Drama

Boyfriends & Girlfriends is the sixth of French director Eric Rohmer’s “Comedies et Proverbes” cycle. The sterility of the “new”, prefabricated Parisian suburb of Cergy-Pontoise is used as the backdrop for the colorful activities of the film’s five principals (literally colorful, in that each character is represented by a different hue). The dramatis personae includes Ministry of Cultural Affairs worker Blanche (Emmanuelle Chaulet); Blanche’s friend, computer school student Lea (Sophie Renoir); Lea’s beau (Eric Viellard); unregenerate “wolf” (Francois-Eric Gendron); and his lady friend, iconoclastic art student Adrienne (Anne-Laure Meury). A windsurfing weekend is the scene for an elongated shakeup and reassessment of everyone’s relationships.
@Hal Erickson, All Movie GuideRead More »

Locarno International Film Festival
1969 Won Golden Leopard

The best Chilean film ever made.
This movie is the best portrait of Chilean society. Ruiz show us like a group of little people with little problems, with a very special way of life. The strangest Spanish in all South American with the funniest accent too. This movie is like Martin Scorsese’s Mean Street but without the crime ingredient. You must see it if you wanna know what’s to be a Chilean, how you can feel believing that you’re in the center of the world but actually living in the end, almost hanging from the continent. Raul Ruiz right now is living in Paris and making the most bizarre but fascinating films of the french production. “Tres tristes tigres” is very difficult to find but if you can, i tell you that you’ll have a real gem.Read More »

Quote:
The Conscript (Dutch: De loteling) is a 1974 Belgian drama film directed by Roland Verhavert based on the eponymous novel published in 1850 by Hendrik Conscience. It was entered into the 24th Berlin International Film Festival. It was also selected as the Belgian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 47th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee.Read More »

Synopsis:
‘In 1954, at the height of the Indochina War, a French platoon comprising four French soldiers and around forty Laotians is instructed to abandon Luong Ba, an outpost on the border with Laos, and relieve Lao Tsaï, a town 150 kilometres to the south. The platoon is led by the young lieutenant Torrens and his adjutant, Willsdorff, who served in the German army during the Second World War. The expedition will last eight days and will end in dismal failure. Amid the setbacks and personal traumas, Torrens and Willsdorff form a close friendship and learn something about themselves…’
– Films de FranceRead More »

Quote:
The unconscious dream state that connects each of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films begins in his latest when frequent collaborator, Jenjira Pongpas (Her characters’ names devolving film to film from ‘Pa Jane’, ‘Jen’ and now simply ‘Je’), stumbles into the frame with her ft. high platform sandal keeping her stumpy left leg in proportion with her right. This familiar image is the proverbial blanket Weerasethakul pulls over his audience, tucking the viewers into his familiar world, allowing for a communal drift into his drowsy landscapes. It’s only a testament to Weesrasethakul’sself awareness as a filmmaker that he has a narcoleptic soldier drop into a lethargic mess as we see him glance upon a movie screen, reflecting how he makes his films onto the characters who inhabit them. This scene, among others, provides a self reflexive exploration of Weerasethakul’s oeuvre, adding to a film that exudes more passion, thoughtfulness and complexity than any of his other major works.Read More »

A young girl, Erminia (Agostina Belli) marries a handsome and successful but brutish local butcher, Antonio (Gianni Macchia) at the behest of her countess stepmother, Giulia (Françoise Prévost). The new wife turns out to be frigid on their wedding night, and the couple have a big fight. She leaves the town to stay with her older, married sister Angela (Ewa Aulin), and gets involved with her sister’s jaded swinger friends. The husband consoles himself by picking up prostitutes and carrying on with a sexy, voluptuous wealthy widow neighbor (Femi Benussi)right in his new mother-in-law’s villa. For some reason the mother-in-law considers this a turn-on and becomes sexually drawn to her loutish son-in-law.Read More »

Jessye is a young and modern Chinese woman who works for the national tourism office in China. She is sent to a small village in southern Italy to investigate the touristic potential of the region for the booming Chinese tourism industry. Her only contact initially is Franco, a solitary farmer who lives with his animals in the countryside and rents his rooms. In the village she also meets Salvatore, who owns the village pub and dreams of a modern lifestyle. Through these and other people of the region Jessye starts to learn more about the local traditions and their endangered Greek language that now have to face the invasion of the present-day expansionist tourism industry.
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David Lowery wrote:
What is it about the sexualization of English professors that irks me so? I think of the cliche of the sturdy, masculine educator bewitching his female pupils with silver-tongued erudition on the works of Percy and D.H Lawrence and I wonder: what of their poor colleagues, the mathematics professors? Can’t fractal equations be as erotically stimulating as the breakdown of Pyrrhic verse? The answer, as any English major knows, is not likely-there’s little that can so easily compound the psychological dynamics between teacher and student like the aphrodisiacal qualities of language-but it was nonetheless a gust of fresh air to see Lena Dunham so precisely pierce this stereotype in her debut feature, Creative Nonfiction. Dunham stars in the film as Ella, a freshman student at an unnamed Midwestern college, who is working on a screenplay for a creative writing class that, in its early stages, could be synopsized by at least three sentences of this very paragraph.Read More »

Great early short film by the underrated French filmmaker Jacques Rozier. The film follows two teenage boys trying to pick up girls in a resort town.
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