Arthouse

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River of Grass has all the elements of a conventional road movie: a car, a gun, criminal plans, and young lovers on the run from an angry father who also happens to be a suspended police officer. But writer and director Kelly Reichardt has instead taken these familiar elements and fashioned an anti-road movie, a deadpan film that is more existentialist comedy than crime drama. The young lovers in question are Cozy, the cop’s daughter, and Lee Ray, a shady character from the wrong end of town.

Lee Ray comes into possession of a pistol, and soon he and Cozy find themselves unintentionally involved in a shooting. Fearing capture by the law, the two make plans to leave town, committing a series of robberies on the way. However, they don’t manage to get very far; indeed, the film’s central premise is how the romantic myth of lovers on the lam proves disappointing in the face of a far more pedestrian reality.
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Yilmaz Arslan directed this Turkish-German-Swiss drama. A woman arrives at an apartment building in a German city to visit her friend Hülya (Yelda Reynaud), only to learn that Hülya has returned to Turkey with her aunt and uncle because of an unspecified illness. There are indications Hülya was kidnapped by her family. Back in Turkey, the unhappy Hülya refuses to speak or eat. At the first chance, she escapes, heading back to Germany without money or identity papers. Beginning the arduous journey, she collapses on the road, is taken care of by peasants, locates her estranged mother, has a run-in with police, and is thrown into a women’s mental institution. Dream sequences are intercut throughout. Shown at the 1998 Venice Film Festival.

— Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide
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Synopsis
Upon returning home to Iran after more than two decades abroad, visiting professor Arash is quickly thrust into a past he’s spent his whole life trying to escape. With an estranged father on his deathbed and a mother who wants nothing to do with her husband’s shady past, Arash finds himself at the mercy of the rest of the family who have their own ideas about what should happen to his father’s assets. Meanwhile, Arash is also grappling with the legacy of his brother’s mysterious, long-ago death. A stranger in his native country, he struggles to navigate the labyrinthine state bureaucracy, as well as the darker twists and turns of a corrupt and violent netherworld.
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Plot:
As Japan nears defeat at the end of World War II, Emperor Hirohito starts his day in a bunker underneath the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. A servant reads to him a list of activities for the day, including a meeting with his ministers, marine biology research, and writing his son. Hirohito muses about the impact on such schedules when the Americans arrive but is told that as long as there is a solitary Japanese person living, the Americans will not reach The Emperor. Hirohito replies that he at times feels like he himself will be the last Japanese person left alive. The servant reminds him that he is a deity, not a person, but Hirohito points out that he has a body just like any other man. He later reflects on the causes of the war when dictating observations about a hermit crab, and then about the peace to come when composing a letter to his son. Soon enough General Douglas MacArthur’s personal car is sent to bring him through the ruins of Tokyo for a meeting with the supreme commanderRead More »

The film captured the atmosphere of the 1920’s with effortless ease: this story of two school teachers Kristina and Ljiljana, the former a Slovene and the latter a Serb woman, lost somewhere in the Yugoslav provinces of the north is imbued from start to finish with the literary and visual spice of Dada and Surrealism. The story itself is hardly of importance; what’s important is that the teachers are forever dreaming of a new life in a big city. But – like those adrift on Gericault’s raft named Medusa in that classic painting of the French Romantic period – the important thing may just being on the move in a sea of chaos. The main question of the film is: did the avant-garde movement have a sense on the Balkans?
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Winter, 1915. Confined by her family to an asylum in the South of France – where she will never sculpt again – the chronicle of Camille Claudel’s reclusive life, as she waits for a visit from her brother, Paul Claudel.
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Unlike William Wyler’s inferior 1939 film adaptation, Luis Buñuel’s Abismos de Pasión is more than a literate extrapolation of Emily Bronte’s gothic masterpiece Wuthering Heights, which certainly must count as one of the five greatest novels of the English language. Though not overtly surreal, Buñuel’s minor classic is fraught with the kind of feverish contradictions typically heir to his cinematic dogma. Critic Manny Farber observed in his eulogy for Val Newton (published in The Nation back in April of 1951) how Jacques Tourneur’s The Leopard Man gives “the creepy impression that human begins and ‘things’ are interchangeable and almost synonymous and that both are pawns of a bizarre and terrible destiny.” Farber felt the Surrealists had never been able to transform the psychological effects of their dramas into a realm of the non-human but, four years later, Buñuel would accomplish something similar with his very Latin rendition of Bronte’s classic. The film’s dreary exteriors (the trees without leaves, the buzzards on constant alert) evoke a landscape of spiritual unrest, a breezy gateway between the living and the dead. While the film arouses the dreaminess of the original text, death signifies more than the lead couple’s transcendence of the flesh—it’s also a fascinating wish fulfillment.Read More »

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On the verge of a forced retirement, Don Celso, an elderly office worker begins to relive both real and imagined memories from his life – a trip to the movies as a young boy with Beethoven, listening to tall tales from Long John Silver, a brief stay in a haunted hotel. Stories hide within stories and the thin line between imagination and reality steadily erodes, opening up a marvelous new world of personal remembrance and fantastic melodrama. A playfully elegiac film from the great Raul Ruiz, conceived to be seen only after his death, Night Across the Street is a beautiful final masterwork exploring the director’s favorite subjects: fiction, history and life itself.Read More »

Blessed with several large rivers, interconnected streams and springs, Japan’s ancient capital, Kyoto, anoints the land with a bountiful source of water. In this tranquil setting, three women join the flow of a small community with the subtle presence of a spring breeze. Setsuko , the proprietor of a whiskey-only bar; Takako, the owner of a coffee shop along the waterway; Hatsumi, a maker of tofu so delicious it seems to spring forth from the clear water. Under their subtle influence, other townspeople gradually begin their own streams too: Yamanoha, a local worker for a furniture workshop; Otome, the owner of a neighborhood public bath; Jin, a young man who assists him at the bath; Makoto, a wayfarer about the town. Among their daily lives, there is Poplar, a small child with a perpetually friendly smile.Read More »