Arthouse

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A slut, a star, a stud and a teen all walk into an orgy… If you think there’s a punchline to this joke, then you haven’t yet seen You and the Night (Les Rencontres d’apres minuit), a visually exquisite, occasionally hilarious, and intermittently trying meditation on sex, love, dreams, death, camp and kitsch that marks a promising feature debut from French filmmaker Yann Gonzalez. Picture The Breakfast Club remixed by Jean Cocteau, Paul Morrissey, Dario Argento and Peter Greenaway, and you’ll get an inkling of what this avant-garde item has in store.Read More »

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Jean-Luc Godard’s densely packed rumination on the need to create order and beauty in a world ruled by chaos is divided into four distinct but tangentially related stories, including the attempts by a young group of idealists to stage a play in war-torn Sarajevo and an elderly director’s efforts to complete his film.Read More »

Longtime Koreeda cinematographer (Nobody Knows, After Life) Yutaka Yamazaki’s first directorial effort, Torso, plows some similar ground to Koreeda’s Air Doll, but to much different effect. Torso covers the relationship between two half-sisters. The older one, Hiroko (Makiko Watanabe) is an uptight, disengaged urban survivor, whose only relationship is with an inflatable male torso. Her secret life of bathing, frolicking and having sex with this headless, armless and legless prosthetic is rudely interrupted when her half-sister, Mina (Sakura Ando) – all extroverted enthusiasm and blabber – appears at her doorstep running from her abusive boyfriend, the one person, or rather body, that never physically appears in the film. The torso and continuing variations of objectified bodies – perfume bottles, pillows, a dress-making mannequin and a gravure idol – becomes the underlying leitmotif of this sensitively rendered portrait of how individuals come to terms with their issues and problems. The “strange” sexuality of blow-up doll attraction is rendered somewhat positively. Watanabe and Ando are perfectly cast and directed with a strained chemistry that at once binds and separates them.Read More »

A feature-length deluge of incessant, brilliant bursts of images (short takes and jump cuts, single frames in series, freeze-frames slightly altered between takes) it creates a Joyce-like dense and sombre mosaic of memory and sensory impressions, a texture instead of a plot, a dream-like flow of visually-induced associations often flashing by faster than they can be absorbed. Described by the director as an ‘anxious allegory and chilling album of nostalgia,’ its penetrating monomania is unexpectedly — subversively — realized to be a statement about American today: the alienation and atomization o technological consumer society is reflected in the very style of the film.Read More »

Doralice is a simple minded woman romantically fascinated by marriage. However, after being raped by a butcher and loses her virginity, a friend advises her to become a prostitute – and she does it. After that, all her wishes and longings will curl up into a fascinating vortex.Read More »

Science, it’s technical use, the breaking of social bonds, it’s rules – that’s the experiment’s name. Sakko and Oi meet by chance.
She’s a casual prostitute, he’s unemployed. They’re the experimental subjects. A play about free time, our time, and unemployment.

Mercedes is the adaptation of Brasch’s own play by the same title. It was produced for dutch television in 1985.Read More »

A patient observation on the adventures a group of three young girls spending their three-week summer vacation at a small village, a quotidian that includes cooking, excursions, playing cards and going out with guys, enjoying the simple pleasures life has to offer.Read More »

An unnamed young man arrives in the foreign city of Strasbourg for reasons unstated. He waits at a hotel, visits a café, sketches passersby… Eventually his motives are revealed, but it is not a traditional narrative that Guerín is after so much as the urban experience of watching, waiting, absorbing. Out of these materials Guerín builds a spellbinding film that reminds us of cinema’s powerful ability to evoke the tugs of memory, desire and the transitory. An extraordinary city film, Sylvia almost entirely eschews dialogue to instead give a symphonic voice to the city itself through a rich and fully immersive soundtrack of urban sounds, explosions of music and strangeRead More »

A bizarre tale about London, a lonely teen yearning for affection and a leather jacket, who lives in a dysfunctional family home where the mother keeps popping and sexually playing with her other child, X-Ray, a member of a gang of Mods who are constantly at war with a gang of Asian Bikers. Amidst this turmoil, London and her soul mate M16 search for meaning in a phantasmagoria without it.Read More »