Arthouse

from the DVD:
Greg Watkins’ romantic black comedy A SIGN FROM GOD depicts a semi-fictional day in the life of independent filmmaker Caveh (Caveh Zahedi) and his girlfriend Laura (Laura Macias) as they struggle with a series of challenges and accidents (including eviction from their apartment, possibly pregnancy, and a car crash) while desperately seeking a sign from God about the future of their troubled relationship. Laura’s increasingly pessimistic attitude — she perceives that the cascading negative events of their lives portend a negative “sign” about the relationship — is offset by Caveh’s serene and abiding faith that everything happens for a reason…Read More »

from rogerrobert.com
The hero of the film (Yves Montand) is a Spanish citizen who has been engaged ever since the war’s end in a variety of underground anti-Franco movements. He is part of a network that moves people and information in and out of Spain, prepares reports, calls general strikes, prints propaganda newspapers and does everything else that seems to be indicated. But the members of the underground are weary; they subscribe to political dogmas that no longer seem relevant, except to a few of them; they can show few tangible results.Read More »

Quote:
“If ever a film replicated the state of dreaming, Stone does. Which is not to say it is, in the classical sense, surreal; but it has the flow and fugitive feeling of a half-remembered reverie, full of mysteries, portents, inexplicable happenings, and chimerical objects. Set in (and filmed in the actual) Chekhov museum, Stone centers on the relationship between a young museum guard and an older visitor who seems at different times to be a lover, a doctor, or a surrogate father. Shot in evanescent black and white with a sound track of silences, breathing, natural sounds, and fragments of classical music, Stone is haunting and enigmatic” (James Quandt)Read More »

Synopsis:
Lacking a formal narrative, Warhol’s art house classic follows various residents of the Chelsea Hotel in 1966 New York City, presented in a split screen with a single audio track in conjunction with one side of screen.Read More »

Quote:
Inviting favorable comparison to the overtly political, social realist films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, The Wound is an understatedly affecting, acutely observed, and profoundly sobering portrait of oppression, dehumanization, and exclusion. By incorporating organic, extended plan-sequences and using repeated images of interminable waiting – from Blandine’s detention, to her self-confinement at a derelict tenement, to Papi’s real-time ride through the countryside in the back of day laborer truck – Nicolas Klotz reflects the inherent inadequacy (if not outright failure) of immigration and asylum laws, lax procedural structure, and government-tolerated, often racially motivated policies (and undocumented, obstructive common practices) that willfully hinder or impede the integration and assimilation of immigrants into their adoptive countries. Using the treatment of Blandine’s wound while in French custody as a metaphor for the authorities’ repeated turning of a blind eye to the obvious, visible social problem, the film serves as a harrowing and trenchant exposition on intolerance and systematic marginalization.Read More »

Synopsis:
It’s 1896. Yankel Bogovnik, a Russian Jew, emigrated to the United States three years earlier and has settled where many of his background have, namely on Hester Street on the Lower East Side of New York City. He has assimilated to American life, having learned English, anglicized his name to Jake, and shaved off his beard. He is working at a $12/week job as a seamster, the money earned to be able to bring his wife Gitl and his son Yossele to America from Russia. Regardless, he has fallen in love with another woman, a dancer named Mamie Fein. Nonetheless, he is excited when he learns that Gitl and Yossele are indeed coming to America. Read More »

Synopsis:
Of the hallowed group of Cahiers du cinéma critics turned filmmakers who transformed French film history, Claude Chabrol was the first to direct his own feature. His absorbing landmark debut, Le beau Serge, follows a successful yet sickly young man (Jean-Claude Brialy) who returns home to the small village where he grew up. There, he finds himself at odds with his former close friend (Gerard Blain)—now unhappily married and a wretched alcoholic—and the provincial life he represents. The remarkable and stark Le beau Serge heralded the arrival of a cinematic titan who would go on to craft provocative, entertaining films for five more decades.Read More »

A woman who has trouble articulating herself finds a place of her own in researching the letters of her great-grandmother in this entrancing character study.Read More »

Quote:
Based on an 1894 novel by Han Ziyun, and starring Hong Kong film and recording star Tony Leung, Hou’s first film set outside of Taiwan takes place in the elegant brothels of late nineteenth-century Shanghai, a hermetic world with its own highly ritualized codes of behavior. It traces the destinies of the beautiful “flower girls”, whose lives depended on their ability to win, and then hold, the affections of their wealthy callers. A mesmerizing and seductive tale of sexual intrigue.Read More »