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Pascale (Isabelle Huppert) lives with her adult twin sons, aimless François (Yannick Renier) and headstrong Thierry (Jérémie Renier, star of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s L’ENFANT and LA PROMESSE), in a renovated Belgian farmhouse. Each is still reeling from the divorce that divided the family some years earlier. Both boys pursue their respective interests, but neither seems compelled to embrace adulthood or the responsibilities that come with it. However, all that is about to change. Pascale has fallen in love again and dreams of a new life for herself and her lover a countryside B&B that they aspire to own together. But what would seem to be a happy time in her life takes a turn for the worse as she finds herself unable to rise from the shadow of her ex-husband and selfish children. In a bid for survival, Pascale leaves the house in the hands of Thierry and François, never suspecting that in her absence, long-buried resentment and rivalry will boil over, igniting a war between the brothers. (DVD Backcover)Read More »

An essay film, staged as a short drama deploying a first person, diary film narration over exquisitely designed object oriented “still life” tableaus, Gillian Leahy’s My Life Without Steve (1986) was a sensational hit in the mid-1980s. It won the Grand Prix and the Irwin Rado Award for Best Australian Film at the Melbourne International Film Festival, and the General Category of the Greater Union Awards (today’s Dendy Awards) at the Sydney Film Festival. The film screened widely and generated passionate debate.Read More »

Doctor Glas face ethical complications when a woman, Helga Gregorius, asks for help in preventing her husband, the disgusting Reverend Gregorius, to have sex with her.Read More »

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Bidaya wa Nihaya (Arabic: بداية و نهاية‎, English: A Beginning and an End) is a 1960 Egyptian film directed by Salah Abouseif and based on the novel by the same name. It was the first film adapted from a novel written by Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz.Read More »

Synopsis
«Reality steals your dreams, and you steal it in order to dream. Reality steals your life, and you steal it in order to live.» A darkly optimistic film. Three versions of a single day. Three characters trapped in parallel universes. The invasion of the Thief will unite them. Each point of view produces a different story. The Sculptress has visions of Judgment Day, the Scientist holds fast to a fragmented memory, the Actor sees «Antigone» invading all space. Three philosophical viewpoints: Fate – Chance – Free Will. What do they have in common? The Thief progresses towards an answer. It is the human condition that unites us, imprisons us and frees us. The brotherhood of mortality. Whatever I spent, I had. Whatever I saved, I lost. Whatever I gave, I have.Read More »

After a dip into the mainstream with Mortal Thoughts, the wildest card in American cinema is back on his own bizarre terrain. This modern urban fairytale is a beautifully ambivalent re-telling of The Prince and the Pauper. Modine is the separated-at-birth twins (both of them), one a hood whose dream life – moppet children, a cooing fashion-plate wife (Singer) – is coupled with violent megalomania, the other a cringing wimp who can’t bring himself to date his best friend’s anguished, poetry-reading sister (Boyle). The whole is held together with a plot about an aspiring writer (Ferrell) on the track of her first real-life drama, and by an atmospheric soundtrack (Terje Rydal, Ali Farka Toure) that accompanies the characters’ hypnotically crazed manoeuvres. M Emmet Walsh steals the show as a garage boss in a drolly choreographed homage to Jacques Demy. Delirious stuff.Read More »

Lucy is a young university student possessed by a kind of radical passivity. She lets a flip of a coin decide the outcome of a random sexual encounter and she displays an uncomplaining patience when facing the repetitions of her various menial jobs that fund her studies. One day she answers an ad in the student newspaper and interviews for a job to be a lingerie waitress. But she is secretly being initiated into a world of strange new work; one where she will have to give into absolute submission to her clients by being sedated; becoming a Sleeping Beauty. Eventually this unnerving experience begins to bleed into her daily life and she finally develops the will to break the spell by discovering what happens to her while she sleeps. With a fearless performance by Browning, Leigh creates a bold cinematic vision; one where Lucy, both in her clandestine sexual adventures and in her mundane daily existence, lives with the same unflinching and brutal honesty.Read More »

Synopsis:
The circus artist Leni Peickert is planning the circus of the future. She wants to show the animals authentically, and not dressed up as people. In face of the inhuman situation, the artists are to increase the degree of difficulty in their work. But her plan goes awry. Leni Peickert approaches a television company, seeing a knowledge of this special technology as a more suitable basis for her attempt to change the world.Read More »

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In a small, dilapidated village in 1990s Hungary, life has come to a virtual stand-still. The Autumn rains have started. A few of the villagers expect to receive a large cash payment that evening, and then plan to leave. Some want to abscond earlier with more than their fair share of the money. However they hear that the smooth-talking Irimias, who they thought had died, is returning. They are apprehensive that he will take all their money in one of his grandiose schemes to keep the community going.Read More »