Quote:
The wife of a barbaric crime boss engages in a secretive romance with a gentle bookseller between meals at her husband’s restaurant. Food, colour coding, sex, murder, torture and cannibalism are the exotic fare in this beautifully filmed but brutally uncompromising modern fable which has been interpreted as an allegory for Thatcherism.Read More »
A factory worker lives in a small house and does her shopping at the local store. One morning as she’s getting ready for work, she learns that the factory, which is the center of her universe, is about to move and disappear from sight.Read More »
‘We’re waiting to grow old’. This sentence briefly sums up Yaoyun and his wife Liyun’s bitter realisation about their lives. They were once a happy family – until their son drowned playing by a reservoir. And so Yaojun and Liyun leave their home and plunge into the big city, although nobody knows them there and they cannot even understand the local dialect. Their adopted son Liu Xing does not offer them the comfort they had hoped for either. Defiantly rejecting his ‘foreign’ parents, he one day disappears altogether. The married couple are repeatedly enmeshed in their memories. Finally, they decide to return to the site of their lost hopes.Read More »
Synopsis:
‘[An accidental detective] begins to investigate the death of an attractive woman whose naked body was found in Beverly Hills. When he recovers her journal, he is taken into her past where he finds that she lead a sexually promiscuous life. Perhaps in the pages of the diary will be a clue to her killer’s identity.’
– Kristie Hassen [Edited for inaccuracies]Read More »
Synopsis
After a 13-year-old student disappears without a trace for a week and suddenly reappears, his mother and teachers are confronted with existential questions that change their whole view of life.Read More »
Quote:
Mr. Neville, a cocksure young artist is contracted by Mrs. Herbert, the wife of a wealthy landowner, to produce a set of twelve drawings of her husband’s estate, a contract which extends much further than either the purse or the sketchpad. The sketches themselves prove of an even greater significance than supposed upon the discovery of the body of Mr. Herbert.Read More »
Quote:
STOURLEY KRACKLITE (Brian Dennehy), the central figure in Peter Greenaway’s ”Belly of an Architect,” is at one point seen reflected in the central panel of a triptych mirror in his Rome apartment, wearing a blood-red robe and flanked by multiple Xerox copies of classically sculpted abdomens, copies he has made from photographs of Roman statuary. It’s a perfect moment, or at least the kind of perfect moment Mr. Greenaway favors: orderly, symmetrical and obscure, offering great compositional beauty but no compelling reason why its riddles require solution.Read More »
Kongo is writing a book on the subject of immigrants but while his editor wants a kind of traveler’s book in which ethnic exotic ingredients are offered to a European audience, Kongo has more ambitious ideas – he conceives of the idea of writing a book that follows the paths of Congolese history and its many ghosts. A brave and powerful film, made with single-mind integrity. Filmed mainly in the Congo, the film also provides a slice of life of the contemporary Congolese community in Brussels.Read More »
Quote:
I know one fact about this didactic director, Peter Greenaway—that he is a painter—and that is all I need to know. Everything falls in to place. He composes every frame, meticulously, based on the fundamentals of classical design and structure as if any frame could be snatched from the reel and hung at the Tate. This is the art of cinematography, and he is a master.
A summary of A Zed and Two Noughts, or most any Greenaway film would be like briefly describing the Sistine Chapel—and it takes the Big Book to do that. This film is a lesson in dichotomy: life/death, birth/decay, everything and nothing. He reminds us that our own redemption lies in the cyclical aspect of nature and the blending of these universal opposites into the dizzying blur of existence.Read More »