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A murder and a future teller meet in a desert road. He, driving his chevrolet, a short-cut hair, a rosemary leaf held behind his ear, a yellow shirt of shiny satin. She, walking on the paved road, heavy red lipstick on, a flowery dress with a loose skirt, and red shoes matching the lipstick. He offers her a ride and, after hesitating for a moment, the two of them engage on a bizarr love affair, an outlaw love, where boredom many times gives way to tragedy, raising the agony of a holiday spent in the abyss. Agony originarily means a fighter who fights on the limit of his endurance.
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One of the most exciting films of 2009: Amit Duttas first feature is based on three short stories by Vinod Kumar Shukla and Saadat Hasan Manto. Maybe it indeed is about the problems of masculinity in the modern world (the director says so, at least), but there’s so much more to find in these images. There isn’t one conventional moment in the film. Dutta, one of the most idiosyncratic directors working today, makes every single shot completely his own.Read More »

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This utterly compelling psychological thriller from Michael Haneke – one of cinema’s most daring, original and controversial directors – stars Daniel Auteuil as Georges, a TV presenter who begins to receive mysterious and alarming packages containing covertly filmed videos of himself and his family. To the mounting consternation of Georges and his wife (Juliette Binoche), the footage on the tapes – which arrive wrapped in drawings of disturbingly violent images – becomes increasingly personal, and sinister anonymous phone calls are made. Convinced he knows the identity of the person responsible, Georges embarks on a rash and impulsive course of action that throws up some unpleasant facts about his past and leads to shockingly unexpected consequences.Read More »

Casanova hires a new servant to witness the last moments of his life. Leaving a gallant and libertine Swiss castle, he decides to spend his remaining days in the poor and dark lands of eastern Europe. There, his society life and rationality begin to collapse under a romantic and violent force, represented by Dracula and his eternal power.

Golden Leopard at Locarno 2013
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From wiki

I, Justice (Czech: Já, spravedlnost; German: Als Hitler den Krieg überlebte [If Hitler Would Have Survived the War]) is a 1968 Czechoslovak psychological thriller, directed by Zbyněk Brynych.
At 1946, during the Nuremberg Trials, the Czecholsovak physician Doctor Heřman is abducted by a mysterious organization. To his horror, Heřman discovers that he is to treat Adolf Hitler, whose suicide in 1945 was faked. Hitler now lives in an isolated sanatorium in Germany, surrounded by his ostensibly loyal followers, a group of former high-ranking Nazis. But those men blame him for Germany’s defeat and destruction, and have decided that a single death is not satisfactory punishment for Hitler. Rather, he is made to believe that the Second World War is still being fought..Read More »

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Pasolini’s ‘Decameron’ at the Film Festival

Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian director, has always been something of a puzzle for American critics, not simply because we have to reconcile his announced Marxism with what appears to be a kind of reformed Christianity (as reflected by the neo-realistic “The Gospel According to St. Matthew,” as well as by the austerely allegorical “Teorema”), but because he forces us to keep shifting critical gears. No three Pasolinis are ever quite alike. At best, they come in pairs, like “Oedipus Rex” and “Medea,” neither of which have yet been released here.

There is, however, a peculiar kind of romanticism throughout all of his films. It is a middle-class romanticism that idealizes the spiritual and emotional freedom that Pasolini sees in what we used to call The Common Man, who, in slightly more straightforward, class-conscious Europe, is still The Peasant. As if he were some medieval maiden locked in a tower, Pasolini seems to long for the freedom to do what the simple folk do, which, to Pasolini, evokes sexual liberation as much as anything else.

In none of his films has this been more apparent than in his marvelous new work, “The Decameron,” which is as close to being uninhibited and joyful as anything he’s ever done.
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The misadventures of Anita G., who was born in 1937 of Jewish parents and who left the GDR for the West, are told in a style close to documentary that owes as much to Godard as to Brecht . They are the misadventures of a figure of a repressed past struggling to live in western society

Number 14 on the Association of German Cinémathèques’s best German films of all times.

Winner of the Venice Film Festival ‘s Special Jury Prize.
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Hanni (Eva Mattes) is only 13, but mature at an early age. Her Franz (Harry Baer) is 19 and an unskilled worker. His relationship with the minor does not go undetected.

Based on Franz Xaver Kroetz’s play, which is in turn based on a true story, this film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder tells the story of a very young girl who, after persuading a local boy to become her lover, induces the lad to kill her father, whose incestuous sexual attentions to her have grown unbearable. The site they choose for this deed, which gives its name to the film, is a wild-game crossing.Read More »

A man, a woman, two children: a family. He is a musician. She used to be one until the children came. One day, Marie discovers that not far from where they live, her husband Thomas has set up a second life for himself, a second home with a second family. Marie falls into shock, slowly sinking into her pain by the end of the day. Finally, she is driven by her desperate need for consolation and explanations to seek Thomas at his night concert in an old castle, where there is a masked ball. From then on, she embarks on an emotional journey that will lead her to make an unexpected decision.Read More »