Arthouse

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Louise lives with Rémi in Marne-la-Vallée. He is an architect, she is an interior decorator. Their lives would be perfect if Rémi were less of a homebody, and if Louise were not such a night owl. Conscious of preserving her independence, Louise rents a pied-à-terre in Paris. Octave, her friend and confidant, is always ready to accompany her during her night prowls. One evening, beneath a full moon, and Octave’s jealous, loving gaze, she succumbs to the charms of a sensual dancer. As day breaks she realises, however, that she would much rather be with Rémi.Read More »

Patrick Bokanowski’s extraordinarily intimate portrait of Henri Dimier at work focuses as much attention on the personality of the materials as on the painter himself. Only fitting, as Dimier repeatedly insists that the artist’s vocation is to let the paper “be aware of itself” and takes obvious pleasure showing the proper way to sharpen a pencil. Dimier demonstrates several playful exercises to cultivate an all-important sense of spontaneity while he approaches teaching as another opportunity for improvisation. “If you lose your momentum you lose your freedom,” Dimier opines. And indeed Bokanowski’s portrait exemplifies the benefit of sustained attention. – Max GoldbergRead More »

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Deploying masterful Steadicam and ominous sound design, Kerr’s enigmatic and disquieting feature debut takes place one summer day on an idyllic estate in Texas. A large family gathers to take a group picture, only for the matriarch to disappear and the rest of the clan to drift away, leaving daughter Katy (Deragh Campbell) to try to salvage the gathering in a world where reality is increasingly untrustworthy.Read More »

During her holiday in Brest, a young Parisian falls in love with a sailor. But autumn comes and the two lovers have to part. They write to each other. Will their love resist at a distance, each living his life, him in Brest with his friends, she in Paris who keeps waiting for him? An impossible love story and the cross-portrait of two cities, Paris and Brest, between the realism of the color images and the poetry infused by the sepia black and white images, lives to the rhythm of the nostalgia of the two lovers…Read More »

After the conductor of the orchestra he has been playing in commits suicide, a young clarinettist is left with a quite valuable violin.Read More »

Directed by the late, great Jun Ichikawa (Tony Takitani, Dying at a Hospital); about the storied Tokiwa apartment that in the 1950s housed up-and-coming manga luminaries such as Osamu Tezuka, Shotaro Ishinomori, Fujiko Fujio and numerous others.

Mark Schilling of the Japan Times called Tokiwa: the Manga Apartment one of the best Japanese movies of the 90s; Kinema Jumpo named it among the 200 greatest Japanese films of all time.Read More »

Synopsis: Six vignettes set in different sections of Paris, by six directors. St. Germain des Pres (Douchet), Gare du Nord (Rouch), Rue St. Denis (Pollet), and Montparnasse et Levallois (Godard) are stories of love, flirtation and prostitution; Place d’Etoile (Rohmer) concerns a haberdasher and his umbrella; and La Muette (Chabrol), a bourgeois family and earplugs.Read More »

Takeshi Kitano plays a version of himself in which he’s a struggling director cycling through a number of different genres in an effort to complete his latest project.Read More »

Synopsis: An aspiring film student is denied a scholarship to the state-funded university when his father is thrown in jail. The man had stopped a train in order to facilitate the union between two old friends. The son then takes a job as a land surveyor and meets a Greek man who works towards the collective benefits of the peasants. The man is killed in a peasant uprising prompted by a bureaucratic boondoggle. The surveyor looks after the man’s widow as his emerging political and social awareness leads him take a stand against government injustice. Another incident, in which gypsies are rounded up by state hygiene workers, further galvanizes the man’s beliefs. He photographs the incident, and his work allows him to be accepted into the school from which he was previously denied admission.Read More »