Arthouse

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The young, successful employee Alex knows finally, what he wants from life – actually, what he doesn’t want: Its life. It bores him to death. Each day the same, which is subjected to the capitalism of the local industry. In a violent fight against his own reason Alex floats now in a sump of the Nihilismus and the uncommon everyday life of a new life, which keeps something new ready behind each corner. In a world, in which one is squeezed into cages, only the egoist can survive…Read More »

Stone Wedding (Nunta de piatra) is made of two distinct segments directed by two different directors. The first part (M. Veroiu) depicts the miserable life of a widow in Romania at the beginning of the century. The second part (D. Pita) is about a bride on the day of her wedding. The best part of both movies is the soundtrack by Dorin Liviu Zaharia, Dan Andrei Aldea and Sfinx.Read More »

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Béla Tarr has taken no time to rest in mentoring two of the most promising filmmakers in Eastern Europe. Having previously mentored László Nemes in his Oscar-winning directorial debut, “Son of Saul,” the acclaimed Hungarian director is set to repeat his mentorship with his newest protégé, Emma Rozanski. Funded by Indiegogo, Rozanski has taken bold steps in her first feature film, “Papagajka,” setting her psychological thriller in the tumultuous background of Sarajevo. Having just begun healing old wounds, the Bosnian town becomes the perfect setting to explore how a young man’s life is turned upside down due to the arrival of a intrusive stranger. Read More »

Vicente, seventeen, lives with brother Nino, ten-years-old, and his ailing father in a derelict house on the outskirts of the capital. They don’t seem to remember their mother, and are very much attached to their father, despite his temper, and his frequent absences from home. One day, the father leaves for good, and Vicente and Nino swear to cover it up. It’s their secret. Clara, the primary school assistant, is fascinatingly beautiful, and secretive, and (may be) she knows it aswel. There are other secrets, though: the origin of the money that appears at Vicente’s house; the relationship between Vicente’s well-to-do uncle and his girlfriend; the relationship between the four people who once played the cards together, and now can’t stand each other.Read More »

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With its giddily complex noir plot and color-drenched widescreen images, Made in U.S.A was a final burst of exuberance from Jean-Luc Godard’s early sixties barrage of delirious movie-movies. Yet this chaotic crime thriller and acidly funny critique of consumerism—starring Anna Karina as the most brightly dressed private investigator in film history, searching for a former lover who might have been assassinated—also points toward the more political cinema that would come to define Godard. Featuring characters with names such as Richard Nixon, Robert McNamara, David Goodis, and Doris Mizoguchi, and appearances by a slapstick Jean-Pierre Léaud and a sweetly singing Marianne Faithfull, this piece of pop art is like a Looney Tunes rendition of The Big Sleep gone New Wave.Read More »

Hamoon’s wife is leaving him. He is also unsuccessfully trying to finish his Ph.D. thesis. He is forced to reexamine his life. In a series of flashbacks and dreams, Hamoon tries to figure out what he did wrong.Read More »

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Many great movies are classics. A few stand as landmarks. The merest handful—perhaps four or five in a century—deserve to be called revolutions. Breathless belongs unequivocally in the final category. Since its first screening in 1960, Jean-Luc Godard’s astonishing debut has lost none of its power to thrill an audience or change the way we see the world.

Godard dedicated the film to Monogram Pictures, the company which made the low-rent gangster cheapies that Breathless was drawing on and greatly sending up. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Michel, a small-time crook who kills a highway patrolman. Though on the lam to Italy, he heads to Paris and hooks up with his girlfriend Patricia, a boyish American whose allure is her cool capriciousness. As they talk, make love and lackadaisically dodge the cops, Godard shows them to be the kind of young people that the movies had never before shown—alive in the present tense, oblivious to conventional morality, eager to try on world views like so many hats. Theirs is an instinctive existentialism, and Godard’s leading actors make it almost impossibly glamorous.Read More »

Synopsis
The internationally acclaimed director and recipient of the Erasmus Award in 2007, Péter
Forgács created a documentary exploring the fate of hundred thousands of Hungarian
men and women who arrived to the United States between 1890 and 1921. To tell their
sagas Forgács weaved this grand epic from the early American cinema, found footage,
photographs and interviews. The film reveals the difficult moments of arrival, integration
and assimilation, which eventually fed the happiness of the later generations and their
fulfillment of the American dream.Read More »

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“The Fruit of Paradise” is a breathtaking experimental film from Vera Chytilova. Well known for her surreal feminist comedy “Daisies” (1966), Chytlova uses many of the same hallucinatory camera tricks for “The Fruit of Paradise”. I used to think that the film “Begotten” was original until I saw the “Fruit of Paradise”. The film’s first 15 minutes is highly psychedelic as it tells the story of creation. There are layers of image on top of image with fast camera cuts. The film almost made my head spin with it’s fast pace, use of color and bizarre experimental sound effects. Then it breaks out into a song about Adam & Eve, which is hauntingly catchy. Now if only I could learn Czech. Then the story of Adam and Eve goes to a modern setting. The devil is portrayed as creepy man of middle age; a persistent stalker and serial killer of women. Eva and her boyfriend go on vacation to a health spa, where they encounter temptation. The devil gets Eva to eat the forbidden fruit. Then the film becomes very comical throughout, as the Devil chases adorable Eva everywhere she goes. Very deep, surreal and philosophical, “The Fruit of Paradise” is another underrated masterpiece to Czech out!Read More »