News of nuclear war breaks during the festivities of drama critic Alexander’s birthday celebration. With the end of the world nigh, he turns to God and vows to renounce everything near and dear to him, if the war is averted. For Alexander, a philosopher troubled by man’s lack of spirituality, the prospect of certain extinction compels the ultimate sacrifice, and he enters into a Faustian bargain with God to save his loved ones from the fear which grips them.Read More »
Helene Regnier’s husband Charles, who is mentally ill, injures their son Michel in a rage. Charles moves back in with his wealthy and manipulative parents, who blame Helene for their son’s condition and vow to win custody of Michel. While the boy is in hospital, Helene rents a room in a boarding house nearby. The Regniers hire Paul Thomas, a family acquaintance who needs money, to find dirt on Helene before the court hearing on custody. Paul moves into the boarding house and, with the help of his girlfriend Sonia, who rarely wears clothes, plots to ruin Helene’s reputation and then her very life.Read More »
Summer 1971. In front of Frederic Rossif’s cameras, a young Vangelis Papathanassiou improvises live on screen using his self-made set-up of electronic instruments and percussions while George Mathieu is painting two giant canvases: The Election of Charles Quint and The Necessity of Hope. The great French dramaturge François Billetdoux writes a beautiful text specially for this opportunity.Read More »
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Notre Musique, is an indictment of modern times divided into three “kingdoms”: “Enfer” (“Hell”), “Purgatoire” (“Purgatory”) and “Paradis” (“Paradise”). A unqiue blend of almost abstract cinema, fiction, and documentary. It opens with a montage entitled “Hell”, which shows real and fictional footage of carnage: soldiers, atrocities, war. As brief as it is, the relentless and strangely beautiful barrage of violence is enough to make anybody despair of the human race.Read More »
From The New york Times
Grimly austere barely begins to describe the atmosphere of dread that seeps through “Fear X” like a toxic mist. The movie’s ominous mood is deepened by Brian Eno and J. Peter Schwalm’s ambient background score, which haunts the movie with faraway groans and rattles.
If “Fear X,” the American filmmaking debut of the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, promises far more drama than it finally delivers, its glumness never abates. Whether contemplating the shabby cottages in a snow-swept Wisconsin suburb or scanning the flatlands of Montana, the camera, which stealthily follows the protagonist’s suspicious eyes wherever he looks, imagines danger crouching in every shadow.Read More »
An unsuspecting student thinks that the wife of an arms dealer is unhappy, but in reality she appears as cynical as her capitalist man.Read More »
PLOT: In 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle), Jean-Luc Godard beckons us ever closer, whispering in our ears as narrator. About what? Money, sex, fashion, the city, love, language, war: in a word, everything. Among the legendary French filmmaker’s finest achievements, the film takes as its ostensible subject the daily life of Juliette Janson (Marina Vlady), a housewife from the Paris suburbs who prostitutes herself for extra money. Yet this is only a template for Godard to spin off into provocative philosophical tangents and gorgeous images. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her is perhaps Godard’s most revelatory look at consumer culture, shot in ravishing widescreen color by Raoul Coutard.Read More »
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An innocent young man witnesses violence breaks out after an isolated village is inflamed by the arrival of a circus and its peculiar attractions, a giant whale and a mysterious man named “The Prince”.Read More »
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Taking leave from their jobs at a gold mine, three workers journey to their home village on foot through the spectacular yet unforgiving wilderness of the mythical island of Hugaw. As time passes and their conversations intensify, buried histories emerge and a sense of psychosis invades the scene. As ever, Lav Diaz’s exquisitely subdued black-and-white images and patient rhythm lend a Brechtian register to the drama; almost always filmed from the same fixed distance, each scene is an immaculate tableau vivant. Behind the film’s folkloric façade, Diaz once again taps into the collective memory of defiant struggles against the tyranny of both contemporary Filipino society and colonial brutality, centred on the timeless image of men walking – one of the key traits of Pan.Read More »