Arthouse

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The story of a boy and his dog is a classic motif of children’s films. However, Franstišek Vláčil transformed this well-established convention into something sadly poetic, perfectly befitting the tenor of his time. As was the case with many artists, the post-Soviet Invasion years were not kind to Vláčil’s career, but by the mid 1970’s he was eventually allowed to take the reins of a smattering of short documentaries and films for young audiences. Though ostensibly one such children’s film, the adult world tragically intrudes in Sirius, Vláčil’s elegiac WWII-era coming of age film, which screens this Saturday afternoon as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Fantastic World of Franstišek Vláčil retrospective now underway at the Walter Reade Theater.Read More »

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Bourges’s sophomore feature is a richly detailed, austerely composed study of an immigrant community in Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park neighborhood, focused on a Syrian couple with a young son, former physician Rashid and his ex-actress wife (Hussam Douhna and Amani Ibrahim), facing marital discord, the disorientation of displacement, and the limbo-like status of the refugee.Read More »

Two students travel across rural China looking for some meaning to their lives.Read More »

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Every scene of the film comprises a dialogue between a man and a woman. The dialogues are fragmentary, in other words, the dialogue in one scene does not tie in with that of the next. In addition there is no development in the relationship between the actor and the actress towards a happy or unhappy ending. The dialogues are not only of substantial interest; it is above all material for the actors. The film balances on the boundary between portraying an intimate relationship between a woman and a man and the intimacy in the acting between the actor and actress. When an actor or actress hardly has any words in a scene, he or she portrays loneliness; when he/she has a monologue, then the attention is focused on speaking the text, on (the reflection about) being an actor.Read More »

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In a working-class neighbourhood, a group of teenagers are plotting a murder while Polo the local loan shark is preparing to celebrate his 43th birthday. L’eau chaude l’eau frette is a poetics of cruelty, a celebration of anarchy in which friend and foe, young and old, come together to party, wash their dirty linen in public, and settle accounts.Read More »

With its low budget and lush black-and-white imagery, Gus Van Sant’s debut feature Mala Noche heralded an idiosyncratic, provocative new voice in American independent film. Set in Van Sant’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, the film evokes a world of transient workers, dead-end day-shifters, and bars and seedy apartments bathed in a profound nighttime, as it follows a romantic deadbeat with a wayward crush on a handsome Mexican immigrant. Mala Noche was an important prelude to the New Queer Cinema of the nineties and is a fascinating capsule from a time and place that continues to haunt its director’s work.Read More »

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Paris, mid-90s, summer. Louise has just left the clinic having woken up from a five-year-long coma, and finds she inherits a house from her aunt as well a family plot involving her father. Ninon is a petty thief who begins a job as a courier, but fears she has been caught stealing by Roland, a set decorator who works across the street. A friendship between Ninon and Louise forms through Roland. Meanwhile, Ida, a librarian, searches for her birth mother. Paris transforms such that life becomes a musical.Read More »

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Set in 1930s Moscow. About an aristocratic woman married to a member of Josef Stalin’s secret police who embarks on an affair with a baggage handler.Read More »

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A man wanders out of the desert not knowing who he is. His brother finds him, and helps to pull his memory back of the life he led before he walked out on his family and disappeared four years earlier.Read More »