Arthouse

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The story of a mistreated donkey and the people around him. A study on saintliness and a sister piece to Bresson’s Mouchette.

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In the French countryside near the Pyrenees, a baby donkey is adopted by young children – Jacques and his sisters, who live on a farm. They baptize the donkey (and christen it Balthazar) along with Marie, Jacques’ childhood sweetheart, whose father is the teacher at the small school next-door. When one of Jacques’ sisters dies, his family vacates the farm, and Marie’s family take it over in a loose arrangement. The donkey is given away to local farmhands who work it very hard. Years pass until Balthazar is involved in an accident and runs off, finding its way back to Marie, who is now a teenager. But her father gets involved in legal wrangles over the farm and the donkey is given away to a local bakery for delivery work.Read More »

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Gloria is set against the backdrop of a rural landscape slowly disappearing in modern Portugal. The small border town of Vila de Santiago, once a booming trade center for illegal trafficking, is about to become a ghost town, as a new motorway is to bypass the city.Read More »

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From the panoramic, historical revue of the many faces of social prejudice and ostracism, Ottinger turns her attention to the mechanism of exclusion invested with the necessary power to make or break people. Frau Dr. Mabuse, whose illustrious precursor is Fritz Lang’s psychopathic, counterfeiting boss of the underworld, derives her power from the fabrication of reality based on the seduction of images and words. Her perfect object and victim is the Bauhaus-dandy Dorian, whose relation to Oscar Wilde’s prototype is as marginal as his relation to power. The fairy-tale framework of Ottinger’s feature compositions asserts itself strongly in this film as Dorian replaces the evil tycoon and becomes king of the media conglomerate.Read More »

Mustafa (Osman Inan) is a hard-working and ambitious agricultural merchant who is cold and austere towards his family. One day he has a brain hemorrhage on a business trip and goes into a coma after the operation. Guler (Ayten Tokun) is suspicious of her husband having an affair. Veysel (Harun Ozuag), their teenage son, wants to leave the military academy and study business administration. Ali (Tayfun Gunay), their 10-year-old son, has to cope both with his bully classmate and the chewing gums he has to sell. Hasan (Taner Birsel), Mustafa’s younger brother, chose to live a life in solitude after getting a divorce, and has always been an outsider to the family. But now, with his brother in coma, he finds himself involved in family affairs. Hasan has to solve the mystery about Mustafa’s mistress and the money lost during his trip. (IMDb)Read More »

Miguel, the arrogant newspaper columnist at the center of “Madrid, 1987,” has spent decades building up a tough outer shell. Pompous, calloused, dismissive, he’s a parade float begging for a hole to be poked in it. That comes in the form of a would-be acolyte, Angela, and a malfunctioning door lock in this sweet, sometimes dull and certainly overlong film, written and directed by David Trueba. Miguel (José Sacristán) has been spouting literary analogies and trite aphorisms long enough that he believes them; Mr. Sacristán gives him equal measures of confidence and tediousness. But Miguel is lovably smug: when an autograph seeker interrupts his squiring of Angela (María Valverde), he signs her paper, “For Sonia, who has lousy timing.” Before long, he and Angela retreat to an apartment nearby, where the faulty door traps them in the bathroom, disrobed but not entangled.Read More »

One of the Best Films of 2008 –Entertainment Weekly, Time Out NY, NY Post

modestly scaled movie with a heart the size of the Ritz – New York Times
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The most playful and also the grittiest of Kieślowski’s Three Colors films follows the adventures of Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), a Polish immigrant living in France. The hapless hairdresser opts to leave Paris for his native Warsaw when his wife (Julie Delpy) sues him for divorce (her reason: their marriage was never consummated) and then frames him for arson after setting her own salon ablaze. White, which goes on to chronicle Karol Karol’s elaborate revenge plot, manages to be both a ticklish dark comedy about the economic inequalities of Eastern and Western Europe and a sublime reverie about twisted love.Read More »

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Beeswax is Bujalski’s third feature and the first to be conceived and shot since Funny Ha Ha (2002) and Mutual Appreciation (2003) turned him into a rising indie star. For the most part, it’s just as insular and homogeneous as any of the films Taubin rapped in Film Comment. It takes place in Austin, Texas, the little countercultural cocoon that launched Bujalski’s career, and most of the action centers on a funky little vintage clothing boutique favored by college students and the like. Its primary characters are all young, straight, white, middle-class, and college educated. And like so many other mumblecore movies, Beeswax is largely preoccupied with sexual and romantic maneuvering, as a young couple who’ve broken up circle each other tentatively and get back together.Read More »

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In the devastating first film of the Three Colors trilogy, Juliette Binoche gives a tour de force performance as Julie, a woman reeling from the tragic death of her husband and young daughter. But Blue is more than just a blistering study of grief; it’s also a tale of liberation, as Julie attempts to free herself from the past while confronting truths about the life of her late husband, a composer. Shot in sapphire tones by Sławomir Idziak, and set to an extraordinary operatic score by Zbigniew Preisner, Blue is an overwhelming sensory experience.Read More »