Arthouse

Variety.com wrote:
Set in ’69, “A No-Hit, No-Run Summer” gets to first base, at least, with its modest tale of B-team squirts who play in old hockey jerseys but eventually hold their own against the well-named Aristocrats. Third feature by Quebecois helmer Francis Leclerc (“Girl at the Window”) is formulaic and insubstantial, but pleasant and occasionally more as it asserts the sandlot’s rejuvenating power for pint-sizers like 12-year-old Martin (Pier-Luc Funk), whose dad (Patrice Robitaille) takes up coaching duties for the summer. Movie is far milder than either version of “The Bad News Bears,” for better and worse; grosses will follow suit.Read More »

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A once-promising athlete whose career was cut short due to a tragic injury turns to a life of crime, and receives an unusual gift that leads him to make a series of rash decisions. Lesha Shultes is only twenty-five years old, but his best days are already behind him. He was set to take the world of sports by storm when a serious car accident rendered him unable to compete on the playing field. Now, the only way Lesha can communicate with the outside world is by stealing. In between bouts of picking pockets on the streets, Lesha visits his ailing mother and his brother in the Army. Lesha has been effectively cut off from all human emotion. It’s only when he receives a video from a girl that he previously robbed that Lesha begins to feel something oddly familiar somewhere deep within.Read More »

The adaptation of a novel by Alexander Trocchi, a figure of the Beat generation, David Mac Kenzie’s Young Adam slowly sails on turbid water, carrying in its wake some characters stuck in lives with hopeless futures.

In 1950’s Scotland, Joe works on a barge owned by Les and Ella. The trio delivers coal bags along the channels between Glasgow and Edinburgh. One day, the two men fish out the corpse of a drowned woman. While Les waits impatiently to make headlines in the press, Joe launches into a secret affair with Ella.Read More »

Life story of Spaniard Ramón Sampedro, who fought a 30-year campaign to win the right to end his life with dignity. Film explores Ramón’s relationships with two women: Julia, a lawyer who supports his cause, and Rosa, a local woman who wants to convince him that life is worth living. Through the gift of his love, these two women are inspired to accomplish things they never previously thought possible. Despite his wish to die, Ramón taught everyone he encountered the meaning, value and preciousness of life. Though he could not move himself, he had an uncanny ability to move others.Read More »

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The intertwined lives of 2 women in 1970’s France, set against the progress of the women’s movement in which Agnes Varda was involved. Pomme and Suzanne meet when Pomme helps Suzanne obtain an abortion after a third pregnancy which she cannot afford. They lose contact but meet again ten years later. Pomme has become an unconventional singer, Suzanne a serious community worker – despite the contrast they remain friends and share in the various dramas of each others’ lives, in the process affirming their different female identities.Read More »

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Mother love gets the Shinya Tsukamoto treatment in the Japanese auteur’s latest mindfuck, a boldly abrasive, sometimes overwhelming tour of an unbalanced psyche. Said psyche belongs to a young, single mother (played by J-pop star Cocco) who imagines sinister doppelgangers lurking everywhere, stabs potential suitors with forks, lacerates her skinny arms with razors (“I cut my body to confirm it,” she muses in voiceover) and, above all, turns any activity involving her toddler son into grueling bouts of hysteria. Only singing seems to soothe her, and one of her songs catches the attention of a masochistic novelist (Tsukamoto) who’s willing to let her beat him into a bloody pulp in order to forge a relationship with her. Filmed with a reeling, zooming camera, scratchily edited, and set to a deafening cacophony of enfant shrieks and industrial noise, this virtuoso bit of grisliness may have something to say about violence-saturated societies nurturing Medea fantasies, but any thematic exploration plays second fiddle to Tsukamoto’s insistence on sheer sensory overload.Read More »

After training as a paintor and sculptor in artist’s studios and art schools in Lima (The Art Center, La Escuela de Bellas Artes) and in London (Regent Street Polytechnic, Chelsea School of Art), Rose LOWDER worked in London as an artist while earning a living in the film industry as an editor. From 1977 onwards she concentrated on studying the visual aspect of the cinematographic process, and was encouraged by Jean Rouch and his staff at the University de Paris X to present some of her work as a thesis under the title The experimental film as an instrument towards visual research (1987).Since 1977 Lowder has been active programming rarely shown films. In order to make this body of work available to a wider public, she constituted a collection of films and paper documents, The Experimental Film Archive of Avignon (1981). Since 1996 Lowder is also associate professor at the University de Paris I.Read More »

The man who lives in the past and The woman who abandoned a past. They were lovers 10 years ago, and had met again in Paris.Read More »

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A long weekend brings four women together in the countryside. Virtual strangers, the women are forced to navigate the depths of social interaction. On the surface all seems placid. But the atmosphere of calm is a facade.Read More »