Arthouse

A disabled man living with his handicapped son in a remote Iranian village.Read More »

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Released in 1964 and directed by Fernando Lopes, “Belarmino” charts the life and times of ex-boxer Belarmino Fragoso. It is considered one of the first films of the Novo Cinema Português, itself part of a wave of New Cinema movements sweeping the world in the 196os, and one of the key markers of a break from the previous traditions of Portuguese cinema.Read More »

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Koreyoshi Kurahara adapted a novel by Yukio Mishima for Thirst for Love (Ai no kawaki), a tense psychological drama about a young woman who is widowed after marrying into a wealthy family, and becomes sexually involved with her father-in-law, while harboring a destructive obsession with the family gardener. Kurahara’s atmospheric style is a perfect match for Mishima’s brooding sensuality.Read More »

Alix Cléo Roubaud, a photographer, describes her images to Eustache’s son Boris. An “essay in the shape of a hoax”, Eustache’s last film wittily questions the relationship between showing and telling as it gradually shifts Alix’s narration out of sync with what we see.Read More »

The world-famous woodblock artist Hokusai is a widower who lacks the ability to earn money, and he lives with his daughter Oei at the house of his friend, Bakin. Hokusai meets a woman called Onao and finds himself uncontrollably attracted to her, but she disappears all of a sudden. One day, an excited Oei brings home a young girl who looks exactly like Onao. Immediately, Hokusai starts to paint, using the young girl as a model. The illusion of Onao drives Hokusai back into the waves of youth as he painted the masterpiece of the gigantic octopus and the beauty being seduced, at the age of 90.Read More »

Director Jun Ichikawa spins this affectionate portrait of the people who populate Shimokitazawa, a bohemian corner of Tokyo filled with small theater companies and smoky coffeehouses.Read More »

Kaneto Shindô’s 1974 film “My Way” is a throwback to films of his early career and is an exposure of the Japanese government’s mistreatment of the country’s migratory workers. Based on a true story, an elderly women resiliently spends nine months attempting to retrieve her husband’s dead body, fighting government bureaucracy and indifference all along the way.Read More »

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One need only look at the phenomenal The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra to see that even in the cinema’s youth filmmakers were not limited by their budgets, but by their imaginations.

Made in 1928, it had a budget of $96 (adjusted for inflation, that’s $1191.33). Sources say that the money was divvied up as such: Film Negative, $25 ($310.24), Store Props, $3 ($27.23), Development and Printing, $55 ($682.54), Transportation, etc, $14 ($173.74). The sets were made of toys and cardboard buildings that were projected like shadows.Read More »

In 1984–85, Johan van der Keuken took his camera across the globe, from Amsterdam to New York to Hong Kong, ending in Geneva. The object of his investigation was money, in particular the maniacal drive to accumulate it in the era of Thatcherite/Reaganite neoliberalism.Read More »