Drama

from imdb:
An alcoholic lawyer who successfully defended a notorious gambler on a murder charge objects when his free-spirited daughter becomes romantically involved with him.Read More »

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As we follow a mother (Jennifer Connelly) and her son (Cillian Murphy), we delve into a past marred by an accident that tears them apart. She will become a renowned artist and healer, and he will grow into his own as a peculiar falconer who bears the marks of a double absence. In the present, a young journalist (Mélanie Laurent) will bring about an encounter between the two that puts the very meaning of life and art into question, so that we may contemplate the possibility of living life to its fullest, despite the uncertainties littering our paths.Read More »

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When Mette and her father are left alone over the Christmas holidays to paint the new nursery the father ends up alone most of the time. The 16-year-old Mette is always off with her friends at the disco or skating, and the father does not mind until he discovers that young Jønne has taken some semi-nude photos of Mette and clearly is intending to go further in their relationship. Suddenly the father starts hanging out with Mette and her friends as they practice winter sports together – and there is hardly anything stranger, or more embarrassing, as far as Mette is concerned. It is clear that father and daughter are heading toward a change in their relationship as both have to adjust to her “growing up.” Read More »

Alpine Fire is as heady and intoxicating as the thin mountain air of the Alps in which it takes place. The entire film is set far above the rest of the world, and the isolated location influences both the characters and the film style.

The exact location is a lonely home pitched on the side of a mountain. Communication with neighbors is done with signs and binoculars; other people may be miles away, on the slope of the next Alp. The time is the present, but the home has no television or telephone, and it seems remote in many ways.

In this house live the elderly parents (Rolf Illig, Dorothea Moritz) and their two children: a daughter, Belli (Johanna Lier) and a son (Thomas Nock) called simply the boy.

The boy is deaf, temperamental and stunted in his learning. The early part of the film details his struggle with the world, and his fascination with ways of seeing; he uses mirrors, binoculars and various looking glasses to examine the silence around him. He becomes enraged when he spots his sister moving to the sounds of a transistor radio, which he immediately finds and destroys.Read More »

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“Valmont,” Milos Forman’s spin on “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” is sumptuous suds, a broadly played trivialization of de Laclos’s 18th-century novel of boudoir intrigue. With its callow cast and playful tone, there is nothing dangerous about Forman’s variation on the novelist’s schemes. It’s a naughty costume dramedy in which the erotic conquests of bored libertines are transformed into children’s kissing games.

Colin Firth and Annette Bening play the story’s sexual strategists, the smarmy Vicomte de Valmont and the devious Marquise de Merteuil, whose machinations sully the virtuous Madame de Tourvel (Meg Tilly) and the virginal Cecile de Volanges (Fairuza Balk). A generation younger than the cast of Stephen Frears’s “Dangerous Liaisons,” the actors’ ages more closely mirror those of the novel’s young adults and teenagers, but they seem less bedroom Machiavellians than members of a 1700s Breakfast Club, not tragically flawed, hopelessly jaded, ultimately doomed and self-destructive, just wet behind the leers.Read More »

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The tragic life of Slava Raškaj, a turn-of-the-century painter born deaf and mute who is viewed as a kind of Croatian Frida Kahlo, is sketched in “100 Minutes of Glory.” Young helmer Dalibor Matanić (“Fine Dead Girls”) adopts a suitably avant-garde, quasi-surrealist style that injects a large amount of visual interest in this tale of a rebellious-but-doomed woman, while Raškaj’s affair with fellow artist Bela Čikoš structures the narrative nicely. Last half hour, however, spins off in superfluous threads about Čikoš that leave the feeling the film is far too long and cripple things for general audiences.Read More »

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It’s the 22nd of December. Sixteen years have passed since the revolution, and in a small town Christmas is about to come. Piscoci, an old retired man is preparing for another Christmas alone. Manescu, the history teacher, tries to keep up with his debts. Jderescu, the owner of a local television post, seems not to be so interested in the upcoming holidays. For him, the time to face history has come. Along with Manescu and Piscoci, he is trying to answer for himself a question which for 16 years has not had an answer: “Was it or wasn’t it a revolution in their town?”Read More »

Toma and Ana meet as students in the literature faculty, and quickly fall in love.
The story of Ana and Toma and the thread of Ana’s mental illness, which runs through their relationship – their extremely challenging situation molds the life they share.

Who’s to blame when Toma’s girlfriend Ana, a college student, goes off the rails with incapacitating panic attacks? Tracing the causes of her mental ills back to her early family life, including a father who defected to the West, the film proposes various cures that range from prescription drugs to confession in church and — just a short step beyond that — the couch. It’s a smart film with engaging moments.
The games people play with each other and the trap of co-dependency are the main focus. As shrewd a psychologist as any therapist, Netzer adopts a warm approach to his characters but doesn’t let them off the hook when, on closer observation, their altruistic actions are revealed as controlling and manipulative. Read More »

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A short excerpt from the Booklet essay by Daniel Bird

Trzecia część nocy (The Third Part of the Night, 1971) is a film by Andrzej Żuławski, the enfant terrible of Polish Cinema. It is also a film about the Polish experience, but one made by a filmmaker too young to remember the War. It was made in 1971, before the so-called Polish cinema of moral concern of Holland, Kieslowski and Zanussi. It is based (in part) on the life of Żuławski s father, Miroslaw, during the Second World War. It is perhaps the first (and probably the last) film about Weigl Institute in Lwow. But above all else, it is the debut film of one of cinema s true visionaries.Read More »