Arthouse

A horror movie testing two approaches to running an insane asylum – absolute freedom versus control and punishment – within the context of a world that combines the worst of both. Jean Berlot, a young man subject to a nightmare of being forced into a straitjacket by two orderlies, is befriended by a marquis. At the marquis’s estate, Jean witnesses a black Mass, buries someone alive, and is invited to try preventive therapy. He’s willing to enter a sanatorium because he believes he can rescue a young woman from there who has told him that the real director and staff of the clinic are locked in the basement. Jean conspires with her to set them free: the horrors have only begun.Read More »

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variety.com

There’s a symphonic rhythm to the aptly-titled Bolivian film “The Great Movement” (“El Gran Movimiento”). Kiro Russo’s portrait of La Paz is driven more by sensory cues than by any steady sense of narrative. Ostensibly following a trio of miners who arrive at the sprawling, Andean capital city with the hopes of getting jobs, “The Great Movement” emerges instead as a dissection of this highest of Latin American urban jungles.Read More »

The actor of a film being made lives without distinction his own personal reality and his character’s fiction. As the involuntary object of chance and circumstance, he looks for a meaning and way out, while being pursued by outlaws, a magician, a romantic fantasy, a drunk and his own self-image. The humour, the reason of the persecution, situations, personages, set decoration, dialogs and soundtrack (which uses themes from other films) lead us to symbols, metaphors and the refusal of a possible logical narrative, in a way to allow the viewer to experiment a sensation analogous to the one of the main character, inducing in him the need of thinking a meaning while lost and led by the sustained expectation, and by the intentionally recurrent anti-climax.Read More »

Banned in India, following riots because of its lesbian theme.

In New Delhi Sita, a beautiful and intelligent young woman embarks on an arranged, loveless marriage to a faithless husband, Jatin. The extended family, owners of a video store, live together according to custom. Family tensions escalate. Radha, Sita’s sister-in-law, is unable to conceive; her disappointed husband Ashok (Sita’s husband’s brother) has taken a vow of celibacy, acquired a swami and is often gone. Eventually Jita and Radha develop a physical relationship which is far more emotionally sustaining than they have found with their husbands.Read More »

In sun-soaked Portugal, Crista, Carloto, and João live in rural peace during the COVID lockdown. They pass their time in a spacious farmhouse where the dog days of summer are filled with dancing, chores, disturbed sleep patterns, flirtations, and building a backyard butterfly house.Read More »

A series of intimate diaries, starting from daily encounters. We experience Bulle Ogier and Viva, Nico and Tina Aumont, Philippe Garrel and Udo Kier, a performance by Béjart, a piece by Marc’O, concerts by Bob Marley and Patti Smith. It’s like a maelstrom of psychedelic images that are passed through a particle accelerator.Read More »

Emotionally withdrawn strip club dancer Ayako has never recovered from her mother’s suicide when she was young. She begins a relationship with patient potter Daiji, but leaves him behind when she quits her job and returns to her home town after a 10 year absence.Read More »

A film about politics and the media, in which two workers in a newspaper plant attempt to make a film.Read More »

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The Brazilian filmmaker Maya Da-Rin has garnered attention for her documentaries Terras (2009) and Margem (2007), both shot in the Amazon region. Now, she is back with her fiction debut, an enigmatic film capable to explore the mystery of the Amazon forrest to create a dream-like atmosphere that impregnates the viewer like a burning fever. In it, Justino (Regis Myrupu), a middle-aged member of the indigenous Desana people in Brazil, begins to come down with a vague illness while working as a security guard at a shipyard in Manaus. His daughter Vanessa (Rosa Peixoto) is preparing to leave her father to study medicine in Brasilia. The two are caught between their family’s past in the Amazon and their present in an urbanizing Amazon.Read More »