Drama

Online review of film:
Eventually it may be that Noah Baumbach could turn into this country’s answer to France’s Eric Rohmer, turning out a steady diet of small, circumspect dramas about the lives and neurotic times of New York-era literary bourgeoisie. That’s one of the things that comes to mind as one takes in Margot at the Wedding, Baumbach’s fourth time out as writer/director and one that seems to set a template for the future. It’s a chill breeze of a film steeped in ugly inter-familial squabbling and the blinkered mentality of its self-absorbed characters who can generally only raise their gaze from their own navels long enough to find something lacking in the person they’re addressing.Read More »

In the curious story of this magic-realistic film, the customs of ethnic mountain peoples in Vietnam are linked to the idiosyncrasies of modern art. There are three protagonists, who live on a lonely mountain. They are the old father and his two children: his beautiful, nubile daughter and a mentally handicapped son. Tradition dictates that the son first has to marry in order to ensure the male family line is continued. For that, young men go to the annual marriage market, but the undesirable son returns every year without a bride. The old man is determined that his son will father a child before he dies and takes unusual measures to ensure this.

The film was banned in its own country, primarily because of the sexual themes, but also possibly because of its unruly form.Read More »

Quote:
Life is a baffling but also intriguing imitation of itself in Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ follow-up to well-received arthouse hit Dogtooth. Scarcely less bizarre than that droll excursus about a family that lives, loves and even speaks at one surreal remove from the rest of the world, Alps denies us such traditional cinematic handholds as rounded characters with backstories; a plot with an identifiable moral arc; neatly tied narrative ends; an easy-to-read ‘message’. Yet the film only very occasionally feels like a piece of self-indulgent arthouse mystification: most of the time, this story of a team of melancholy, oddball characters who help (or profit from) the bereaved by standing in for departed loved ones holds us emotionally and intellectually – and ends by saying something profound about a world in which ‘reality’ is just another TV format…Read More »

The war has ended leaving a deep trace in people. Going trough a different conflicts in the first days of peace – dealing with a former enemy’s collaborators and executing traitors – a former soldier continues with killing even in peace. So, the war goes on, a struggle within himself and with the people around him.Read More »

Synopsis:
A poor farmer is obsessed with finding gold on his land supposedly buried by his grandfather. To find it he conveniently moves a marker out of his way that designates the land on which it rests as as God’s Little Acre, where anything that comes from the ground will go to God’s work. Eventually he abducts an albino to help him find the gold. Meanwhile, his daughter-in-law is suspected of fooling around with a labor activist out of work since the mill closed, and a local political hopeful actively seeks his daughter’s hand in marriage.Read More »

Tuna fishing. It doesn’t exactly evoke the stuff of drama, yet very dramatic is this gripping yarn (puns intended) about the solemn, solitary lives of the men who catch what ends up as our sushi and sashimi. Opening with a shot of a young couple traversing sand dunes, the woman posits a question – women or fishing? This question fuels the drama of the next two-plus hours. – See more at: linkRead More »

Synopsis:
In a poor neighborhood of New York, the bitter and lonely Jewish pawnbroker Sol Nazerman is a survivor from Auschwitz that has no emotions or feelings. Sol lost his dearest family and friends in the war and his faith in God and belief in mankind. Now he only cares for money and is haunted by daydreams, actually flashbacks from the period of the concentration camp. Sol’s assistant is the ambitious Latino Jesus Ortiz, who wants to learn with Sol how to run a business of his own. When Sol realizes that the obscure laundry business he has with the powerful gangster Rodriguez comes also from brothels, Sol recalls the fate of his beloved wife in the concentration camp and has a nervous breakdown. His attitude leads Jesus Ortiz to tragedy and Sol finds a way to cry.Read More »

After ten years away, Jacques Pruez, an unmarried, 50-year-old, modestly successful actor, returns to his home village to comfort his dying mother. His father Yvan, a family barber who’s counting on his “successful” son to support him in his old age, refuses to believe that his wife is sick and insists that her doctors are killing her. She dies, and Jacques finds out that Yvan is not his real father. Besieged by memories of his childhood, the village and the past, Jacques wanders the streets at night, reliving the moments that set him apart from the rest….Read More »

In this testament to the special bond between a mother and her son adapted from French author Romain Gary’s loosely autobiographical novel of the same name, Charlotte Gainsbourg turns in an exuberant performance as Nina, Gary’s overbearing single mother, while Pierre Niney plays Gary as an adult. Hounding the boy at every turn – from his difficult childhood in Poland, to his adolescence in the South of France, to his World War II adventures as a Free French bombardier – Nina makes it clear that she expects her son to become a great writer, a war hero, a French ambassador, and a Knight of the Legion of Honour. Despite bursts of resistance and the obstacles imposed by anti-Semitism in both Poland and France, Gary is determined to realise his mother’s monumental aspirations…Read More »