Arthouse

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The concluding part of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Trilogy Of Life”, following The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights corrects many of the mistakes found in the latter, noticeably its ramshackle, uneven approach, and returns to the charming territory of the former. Indeed, the film is as good as The Decameron, if not better, and is generally considered to be the trilogies crowning moment and one of Pasolini’s finest films (critic Tony Rayns recently included it amongst his choices for Sight and Sound’s 2002 Top Ten Critics’ Poll).Read More »

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LEAD: EARLY in ”The Sea and Poison,” the harrowing Japanese movie now at Film Forum 1, a surgical team performs a lung operation on a young woman. It is probably the most graphic view that most of its audience will ever have had of the scalpel and forceps doing their work, and you may find yourself joining the young intern Suguro, who confesses, ”Today in the operating room, I had to close my eyes.

EARLY in ”The Sea and Poison,” the harrowing Japanese movie now at Film Forum 1, a surgical team performs a lung operation on a young woman. It is probably the most graphic view that most of its audience will ever have had of the scalpel and forceps doing their work, and you may find yourself joining the young intern Suguro, who confesses, ”Today in the operating room, I had to close my eyes.”Read More »

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Ichiko lived in a big city, but goes back to her small hometown Komori, located on a mountain in the Tohoku region. She is self-sufficient. Ichiko gains energy living among nature and eating foods she makes from seasonal ingredients.Read More »

Three middle-aged friends reunite for the first time in years. Each of them sets out to confess unexpressed feelings, but their vacation takes a surprising turn when the undercurrent of their past lives threatens to resurface.Read More »

Lionel has brought up his daughter, Josephine, on his own since his wife’s accidental death. Over the years, their life together has grown to resemble that of a couple. Josephine has now reached the age at which the roles begin to be inverted. She is now the one who seems to want to take care of her father. Lionel knows that he has one more thing to do: to convince Josephine to make her own way in the world, to become a woman and to leave him.Read More »

Gu Wentong, a middle-aged food critic, is drifting through the local eateries of vibrant Beijing with his younger photographer colleague Oyang. A divorcé with a 6-year-old daughter and estranged from his father for decades, he is looking for a new perspective on life while reconsidering his failings as a father, a son, and a lover. While the seasons come and go, people get together and move apart. Only one thing will remain the same: The White Pagoda where they all meet sooner or later.Read More »

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Even though they grew up in opposite parts of France, Gwen (Isild Le Besco) and Lise (Karen Alyx) are best friends and spend every summer vacation together on the Brittany coast where Gwen lives and Lise’s family has a summer home. But this summer is different because Lise’s family isn’t going on vacation for reasons that she won’t explain to Gwen. Sick of her parents bickering about money and missing her bosom buddy, Gwen finds a boyfriend and mingles with some horny out-of-towners. Now fifteen, she’s discovered that summer can be fun even if Lise isn’t there. Then suddenly, Lise shows up at Gwen’s house uninvited to stay for a couple of weeks. Read More »

Oskar Roehler was born in 1959, the son of writers Gisela Elsner and Klaus Roehler. He grew up in London, Rome and Nuremberg and made his first short film She LA in 1994. He had his feature debut in 1995 with Gentleman, which was shown at the Munich Filmfest the same year.

Frank Seltsam likes fast cars good looking girls and expensive drugs. but lately more and more doesn’t work out the way he wants anymore: his car was taken in by the police, in the shoping center there are no more wonderbras and germaine – the girl he fancies – comes with some other man to his party. his frustration turns into an orgie of blood champaign and heroin…Read More »

James Gracey on Eye For Film wrote:
Based on a 19th century Gothic novella by Aleksey Tolstoy (previously adapted for cinema by Mario Bava as a segment in his 1963 anthology, Black Sabbath), The Vourdalak is the debut feature film from French writer-director Adrien Beau. It tells of the Marquis d’Urfé (Kacey Mottet Klein), an emissary of the King of France who seeks shelter with a family when he becomes lost travelling through Eastern Europe. The family are anxiously awaiting the return of their patriarch, Gorcha, who has gone to capture an outlaw. Before leaving, he forewarned his family that if he does not return within six days, he has been killed and, if he reappears, they must refuse him entry to the house as he has become a vourdalak; a walking corpse returned from the grave seeking the blood of its loved ones…Read More »