Description: An Italian high school student becomes infatuated with a woman he sees outside his class window. Her fiancée is in jail for being involved in a radical movement, and she spends much time in court providing moral support. At first she resists the student’s advances, but eventually begins an affair with him. Their situation is condemned by her family and his father, who is the woman’s psychologist.Read More »
A man creating a cautionary tale about drug abuse finds himself and his lover drawn into the deadly web of heroin in this drama. Francois Mauge (Mehdi Behaj Kacem) is a filmmaker who is still dealing with the death of his wife, a well-known model and actress who succumbed to drugs. Determined to make a statement about his loss through his work, Francois decides to direct a film about a woman struggling with addiction called “Wild Innocence,” and casts an attractive young actress named Lucie (Julia Faure) in the leading role. Francois soon falls for Lucie and they become lovers, but Francois loses financing for his project, and in order to continue filming, he approaches a less-than-scrupulous financier, Chas (Michel Subor), who was friends with Francois’ late wife. Chas offers to back the movie, but under one condition — Francois has to help him smuggle a large quantity of heroin into France. As if this ugly irony were not enough, Lucie develops a curiosity about drugs while researching her role, and tries snorting heroin; before long, she’s devolved into a full-blown addict. Philippe Garrel’s film was inspired in part by his romance with Nico, the noted model, musician, and actress who herself developed a very serious drug habit during the course of their relationship.Read More »
Synopsis
reassurance.blogspot.com wrote:
La vie nouvelle, with its schizophrenic camera and piercing audio frequency, provokes a dangerous sensation. It pulsates like a tremor, as if we’re entering a universe after some unnamed, unmentioned nuclear disaster. While it’s easy to make visual association to familiar images of horror like Night of the Living Dead when the film opens on a dark pasture with zombie-like peasants, Salò; or The 120 Days of Sodom while a group of Russian criminals strip a group of beautiful youths naked or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me as characters malevolently scream into the air, Grandrieux’s vision is wholly unique.Read More »
Christoffer Boe studied at Copenhagen University before being accepted at the Danish Film School’s director’s course in 1997. He has directed three short movies. One of them, Anxiety, received the Prix Découverte de la Critique Française and was screened in Critics’ Week in 2002.Read More »
NY Times:
The notion that our sexual behavior is the purest expression of our deepest selves is delicately explored in “9 Songs,” Michael Winterbottom’s lyrical, graphically explicit chronicle of an ordinary love affair between two attractive people. The movie isn’t the first art film to show real as opposed to simulated sex, but it’s the first to scrutinize at length one couple’s bedroom etiquette in a search for their identities. If anything, “9 Songs,” conceived and directed by Mr. Winterbottom, the British filmmaker responsible for movies like “In This World” and “Welcome to Sarajevo,” that boldly enter the topical fray, proves that showing what people do in bed may not reveal all that much. The truth lies hidden in their minds.Read More »
Just before twilight, a four-engine plane lands on the runway of a country airport. The plane comes to a halt. A single passenger disembarks: Joe, the last survivor of a Jewish family, the Falsches. He has an appointment with them all tonight, forty years after leaving Berlin for New York in 1938. They are all waiting for him in the arrival lounge of the airport. A night of encounters, of celebrations beyond life and death; a meeting which will soon turn into a family psychodrama.Thirteen people will confront each other about their links to Germany, their life in exile, the presence of Lilli among the Falsches; the cries of anguish in the face of death in the camps, incomprehensible to those who went into exile, the Berlin of today, where nobody remembers the Falsches – not even Joe, who would prefer to forget, and never see them again.Read More »
Summary: Michel is a young man who works as a trainee operator in television, a temporary job before his military service. He meets and becomes friendly with two young women, Liliane and Juliette, aspiring actresses who lack the talent to land roles in anything greater than mediocre TV ads. The three friends share a holiday in Corsica, which will be Michel’s last break before being drafted into the French army, most probably to fight in the war in Algeria.Read More »
…Shohei Imamura presents an unsentimental, provocative, and compassionate examination of resilience, pragmatism, and the essence of human behavior in The Insect Woman. Using informal, cinéma vérité-styled camerawork, freeze-framed scene changes (accompanied by melancholic folksong verses), and historical context (Japanese isolationism, World War II, postwar occupation, Korean War) Imamura achieves a clinically objective, yet sympathetic portrait of his archetypally sensual, primal, and strong-willed heroine as she perseveres through the turbulence and uncertainty of her economic and societal confines: Tomé’s job at the mill during wartime Japan, her attempts at an honest living by working as a cleaning woman during postwar occupation, her resort to prostitution during the economic depression, her rise to the role of madame during the 1950s social reforms (similarly explored in Kenji Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame). By correlating episodic fragments of Tomé’s life with the dynamic events and profound changes of everyday existence in early twentieth century Japan (and Asia in general), Imamura illustrates the instinctuality, mysticism, and idiosyncrasies embedded in the native culture that is often suppressed and aestheticized (especially evident in the films of Yasujiro Ozu) in the country’s postwar, westernized, “official view” of Japan, and in the process, celebrates the resilient soul of a marginalized national identity.
Acquarello, Strictly Film SchoolRead More »
Underground filmmaker Amos Poe (“Blank Generation”) wrote and directed this punk-flavored thriller about a terrorist agent whose mission in New York exposes him to constant danger and a bizarre array of friends and enemies. Eric Mitchell, Patti Astor star, with appearances by The Cramps and Debbie Harry.Read More »