Arthouse

Steve Seid writes:
Clouzot’s final foray into features takes us into another tortured love triangle to explore voyeurism and, by extension, the very gaze that so draws us to cinema. Josée (Elisabeth Wiener) meets her artist-lover’s gallerist, the chic but kinky Stanislas Hessler (Laurent Terzieff), whose hobby is photographing female nudes in S&M postures. Naturally, Josée succumbs to the temptation to pose, but finds she needs bonding not bondage. Enter the obsessive kinetic artist Gilbert (Bernard Fresson), and the triangulated trap is sprung. Like Peeping Tom, Woman in Chains uses the camera’s gaze as a substitute for our own voyeuristic impulse.Read More »

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One of the most adventurous filmmakers to emerge from the Philippines in decades, Lav Diaz is, in many ways, the spiritual father of what some have called the Filipino New Wave, a group of filmmakers who have adopted digital technology to create an intimate and raw style. At the same time, he stands separate from them, often working on an epic scale and addressing historical shifts in Philippine society. (See his epochal Ebulysion: Evolution of a Filipino Family.)Read More »

Facing seizure of their own lands, two families find themselves farming together on the same field, hoping just to get through another rice-farming season. But no matter how much the world is evolving, how much the country is going through economic, political, and social changes, they still cannot grasp the new ideology of “happiness.” How can you dream of utopia when your stomach is still grumbling?Read More »

Synopsis:
‘The bourgeois family Olmi observes here is caught in a process of disintegration that hardly requires the promptings of a languid summer’s minor crisis. A motorcycle crash, a business reorganisation seminar and a childbirth represent the unlikely-seeming dramatic punctuation in Olmi’s mosaic portrait of minimal domestic communication; while the director himself adopts an uncharacteristically elliptical structure and a rare stridency to capture both the frenetic tail-chasing and tentative adaptations to change which criss-cross the dead institutional centre. If the criticism is muted, it’s because for Olmi, every new circumstance offers at least a new option.’
– Time OutRead More »

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Depiction of a small Turkish town, as seen from the perspective of an 11 year old girl and her 7 year – old brother. The four part film unfolds along with the seasons. The first part is set at the school the girl attends, the social environment she must adapt to and its difficulties. She faces with her feeling of shame and some merciless clues of life. The second part is in spring. We see the girl with her brother and their journey to the maize field where their family are waiting for them.Read More »

Like the unknown woman imagined by the poet – which is never quite the same nor entirely different- this new Glimpse 13 resembles it’s twelve prestigious precedents while having its own distinct identity. Roy Stuart has put extra effort into the design and implementation of the twenty odd sequences that make up this diverse album. All the imagination, energy, expertise, as if making a feature film. Probably because he had been working on a feature film project earlier this year. This is especially true of the brilliant main sequence, which tells the story and contrast of two girlfriends-an inexperienced childlike beauty that recites romantic poetry in the street and a more mature girl who likes to show off in front of her webcam.-The younger girl opposes her friends twisted plan to use her as bait to pick up and rip off a guy -but who will come out on top? …Read More »

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As a young girl in Japan, Nagiko’s father paints characters on her face, and her aunt reads to her from “The Pillow Book”, the diary of a 10th-century lady-in-waiting. Nagiko grows up, obsessed with books, papers, and writing on bodies, and her sexual odyssey (and the creation of her own Pillow Book) is a “parfait mélange” of classical Japanese, modern Chinese, and Western film images.Read More »

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The father of a son living on the fringes of a village believes that working is a fools game, for the lord takes what little the workers make. When a young woman enters their home tensions begin to rise and their idle life is threatened.Read More »

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Told as a film within the film, the story concerns an aging actress. Ewa is a flamboyant, pushy actress whose career and love life have come to a dead end. She lives in a faceless housing development. She is totally engrossed in herself and dreams of making a comeback as a singer. But her overbearing personality time after time sets her into conflict with those she tries to work with in the theater and her bedroomRead More »