Arthouse

synopsis
Repentance (Pokayaniye) features Avtandil Makharadze in a dual role. As Georgian mayor Varlam Aravidze, Makharadze is a strutting, arbitrarily cruel dictator, something of a composite Stalin and Hitler. Visually he very closely resembles Lavrentiy Beriya, Stalin’s right hander and one-time KGB chief. As Abel, the mayor’s son, Makharadze finds himself in the middle of an ideological squabble when his father dies. Zeinab Botsvadze, a local woman who had suffered mightily under the mayor’s regime, refuses to allow the old man’s corpse to be interred.Read More »

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Adapted from director Collard’s own novel, Les Nuits fauves won the filmmaker a French César for Best Debut Director just days after he died of AIDS-related illness (the film took four Césars, including Best FIlm, in 1993).

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Here is the text for the poem by Sully Prudhomme that the song is based on:

Le long du Quai, les grands vaisseaux,
Que la houle incline en silence,
Ne prennent pas garde aux berceaux,
Que la main des femmes balance.

Mais viendra le jour des adieux,
Car il faut que les femmes pleurent,
Et que les hommes curieux
Tentent les horizons qui leurrent!
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The goalkeeper of a little-known soccer team is kidnapped by a Argentinean government squad and sent to a detention center. After months of torture, he plots his escape with three other young men.

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If American moviegoers have plenty of reasons to feel icky about government-sponsored kidnappings and hidden prisons, “Chronicle of an Escape” gives them another good one, by viewing a fact-based Argentinean story through the stylized lens of a horror film. Laced with dread that builds to a thoroughly gripping third act, it should do well with art house audiences who like their history lessons to come with a shot of adrenaline.Read More »

Driven around Paris by a loyal driver (Édith Scob), a mysterious man (Denis Lavant) dresses up in costumes and plays a number of strange, semiscripted roles.

Manohla Dargis wrote:
“Holy Motors,” from the French filmmaker Leos Carax, is a dream of the movies that looks like a movie of dreams. It is a reverie that begins, appropriately, with a seated audience waiting in the dark (like us) and then cuts to a dimly lighted room, where a man (Mr. Carax) rises from a bed that he shares with a dog. He lets the sleeping dog lie (no need for trouble just yet) and creeps over to a mysterious door hidden in a wall. With a strange metal key that’s apparently grafted to one of his fingers, he unlocks the door and — like Little Nemo tumbling into Slumberland, Dorothy crossing over the rainbow and Alice falling down the rabbit hole — leaves one world for another.Read More »

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“Classical Period,” the second and (at barely more than an hour) longest feature from the offbeat filmmaker Ted Fendt (“Short Stay”), is technically in English, but it might as well be in liberal-arts-speak. Characters toss off lines like “I’ve never read the Borges book this quote is from” and “It’s actually the most comprehensive book about the freeway revolt in Philadelphia that I’ve read.” Such insights and humblebrags are the bulk of the dialogue. The title evokes the musical era that preceded Romanticism, and this highly original movie has been denatured of romance or even obvious dramatic incident.Read More »

Synopsis
Emerging from a coma after a water ski accident in which his girlfriend Délie was killed, Stan van der Decken is informed that he is the heir of the mysterious Professor Starkov. He then embarks on a trip to the village of Las Estrellas…Read More »

The script is based on Borges’s story “The Gospel according to St. Mark”.
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As you may know, Michael Haneke doesn’t make comfortable films; there was Funny Games, which I thought was almost physically painful to watch, and then he made The Piano Teacher, a shocking but compulsive experience starring Isabelle Huppert as a sexually repressed piano teacher who has a dysfunctional relationship with her mother. And the rest of the world. Time of the Wolf is disconcerting, although not quite in the same class as The Piano Teacher.Read More »