Arthouse

Made for TV and the French Bicentennial celebrations, this is an extreme case of Peter Greenaway’s obsession with cataloguing and classification. Comprising 23 case histories of corpses fished out of the Seine between 1795 and 1801, it forms a kind of micro-reprise of his monumental The Falls, piling up its narratives, Holmesian speculations and slow, clinical tracking shots over corpses, in a rigidly uniform structure. But within this forbidding system, Greenaway breaks up the frame, much as in Prospero’s Books, using Paintbox graphics to play on the comparative textures of television and paper. Death in the Seine is a pedantic film, because it’s about pedantry and the systematic collecting of facts which might or might not constitute evidence. It wasn’t taken up by British TV, which considering the film’s sign-off comments about the transience of memory and recorded knowledge, is a rather sour irony.Read More »

Quote:
All seems lost. And then, in an old, lonely and icy park two shadowy figures meet: those of Deus and a Messenger from God. The Messenger gives the crook (the temporary state of poor João de Deus) a suitcase stuffed with money. His mission accomplished, the Messenger leaves. João counts the bank notes. The silent waters of a nearby lake are disturbed when a heavy object plunges in. João goes to see what is happening. A young girl (Joana) is drowning. João throws himself into the water and carries the unconscious Joana off to a convent (Capucines?). How Responsible! João de Deus returns to the park to recover the case and its precious contents: happily, nothing has been touched…Read More »

Quote:
A poetic journey in the heart of Portugal. They were two. A man and a woman that met and traveled down from the Tras-os-Montes to the sea. Legends and steep and rocks, faces and sounds… In the film, the chant of a country’s history eight century long is passed on.Read More »

The Door (Hungarian: Az ajtó) is a 2012 Hungarian drama film directed by István Szabó and starring Helen Mirren. Movie based on the award-winning novel of the same name by Magda Szabo (no relation to the director) – tells the story of a writer and her housekeeper who develop an enduring relationship.

Mirren plays the role of housekeeper Emerenc in the novel which has been adapted for the screen by Istvan Szabo and Andrea Veszits.

The film has been selected to be featured in the competition programme at the 33rd Moscow International Film Festival.Read More »

Quote:
“What is to be done?“ three women with artistic and creative professions in temporary living conditions are wondering. With mixed feelings they are heading towards the time when their spontaneous life comes to an end, which means they have to make one or more (life) decisions eventually.Read More »

Quote:
What can be said about Funeral Parade of Roses other than that it is the personification of a fever dream, and the definition of a “mindfuck.” Toshio Matsumoto’s 1969 cult film is nothing but a nightmare that stares down at you with glaring eyes, and never allows you the opportunity for a rest even after it’s over because it will stay with you and haunt you for days. The images are so stark and hellish that one begins to believe that they are in the pits of hell, either that, or inside the mind of a mad genius. Matsumoto’s controversial film was a re-telling of the classic Oedipus Rex tale by Sophocles, and was given a brief release in the US in 1970.Read More »

Synopsis:
Giving up-and-coming writers a chance, or better yet, two. The American playwright and later comedian Peter Paul Bergman wrote a film script in the summer of 1964 at the LCB workshop “Playwriting,” which formed the basis of Flowers is His Name. In this crime parody, detective Peter Flowers gets to deal with Nola, the “most beautiful and depraved woman in the world,” as it says in the opening credits: “Love is the material, ecstasy the action, today the time.”Read More »

A visually beautiful burlesque fantasy about a fountain-of-youth pill and its effects on Getz, a down-and-out Tel Aviv night-club singer. After taking this much sought after pill, Getz becomes the epitome of youthful energy, and therefore a teen idol, a symbol of beauty and youth, up to the cathartic ending of the movie.Read More »

A film looking at the past to warn about the future, from a little boy’s point of view. A companion to ‘American Dreams (lost and found)’ (1984)Read More »