Arthouse

Two old friends reunite for a quietly revelatory overnight camping trip in this breakout feature from Kelly Reichardt, a microbudget study of character and masculinity that introduced many viewers to one of contemporary American cinema’s most independent artists. As expectant father Mark (Daniel London) and nomadic Kurt (Will Oldham) travel by car and foot into the woods in search of some secluded hot springs, their fumbling attempts to reconnect keep butting up against the limits of their friendship and the reality of how much their paths have diverged since their shared youth. Adapted from a short story by Jonathan Raymond and accompanied by an atmospheric Yo La Tengo score, Old Joy is a contemplative, wryly observed triumph whose modest scale belies the richness of its insight.Read More »

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With this spare chamber piece, set in an empty theater, Ingmar Bergman returned to his perennial theme of the permeability of life and art. Lingering after a rehearsal for August Strindberg’s A Dream Play (a touchstone for the filmmaker throughout his career), eminent director Henrik (Erland Josephson) enters into a frank and flirtatious conversation with his up-and-coming star, Anna (Lena Olin), leading him to recall his affair with Anna’s late mother, the self-destructive actress Rakel (Ingrid Thulin). The sharply written and impeccably performed After the Rehearsal, originally made for television, pares away all artifice to examine both the allure and the cost of a life in the theater.Read More »

The earlier of Guiraudie’s two medium-length films looks forward to both No Rest for the Brave and The King of Escape with its tale of a young woman who falls in love with a gay shepherd. During their wanderings, they cross paths with a bandit – played by the director himself – as well as the bounty hunter who’s pursuing him. Sunshine for the Scoundrels announces Guiraudie’s fascination with loners and oddballs, his extravagant imagination and his affection for the rough landscape of France’s Massif Central, whose ruggedness gives the film the flavor of an eccentric Western.Read More »

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Luc goes off on his bicycle to forget his problems. A suit of accidents make him spend the night in a little town of Picardie. He meets Sylvain, who tries to help him, for the best and the worst.Read More »

Werner Schroeter’s rhapsody of excess leaps from 1949 Cuba to contemporary France to points in between, while its feverishly shifting visual style evokes and parodies everything from kitschy Mexican telenovelas to silent French art films.

Film en quatre épisodes : Cuba, Drame du rail, Coeur brisé et La Trahison. Dans Flocons d’or, qui traite de la mort, l’héroine Montezuma est l’épouse française d’un gros propriétaire terrien qui se droque. L’action se déroule à Cuba vers la fin des années 40. Des quatre épisodes du film, un seul comporte une ironique lueur d’espoir.Read More »

A few days of a dandyish French intellectual in his late 20s named Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Leaud), who’s living with and supported by his lover, Marie (Bernadette Lafont); she’s in her mid-30s and runs a small boutique. In the first scene he borrows a neighbor’s car and tracks down a former girlfriend, Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten), who’s just started a new semester at the Sorbonne, and tries to persuade her to marry him, only to discover that she’s just agreed to marry someone else. (We and Alexandre briefly glimpse Gilberte with her husband, played by Eustache, toward the end of the film, in the liquor section of a department store.) After hanging out with an equally idle friend (Jacques Renard) at the Deux Magots cafe, Alexandre follows a young woman after she leaves a nearby table, asks for her phone number, and scores; the remainder of the film is devoted to his courting of her.Read More »

Synopsis
A seminal Quebec erotic film about a curious girl who leaves her convent to explore the Montréal hippy scene, becomes a prostitute and meets her true love who doesn’t know she’s a hooker, that started erotic film genre in Canada.Read More »

From The Guardian
Filthy is right. This is a film to counter-balance any lingering misapprehension that the countryside is a place of picturesque tranquillity – and, thank heavens, it is not your everyday Britpic. Andrew Kötting’s second feature, adapted from Zola, is a gallery of bucolic grotesques set in a remote rural community in the early 20th century, long before EU subsidies, mad cows and agribusiness (but not before foot and mouth). The screenplay was written by Kötting and comic Sean Lock.Read More »

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As Another Girl, Another Planet’s hapless protagonist Bill (Barry Sherman) thinks back on relationships with girlfriends past, the Pixelvision might be read as the haziness of his memory drifting away from romantic love. As the characters break out into poetic litanies about pain and desire (“I wasn’t used to being happy. It was somehow exhausting,”) music becomes the tool to express their feelings. As one relationship crumbles apart, Nick Cave and the Bad Seed’s ferocious “The Mercy Seat” drives hard through the scene as Bill fiddles with lit matches. During a tender kiss between boy and girl, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” opines in the background.Read More »