This is the “Bonus Disc Extras” of Memento Films’ BD release of “Winter Sleep”.
Bonus Disc Extras includes:
Behind the Scenes (2:18:56) in Turkish with French soft-subs.
Winter Sleep at Cannes (0:10:35) in French & English
Trailer (00:01:40) (no subs) Read More »
Plot Synopsis
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Winner of the Best Director prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together is a stunning display of filmmaking style and a touching story of love on the brink of dissolution. Hong Kong cinema superstars Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung play a pair of lovers living out the waning days of their relationship as expatriates in Buenos Aires. Lusty tango bars, the salsa music of the La Boca sidewalks and a hypnotic visit to the nearby Iguazu Falls give further dimension to the tensions growing between the two lovers.Read More »
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Love Streams is at once a culmination of the director’s obsessions and his most atypical film. It’s a movie that gives up its mysteries slowly—flirting with theatricality, inserting dream sequences, concluding on a brazenly surreal enigma. Cassavetes stars as Robert Harmon, a tough-guy novelist with unorthodox research methods. Rowlands, magnificent as ever, is Robert’s sister, Sarah Lawson, a divorcée who turns up at his doorstep with two taxis full of luggage and an entire barnyard menagerie. An emotional live wire and by default a social rebel, the embarrassingly demonstrative Sarah is kindred spirit to A Woman Under the Influence’s unhinged housewife Mabel Longhetti and Opening Night’s aging stage star Myrtle Gordon: All are women with a raw-nerved, overwhelming capacity and need for love. The enormously moving interplay between Cassavetes and Rowlands gets at the heart of the performative spectacle unique to his films: an interaction beyond words and gestures, predicated on the invention of a shared language so hyperbolic and specific and almost inexplicable it must be love. Indeed, the movie—as its title suggests—performs an anatomy of its subject. More explicitly metaphysical than the other great Cassavetes films, it nonetheless shares their view of love as a way of life and a form of madness.Read More »
In 1985, filmmaker Richard Linklater began a film screening society in Austin, Texas, that aimed to show classic art-house and experimental films to a budding community of cinephiles and filmmakers. The Austin Film Society raised enough money to fly in their first out-of-town invitee, visionary experimental filmmaker James Benning. Accepting the invitation, Benning met Linklater and immediately the two began to develop a personal and intellectual bond, which has lasted through the present. After the cult success of “Slacker” (1991), Linklater has gone on to make award-winning big budget narrative films including “School of Rock” (2003), “Before Midnight” (2013) and “Boyhood” (2014). Benning, meanwhile, has stayed close to his modest roots and is mainly an unknown figure in mainstream film culture. Combining filmed conversations and archival material, “Double Play” explores the connections between the work and lives of these two American visionaries.Read More »
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A heist-movie of such exquisitely bizarre loopiness to make Inception look like Ocean’s Eleven, Sergio Caballero’s The Distance (La distancia) is a likeably giggle-inducing dollop of deadpan surrealist whimsy. Observing a trio of telepathic Russian dwarves tasked with robbing an abandoned Siberian power-station, Caballero’s follow-up to 2010’s even more deliciously outre Finisterrae confirms the Catalan’s status as a puckish jester in the court of current European art-cinema. Adventurous audiences enduring the longueurs and waywardness of his gloriously uncompromised vision are rewarded with a hilariously abrupt finale that should delight many but leave others baffled and bemused. Festivals with late-night slots to fill will clamor for this cultish item, which might even find small distribution niches in eccentricity-embracing territories such as Japan and France.Read More »
Winter, Beirut. On a beach littered with cans washed up from the sea, Lili and Michel meet. Perhaps they know each other from before. As they struggle to piece together the fragments of an uncertain past, memories emerge: an act of terrorism, an explosion and the disappearance of a child, Elena.
Woven throughout these fragments is the deep voice of a Japanese narrator who recounts his own experience of a weeping Beirut, and his 27 clandestine years fighting alongside the Palestinians as a member of the Japanese Red Army. His voiceover shapes Michel and Lili’s story, their fate dictated by the enigma created for them by this narrator who turns out to be legendary Japanese New Wave filmmaker Masao Adachi.Read More »
Criterion Synopsis:
Two restless young men (Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur) enlist the object of their desire (Anna Karina) to help them commit a robbery––in her own home. French New Wave pioneer Jean-Luc Godard takes to the streets of Paris to re-imagine the gangster genre, spinning an audacious yarn that’s at once sentimental and insouciant, romantic and melancholy. The Criterion Collection is proud to present the convention-flauting postmodern classic Band of Outsiders (Bande à part).Read More »
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In Jim Jarmush’s Coffee and Cigarettes, friends meet to romanticize about their love for two savory customs. Cristi Puiu’s Cigarettes and Coffee turns Jarmush’s film around. Neither Fiul (Mimi Branescu), a young man dressed in a suit, nor Tatal (Victor Rebengiuc), his poor looking father, smoke or drink coffee as they meet in a bar to talk business. Instead, they have water, beer, and apple pie. And unlike the character’s in Jarmush’s film, Fiul’s and Tatal’s conflict is not to come to terms about myths on tobacco and caffeine. The old man in Puiu’s film actually has a serious problem.Read More »
Review from the New York Times website, by Vincent Canby :
“Thérèse”, Alain Cavalier’s cool, unsentimental, astonishingly handsome consideration of the life of St. Therese of Lisieux (1873-1897), is a far cry from “The Song of Bernadette.” Here are no heavenly choirs, no visions bathed in celestial light, no skeptics suddenly transformed into believers by miraculous, not otherwise explicable phenomena. Instead, “Thérèse” is resolutely objective. It examines the religious faith and exaltation of Thérèse Martin, later to be known as the Little Flower of Jesus, in the pragmatic way with which she herself seems to have accepted the experience of her conversion. As played – radiantly and with a good deal of humor – by Catherine Mouchet, Thérèse remains a mystery not to be analyzed but to be accepted as a fact of church history.Read More »