Arthouse

Synopsis
A young man takes drastic measures to rid his dysfunctional family of its various afflictions.Read More »

This low-key, well-acted, underrated and pitch-black comedy didn’t get the recognition it deserved upon it’s (limited) release in 1994, even with director Michael Tolkin’s stature as screenwriter of ‘The Player’ and his freaky directorial debut with ‘The Rapture’. Peter Weller and Judy Davis play wealthy but spirtually bereft professionals in LA who decide to ditch their previous lives and open a store. It goes badly rather quickly. Watch for Adam West, perfectly cast as Peter Weller’s hipster father.Read More »

Toronto International Film Festival writes:
Exorcist author William Peter Blatty intended for his adaptation of his own novel Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane to be directed by William Friedkin; when studios rejected the script, Blatty put up half the budget himself, convinced the Pepsi-Cola conglomerate to provide the balance, and stepped behind the camera to make his directorial debut. Set near the end of the Vietnam War, The Ninth Configuration takes place in a spectacular castle that has been commandeered as a mental hospital for military veterans.Read More »

Based on the novel ‘Matéria de Memória’ of Carlos Heitor Cony, it tells the story of a widowed man who maintains ambiguous relations with his mother-in-law, who lives in the same house. Then he decides to lock himself in the room, reviving memory through old letters and photographs. An absolute rarity.Read More »

Synopsis
Portabella’s first feature, co-scripted by poet Joan Brossa, became one of the most influential works of the Barcelona avant-garde, although like all his early films, it circulated only in an underground fashion. Eschewing dialogue, the director constructs a non-narrative story in fragments that reveal the daily lives of an adulterous couple interspersed with a cryptic stream of unrelated imagery. The title of this homage to directors including Eisenstein, Antonioni, Bergman, and Buñuel refers to the 29 “black years” of the Franco dictatorship.Read More »

Synopsis
A political activist escapes the prison van and is sheltered in a posh apartment owned by a sensitive young woman. Both are rebels: the activist against political treachery and the other on social level. Both are bitter about badly organized state of things. Being in solitary confinement, the fugitive engages himself in self-criticism and, in the process, questions the leadership. Questions are not allowed, obeying that is mandatory. Displeasure leads to bitterness, bitterness to total rift. The struggle has to continue, both for the political activist, now segregated, and the woman in exile.Read More »

Quote:
An insistent cataloguer of the innumerable manifestations of everyday insanity and the absurdity of “normal,” mundane existence, Ulrich Seidl blends the techniques of documentary and narrative… An insistent cataloguer of the innumerable manifestations of everyday insanity and the absurdity of “normal,” mundane existence, Ulrich Seidl blends the techniques of documentary and narrative filmmaking to create unique exposes of the illusions, self-deception, and cultural complacency of the Austrian middle class. In MODELS, Seidl examines that most glamorized segment of the population through a voyeuristic lens, interested more in the banalities of his three subjects’ lives than in perpetuating the images of their perfection.Read More »

Mikhaël Hers has been one of France’s most hotly-tipped new directors ever since his medium-length ensemble pieces Charell, Primrose Hill and Montparnasse – films largely about young people walking and talking, but with a magical contemplative atmosphere all their own. Stretching out to full length, Memory Lane confirms Hers’s utterly distinctive signature. Very loosely resembling a slacker take on the Eric Rohmer tradition, Hers’s film follows the events – or spaces between events – of one summer in Paris and its outskirts, experienced by a group of young people and remembered melancholically at a couple of months’ distance.Read More »

This film is loosely based on Goethe’s Dr. Faustus. It’s the second feature that Gonzalo Suárez made, when he still was a member of the Barcelona School (Escuela de Barcelona). The Barcelona School was a 1960s group of Catalan filmmakers, concerned with the disruption of daily life by the unexpected, whose stylistic affinities lie with the pop art movement of the same years and with the French Nouvelle Vague. Among their members: Joaquin Jordà, Jacinto Esteva, José María Nunes, and also, at the begining of their career, Vicente Aranda and Gonzalo Suárez.Read More »