Arthouse

Harry Munter, a sensitive, kind, appealing man in his twenties, lives with his parents. He’s an inventor, a bit of a mystic, maybe a genius, and a good son and grandson. He’s offered work in the U.S. But a friend has cancer and the world is changing in ways that provoke profound sadness

Amos Vogel in “Film as Subversive Art”: 　”A powerful, poetic image: the mystery of black against white, of an outsider walking on the water, on stilts, Christ-like, stubborn, the tension of his forward-leaning body reflecting his determination. This, indeed, is the topic of this intensely mysterious, lyrical film, one of the most original and disregarded works of contemporary cinema.”Read More »

Quote:
The Flowers of St. Francis—or, Francesco, giullare di Dio (Francis, God’s Jester), to give it its full title in Italian—is a delicate, fascinating hybrid, a film that is self-consciously, almost militantly, naive, and, as such, something of an anomaly in Rossellini’s body of work. Never again would his films attain the directness, simplicity, even purity that is so gloriously on display here, a work poised between the theological and the historical, between the Rossellini who emerged from neorealism into the full-blown spiritual crisis manifested in The Miracle, Stromboli, and Europa ’51, all set in postwar Italy, and the latter-day director whose abiding interest was in the depiction of history. Those later works often took religious subjects, but unlike in Acts of the Apostles, Augustine of Hippo, and The Messiah, Rossellini in The Flowers of St. Francis is less concerned with creating a portrait of a particular historical figure than he is with exploring the nature of spirituality, specifically, of “Franciscanism” itself and its impact on the medieval world.Read More »

Synopsis
An aged, prosperous and above any suspicion, bourgeois by the nickname ‘The Master’, lives isolated in a luxurious beachfront villa with his teenage daughter who he has kept well protected from the mischief of the outside world. Behind the façade of the vigorous art lover, however, he prospers by illegally trading antiquities in the black market and a loan sharking. The ‘Master’ has two henchmen to do his ‘dirty work’, Hermes and John. Both will commit a fatal mistake: while Hermes falls for the daughter of his ‘Master’, John is obsessed with a prostitute. Both will pay a heavy price for being ‘sentimentalists’…
IMDb.comRead More »

Synopsis
“NYFF” wrote:
NYFF perennial Hong Sang-soo’s latest may be his wittiest—and his most deeply felt—work to date. Toggling between the present and the past, reality and fiction, and divided into four chapters (and different points of view), Oki’s Movie recounts the amorous and artistic adventures of talented young director Jin-gu (Lee Sun-kyun), his middle-aged cinema instructor, Professor Song (Moon Sung-keun), and Oki (Jung Yumi), the woman who loves them both.

As “Pomp and Circumstance” wryly plays throughout, the protagonists nobly fumble their way through romance and work, culminating in Jin-gu’s disastrous post-screening Q&A. Hong’s eleventh feature is a comedy with tremendous emotional heft, concluding with a heartbreaking précis on the vagaries of the heart and the terrors of aging.Read More »

Quote:
A group of girls and boys in their twenties settle in a country house that seems completely isolated from civilization. One of them writes a novel while the others try to become a gang and prepare a robbery; some fall in love, or seem to be, or believe (or say) they are in love. But these two, three, ten plot lines unfold from what the characters hide or just don’t know, connecting the writing of the novel and the forming of the gang, and the past of two of the characters with that of the house, and of those who perhaps were the two most bitter enemies of nineteenth century Argentine history… With a sense of humor and play that is both the character’s and the film’s, Todos mienten superimposes plot lines as if it were a tapestry from which a part is constantly hidden, revealing it later and changing its meaning, by means of a complot of specialists in pretense that asks the audience to become an accomplice. Brilliant, vital, with an extraordinary depuration and economy of film resources that makes systematic long takes not seem like a prison, but the result of a necessity, Todos mienten is the joy of cinema in its purest form. –BAFICIRead More »

Quote:
A mysterious visitor (Kentucker Audley) spends the night at an apartment belonging to a young engaged couple (Sophia Takal and Lawrence Michael Levine) and their friend (Kate Lyn Sheil.) Over the course of the night and the following day he sleeps with all three roommates and then disappears, leading to conversations about God, life and filmmaking.

Starring: Sophia Takal, Lawrence Michael Levine, Kate Lyn Sheil, Kentucker Audley, Joe SwanbergRead More »

Synopsis:

Explores sisters, in their twenties, their parents, and family dysfunctions. Kay is gangly and slightly askew, consulting a fortune teller and then falling in love with a man because of a mole on his face and a lock of hair; then, falling out of love when he plants a tree in their yard. Sweetie is plump, imperious, self-centered, and seriously mentally ill. The parents see none of the illness, seeing only their cute child. Kay mainly feels exasperation at her sister’s impositions. Slowly, the film exposes how the roots of Sweetie’s illness have choked Kay’s own development.Read More »

Synopsis:
A mute woman along with her young daughter, and her prized piano, are sent to 1850s New Zealand for an arranged marriage to a wealthy landowner, and she’s soon lusted after by a local worker on the plantation.

Review:

Quote:
“The Piano” is as peculiar and haunting as any film I’ve seen.

It tells a story of love and fierce pride, and places it on a bleak New Zealand coast where people live rudely in the rain and mud, struggling to maintain the appearance of the European society they’ve left behind. It is a story of shyness, repression and loneliness; of a woman who will not speak and a man who cannot listen, and of a willful little girl who causes mischief and pretends she didn’t mean to.Read More »

Synopsis:
The Inguri River forms a natural border dividing Georgia from Abkhazia. Tensions between the two nations have not abated since the war of 1992–93. Every spring, the river brings fertile soil from the Caucasus down to the plains of Abkhazia and northwestern Georgia, creating tiny islands. The islands are havens for wildlife and occasionally also for local peasants who find them perfect for the cultivation of a crop to supplement their income.
This long-awaited, fable-like drama from writer-director Ovashvili (The Other Bank, VIFF 08) captures the inexorable cycle of life in this harsh place. One such cycle begins when an old Abkhaz farmer sets foot on one of the islands. The man builds a hut for himself and his teenage granddaughter. He ploughs the earth and they sow what is soon to become a truly amazing corn crop. As his granddaughter blossoms into womanhood and the corn ripens, border patrol boats from the two nations frequently pass, reminding us and them of the dangers of cultivating in no-man’s land. Before long, the girl finds a wounded Georgian soldier hiding among the stalks…Read More »