Arthouse

Synopsis:
Forty-something Quebeçois Philippe Roberge is floundering in his life. He believes that no one listens to him or takes him seriously. A graduate student in Philosophy of Scientific Culture, he has just failed his Ph.D. dissertation for the second time, his theory of interest in outer space being a narcissistic response from man being widely rejected throughout the community. To make ends meet, he works selling newspaper subscriptions. And he has a cordial but basically non-existent relationship with his ex-wife. Philippe examines his life in response to the recent death of his mother coupled with his dissertation beliefs. Although she lived in a care home, he acted as her primary caregiver.Read More »

Quote:
Torben Skjødt Jensen’s elegant documentary is a collage of memories and reflections on one of cinema’s greatest directors. Visually rich and densely layered, Carl Th. Dreyer—My Métier illuminates an artist too little understood and too important to overlook. Through interviews, historical writings, and rare archival footage, a portrait of Dreyer emerges—an austere perfectionist, yes, but also a passionate man possessing a genuine sense of humor.Read More »

In 1990s Belarus, a wanderlust young DJ is derailed by a typo in a forged US Visa application, forcing her to a backwater village where she is determined to fake her way to the American dream.Read More »

This is an adaptation of one of the most important novels of Argentine literary modernism, Roberto Arlt’s El juguete rabioso (1926). Similar in many ways to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1917), this novel (and the film) chronicles a young man’s journey through a life of poverty on the margins of society in Buenos Aires among anarchists and gangsters during the first years of the 20th century. The novel is essential reading for an understanding of subsequent Argentine literature, yet it is little known outside of Argentina. In El beso de la mujer araña AKA Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976), Manuel Puig was very consciously drawing the whole conceit of the homosexual ‘traitor’/’lover’ and the political prisoner directly from this book.
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Calanda is a town in the province of Teruel, in Aragon, Spain. It lies on the southern fringe of the Ebro river basin, at the confluence of the Guadalope and Guadalopillo rivers.

The climate is transitional between Mediterranean and Continental. Its economy is based in agriculture, especially peaches and olives, both having a Protected Designation of Origin, Melocoton de Calanda in the case of the peach production and Aceite del Bajo Aragon in the case of the olive oil, other agricultural produce are almonds and other fruits and residual cereal production. It was the hometown of Spanish film director Luis Buñuel.Read More »

Quote:

The literal translation of the Taiwanese title is ‘Help Me, God of Love’, since Eros is an artifact of Greece-Roman mythology. The exclamation is a wry reference to the film’s comically cynical perspective on human relationships, in which a wide variety of unlikely subjects – food, marijuana and live eels, amongst others – become substitute objects of comfort and affection for the protagonists. The plea for help is also a strong theme in the form of the suicide hotline.Read More »

L’Inconsolable
2010, 14 minutes 44 secondes, couleur
D’après L’inconsolabile, Dialogues avec Leucò de Cesare Pavese.

Sept des Dialogues avec Leucò (1947) sont mis en scène dans De la Nuée à la résistance (1979), cinq le sont dans Ces rencontres avec eux (2006). Le genou d’Artémide (2009), Femmes entre elles (2009) puis L’inconsolable (2011) en constituent donc les treizième, quatorzième et quinzième adaptations.Read More »

AMG (allrovi.com): Maria Saakyan’s elegiac, semi-autobiographical slice-of-life drama The Lighthouse (2006) unfolds in the very early ’90s, against the backdrop of the Caucasus wars that plagued Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. As the scope of this mass-scaled conflict extends itself to one woman’s small village, she is forced to drop everything, move to Moscow, and start over from scratch — thus bidding farewell to her hometown and way of life, perhaps indefinitely.Read More »

Plot Summary for Brødre (2004)
Michael (Ulrich Thomsen) has everything under control: a successful military career, a beautiful wife (Connie Nielsen) and two daughters. His younger brother Jannik (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) is a drifter, living on the edge of the law. When Michael is sent to Afghanistan on a UN mission the balance between the two brothers changes forever. Michael is missing in action – presumed dead – and Sarah is comforted by Jannik, who against all odds shows himself capable of taking responsibility for both himself and the family. It soon becomes clear that their feelings have developed beyond mutual sympathy. When Michael comes home, traumatized by being held prisoner in the mountains of Afghanistan, nothing is the same.Read More »