A renowned actress (Ellen Barkin) abandons her successful career for a secluded life in the hills. But before long, she begins to fear she has only lived through the characters she has played. Reality becomes inseparable from unhinged obsessions in a hallucinatory struggle to reclaim herself. With a tour de force by Barkin, Cam Archer’s (Wild Tigers I Have Known) confirms him as one of the most distinct voices in American cinema.Read More »
An assassin accepts a dangerous mission to kill a political leader in seventh-century China.
J. Hoberman wrote:
“The Assassin” is extraordinarily beautiful. The film’s editing and narrative construction are, however, no less remarkable. For all its exquisitely furnished interiors and fantastic landscapes, “The Assassin” is far too eccentric to ever seem picturesque. Nor does it unfold like a typical wuxia. Mayhem is abrupt, brief and fragmentary — predicated on suave jump-cuts and largely devoid of special effects.Read More »
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Jean-Luc Godard wrote, directed, and edited this mind-boggling comedy. “The Idiot” (also known as “the Prince” and played by Godard himself) has been guaranteed financing for a film, if he can deliver it within 24 hours. But he encounters all sorts of hilarious problems as he attempts to do so. Meanwhile a pop group (Les Rita Mitsouko) works on a new album. (-DVD cover)
With a tip of the hat to Jerry Lewis, Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, and (for good measure) Dostoyevsky, Jean-Luc Godard wrote, directed, edited and stars in this mind-boggling comedy. The rambling plot involves a hapless filmmaker (Godard) and his attempt to meet a deadline for delivering a film. From there the movie branches out into an abstract, episodic structure. “…engages even as it baffles…The confusion that results, punctuated by glimmerings of understanding, is the point” (A.O. Scott, The New York Times).Read More »
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The director Gaspard Bazin is preparing a new feature film. For now, he is still in the casting and financing stages. He’s asking the help of Jean Almereyda, a producer once fashionable but now at low ebb, who has more and more difficulties to raise cash for his company. His wife, Eurydice, dreams of being a movie star. Between the two men, a perverse game is starting, Almereyda wishing to please his wife, but the unrepentant seducer reputation of Bazin holds him to require a part for Eurydice…Read More »
Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote:
Jacques Rozier is perhaps the least known of the most talented French New Wave directors, if only because his output is so limited—about one feature per decade. His subject is teenagers, and his method owes a lot to cinema verite. This first feature, made toward the beginning of the 1960s, is also probably his best; it concerns a young TV worker who is dating two 18-year-old girlfriends and can’t choose between them. Rozier’s graceful style is a mixture of sweetness and light, devoid of pretension and open to youthful energies. Recommended.Read More »
A young man and a woman meet in the bath of a resort in Atami one evening. The young man then attempts to swoon the woman while in the meantime enjoying the city sights of the vacation town, all accompanied by a sensual jazz score.Read More »
A cat’s inquisitive look interferes with the pleasurable sensations of a boy while masturbating.
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A successful fashion designer abandons a sado-masochistic relationship with her female assistant in favor of a love affair with a beautiful young woman.Read More »
Synopsis:
Emak-Bakia shows elements of fluid mechanical motion in parts, rotating artifacts showing his ideas of everyday objects being extended and rendered useless. Kiki of Montparnasse (Alice Prin) is shown driving a car in a scene through a town. Towards the middle of the film Jacques Rigaut appears dressed in female clothing and make-up. Later in the film a caption appears: La raison de cette extravagance (The reason for this extravagance)and it cuts to a car arriving and a passenger leaving with briefcase entering a building, opening the case revealing men’s shirt collars which he proceeds to tear in half. The collars are then used as a focus for the film, rotating through double exposures.
When the film was first exhibited, a man in the audience stood up to complain it was giving him a headache and hurting his eyes. Another man told him to shut up, and they both started to fight. The theatre turned into a frenzy, the fighting end up out in the street, and the police were called in to stop the riot.Read More »