranger-in-black appears on the scene and shows her a painting he had done of her in the nude. Embarrassed, but hardly offended, she makes his acquaintance and is soon introduced to the secret pleasures of life: love-making, the beauty of art, the music of Mozart, the delights of the dining table. The meadow becomes a natural backdrop for her lessons in life’s mysteries, in contrast to the moral concerns of her mother, the puritanical ethics of the church, and the puzzling medical diagnosis of the country doctor. “Maybe it’s something the devil told her,” they conclude. (Ziegler Film)Read More »

Quote:
The film centers on a brother and sister who live in their family’s traditional Japanese house long after both of their parents have died. Kenichi (Naoto Ogata), who is in his twenties, works in a used bookstore while his sister, Yoko (Urara Awata), who has just finished up high school, dutifully takes care of the house. Since his parents are dead, Kenichi is serious about looking after his underaged sister. He even spurns his girlfriend — another clerk at the same bookstore — because she wants to get married before Yoko comes of age. On Yoko’s end, she longs to break out and be free. One day, she brings home a bumptious freelance photographer (Toru Tezuka) whose crude ways do not impress the conservative Kenichi. In spite of this — of perhaps because of this — Yoko beds him and soon is spending more and more time with the lad. With his orderly life coming apart at the seams, will Kenichi be able to get his sister back? ~ Jonathan CrowRead More »

Harry Kümel’s last major film to-date, a masterpiece of vividly operatic style and fluid camerawork. Despite being based on a 19th century classic Dutch novel, the film is less a traditional costumer (as apparently the critics took it to be) than a flamboyant fantasy on Kümel’s running theme of a vicious cycle of repeated wrong decisions and bad choices that engulf the lead character and eventually destroy her. The film displays the usual influences of von Sternberg, Resnais, Bergman, the Belgian symbolists, but creates a uniquely Kümelian feel and texture of a different reality at one remove from ours.Read More »

A composition of symbolic, surreal and almost mystic images.Read More »

Archipel des amours is a collection of nine short films by Paul Vecchiali and eight other filmmakers associated with his company Diagonale. Each of the films in this collection presents an intimate situation complicated by the kinks and jinxes that prevent or forestall the consummations and satisfactions of love. The segments’ would-be lovers are thereby isolated from one another as if each were an island unto her- or himself. In the anthology form, the films are sometimes connected by brief shots of a shore of an unknown insular coast and/or the sounds of waves lapping again the piers.Read More »

Achternbusch, poet, poacher, and Bavarian wants to leave his native land.
Quote:
In this somewhat experimental satirical black comedy, a renowned and sensitive poet and writer is fed up with the crudenesses of his native Bavaria and, in a well-publicized move, says he refuses even to die there. Instead, followed by reporters, he retires to Greenland. There, he has a reunion with his girlfriend, and gains some idea of the current situation of his wife before he dies.
~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie GuideRead More »

North is everywhere solitary. Here is all North. This is a record of the people I met in these Norths. However, my memory is fragmented and does not get the point at all. Now I’m starting to wonder my efforts came to nothing. I’m just getting the occasional recognition of the existence of the world through the dull pain changes shape little by little.
(Source: Official website)Read More »

One of the few bona fide counter-cultural films to be produced by a major studio, The Swimmer is a sun-scorched and surreal suburban satire that boasts a fine performance from Burt Lancaster (Castle Keep, Buffalo Bill and the Indians) as Ned Merrill, the all-American man who one day determines to swim home to his Connecticut mansion via a series of pools in his neighbourhood.

Directed by Frank Perry (Diary of a Mad Housewife) imbues Eleanor Perry’s (David and Lisa, Ladybug Ladybug) adaptation of John Cheever’s short story with stunning expressionistic flourishes, creating a true masterpiece of cinema.Read More »

Synopsis

An homage to the Gaza Strip, Ouroboros follows a man through five different landscapes, upending mass-mediated representation of trauma. A journey outside of time, marking the end as the beginning, exploring the subject of the eternal return and how we move forward when all is lost.Read More »