REVIEW by Anji Milanovic (from plume-noire.com):
In Old, New, Borrowed and Blue director Natasha Arthy begins the film with a signed certificate of authenticity from the Dogma school. By the film’s end, however, it’s clear that she has taken the rules of Dogma and used them to make her own engaging film, instead of an exercise in philosophical experimentation.Read More »
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A sardonic and irreverent contemporary adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet Goes Business is an idiosyncratically whimsical, yet incisive satire on corporate greed, materialism, corruption, and vengeance. Shot in black and white and employing high contrast lighting, the film achieves an atmospheric noir that reflects Aki Kaurismäki’s irrepressibly droll sense of humor and penchant for understated irony. Kaurismäki incorporates traditional, often manipulative and hackneyed stylistic devices of lush, overarching music, directed stage lighting, expressionistic gestures, skewed camera angles, and meticulously composed slow motion shots in order to playfully subvert dramatic convention: Lauri’s angered departure from Hamlet’s office; Hamlet’s self-consciously tormented delivery of a poem to Ophelia; the overdramatic, but anticlimactic plot device of the Murder of Gonzago play-within-a-play episode to expose Klaus’s treachery; the exquisite choreography of Ophelia’s final moments of despair. By integrating muted emotion with exaggerated theatricality, Kaurismäki creates a delirious and incongruent fusion of highbrow art film and pop culture kitsch – a patently iconoclastic comedic tragedy on indecision, inertia, and alienation.
(filmref.com)Read More »
Synopsis
Jupiter comes down from Mount Olympus and disguises himself as a mortal to romance a woman…Read More »
Plot: When their mother dies, Frederick Smith hires Emma Thatcher to be a nanny to his 3 children. The children grow up and Frederick becomes rich and successful. He and Emma marry right before his death, and his will becomes a source of trouble between the children and Emma. Written by Rebecca Fennig Read More »
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In early 18th century England, a frail Queen Anne occupies the throne and her close friend, Lady Sarah, governs the country in her stead. When a new servant, Abigail, arrives, her charm endears her to Sarah.Read More »
Stanley Donen (April 13, 1924 – February 21, 2019)
RIP.
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Mark and Joanna Wallace (Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn) have the kind of marriage where barbs and insults mean more to them than all the endearments ever spoken. During a present day trip to the south of France, they remember other European jaunts they’ve made. On their journey, they experience anew the first glow of passion, the aching loneliness of being apart, the elation of cresting a hill at sunrise, the joy of making up after a fight, and ultimately, they establish what it means to be a couple.Read More »
Jacques Blanchot loses everything: his wife, his home, his job. He gradually alienates himself from the world around him. Until the day when the owner of a pet shop takes him in.Read More »
After his father’s death, a Parisian medical researcher returns to a region of Portugal to deal with part of the family legacy – a prosthesis factory owned by an old family friend. He finds the factory owner and his wife “possessed” by the local Marquis and finds himself constantly accosted by all sorts of supernatural manifestations.Read More »
Two brothers, both military, come to a kind of campus, where their third brother is kind of ill : he keeps in his room, not speaking anymore.
Why ? What can one do for him ?
One can think of Bresson with humor, or a poetic musical. The less you know about the movie before watching it, the better it is. It is too simple and too fragile to resist too much description.Read More »