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“Richard, an isolated programmer who made millions with his company, meets a pretty girl in a café. The pretty girl is a drummer; she is also a stripper. Richard wants to live it up and after careful negotiations, takes Florence to Las Vegas for a weekend. He pays her 10,000 dollars and promises to adhere to her conditions, which include no kissing on the mouth, no penetration, and limits their time together to the hours between 10pm and 2am. “Read More »
Synopsis
A young woman becomes the fourth wife of a wealthy lord, and must learn to live with the strict rules and tensions within the household.Read More »
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The movie begins with a startling, intimate sex scene. A hefty middle-aged man is making love with an attractive middle-aged woman. He is avidly concerned with bringing her to orgasm, each one worries that the other is worried that the other is taking too long—“I feel good. I’m good,” insists one of them— the sex ends in resignation. What’s startling about the scene is not its explicitness, which is not inordinate. It’s the way the characters are framed, in medium closeup, in compositions that emphasis the space between their faces as much if not more than their faces. (One is reminded of Elie Faure’s writing on Velasquez, quoted by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Pierrot Le Fou.”)Read More »
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Nicolas Mallet (Jean-Louis Trintignant, The Conformist), a naive bank clerk, meets Marie-Paule (Jane Birkin, Je Taime Moi Non Plus, Keep Your Right Up), a beautiful but lonely young girl, in a quiet corner of Paris. She smiles at him and he offers to buy her a drink. When she agrees, he assumes that his luck has finally changed. But when later on they rent a room in a cheap hotel, he discovers that she is a prostitute. Before they make love, he forces her to tell him that she came to the hotel because she truly wanted him.Read More »
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An introspective, obsessive-compulsive Japanese expatriate named Kenji (Tadanobu Asano) reflects in voice-over the overt absence of motivation for his desire to end his life as he meticulously arranges the requisite accoutrements for his latest suicide attempt: a hangman’s noose strategically rigged towards the center of the hallway so that his lifeless body is visible upon entering the front door, a neat pile of books to stand on and eventually kick out beneath his feet, an obligatory note cradled on the palm of his hand – facing forward – that enigmatically reads “This is bliss”. It is a carefully orchestrated scenario staged for dramatic effect that would soon be abruptly – and rudely – interrupted by the incessant ringing of the doorbell after which he is greeted by his animated and presumptuous brother, a volatile and ill-mannered yakuza named Yukio (Yutaka Matsushige) lying low from his mob boss after having an affair with his daughter, who then hands him a six-pack of beer, a pair of shoes, and a gift-wrapped box that, as he immediately clarifies, is not intended to be a present for him.Read More »
Synopsis: MTV-worshiping seventeen year old Denise, who is one of the only white people from the poor part of a Dutch city, falls in love with the charming young Arab man Michael who promises her a life she can only imagine. But Michael is a so-called “loverboy” who has a secret agenda and manipulates her into prostitution making her believe that’s the only way to continue their expensive lives together.Read More »
This suspense film revolves around the crime of child abduction. The parents of the missing child undertake a feverish search for their son. The police are contacted, and a ransom letter is received.
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Michael Haneke’s latest torture mechanism is less funny game than daunting debasement ritual. Isabelle Huppert stars as Erika Kohut, an icy piano teacher who goes masochistic when handsome young Walter Klemmer (Benoit Magimel) wants to play with her cold ivory. Huppert responds to Haneke with such straight-faced precision that you might just buy into the director’s seemingly shallow provocations. Spousal punishment in Bergman’s Cries & Whispers came in the form of self-mutilation. Haneke, though, has Huppert paint a more squeamish picture of self-love that also contemplates the possibility of pleasure in pain. The director has an uncanny ability to force the spectator’s gaze and takes his time revealing Erika’s many fetishes. Though all-powerful in the classroom, Erika is slapped around by her busybody mother as if she were a constantly misbehaving child.Read More »
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A look at the lives of 3 well-off Iranian couples who are ostensibly living an idyllic life and are going to have a get-together for a birthday party. Each couple bearing their own sordid secrets attend the party to find out what follows on the hills of the cold welcome of their host.Read More »