Arthouse

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Working from his own novel Metaphysics, writer-director Lech Majewski (Glass Lips, Gospel According to Harry) crafts magic in The Garden of Earthly Delights intimate passion plays, which are filled with loving detail (Village Voice) and creates a luminous, highly erotic treatise on art, love and death (Chicago Reader). When London art historian Claudine (Claudine Spiteri) meets engineer Chris (Chris Nightingale), it is love and lust at first sight. But their spiritual and erotic connection is threatened by a devastating and deadly illness.Read More »

Story of Expedito, a retired man who walks through or passes by the streets of Río de Janeiro, Brazil. His reality is shared among millions of Brazilians that gain an invisibility status in the metropolis. Expedito turned into an anonymous, witness of the random conflicts that happens everyday at the streets.Read More »

SYNOPSIS
A worker dies in an accident at his work and is buried with his union card, essential for the widow to receive a pension. To recover it, the family is forced to carry out a clandestine exhumation. The impediments of the bureaucracy make it impossible to bury the corpse again. The absurdity of the situation degenerates into violence.Read More »

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Santa Sangre is the surreal horror story about a young man, Fenix (Axel Jodorowsky) who has grown up in a circus with his mother Concha (Blanca Guerra) and his philandering father. Fenix witnesses a brutal fight between his mother and father, at the end of which his mother loses both of her arms and his father commits suicide. Fenix spends years in an insane asylum, before his mother persuades him to act as her hands in her bizarre nightclub act. Soon, Concha is having Fenix perform a variety of murders, where he is killing every female in sight. Though the film has some of the hallucinatory qualities of Jodorowsky’s earlier films, Santa Sangre doesn’t quite have the same punch, particularly in terms of cerebral and emotional impact, despite its fine visuals. Santa Sangre is available in both R-rated and NC-17 edits.Read More »

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Of the three films, Pola’s is the best. – Jonas Mekas

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Knowing Pola Chapelle as a singer, she could not make anything that is not beautiful. – Anais NinRead More »

Premiere: Filmfestival Venice 1988
Awards: Golden Lion (Filmfestival Venice), Félix (European Filmaward of the European Film Academy)

Joris Ivens’ last film, made with Marceline Loridan, is a testamentary view on his own life and the changes in the world. After Pour le Mistral this film is his second attempt to film the invisible: the wind. On location in China they try to capture the wind as a natural phenomenon, and as metaphor for the constant changes in Culture and Society. In 1988 the film premiered at the film festival of Venice, where Joris Ivens received the Golden Lion for his complete oeuvre.Read More »

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A Nutshell Review: Dixieland Daimyo, 26 October 2006
Author: DICK STEEL from Singapore

My initial reaction was, this sure is one strange movie. Set in the late 19th century and after the end of the American Civil War, three slaves decided to make their way back to Africa, but en route, found themselves on the shores of Japan after a shipwreck. From then on, it’s a weird mix of Japanese shogun intrigue and jazz music fused into a somewhat nonsensical end.Read More »

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Peter High: Your war films seem to fall into two categories – those large, epic productions you did for Toho like Gekido no Showa-shi Okinawa kesen (The Battle of Okinawa, 1971) and the low-budget, personal ones financed by yourself, like Nikudan (The Human Bullet, 1968) and Tokkan (Batle Cry, 1975).Read More »

Using satire, encoded in symbolism and surrealism, the French director Armand Gatti tells the story of an imaginary country in Latin America governed by Admiral Anastasio. In this setting, Cristóbal, a foreign sailor, and Julio Bobadilla, a black peasant convinced of the importance of the organ music from Manzanillo to stimulate the revolution, become the leaders of a social movement that plans to overthrow the tyrant to the rhythm of conga.Read More »