Drama

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A strange disease starts to affect people in Taiwan just before the year 2000. The authorities order everyone to evacuate, but some tenants of an apartment building stay put, including a shop owner who lives by himself. One day, a plumber goes to the shop owner’s apartment to check the pipes. The plumber drills a small hole in the floor, which comes down through the ceiling of another apartment. The hole never gets repaired, and this leads to some tension between the shop owner and the woman who lives below him.Read More »

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Three Palestinian women living in an apartment in Tel Aviv try to find a balance between traditional and modern culture.Read More »

From the IMDB:
Propaganda story about a ‘Young Pioneer’ Pavel Morozov, who denounced his father to Stalin’s secret police and was in turn killed by his own family.Read More »

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“The Bad Batch” turns a completely ridiculous premise — dystopian warfare in a sun-bleached desert filled with cannibals, a raving cult leader, desperate thieves and LSD — into a warm, at times even elegant salute to the transformative power of companionship. This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour’s sleek debut “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” another creepy premise given fresh life. With “The Bad Batch,” Amirpour pairs elements of “Mad Max” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” with western flavor for another beguiling ride. The scale has expanded and there are a few more recognizable faces this time around, but nothing about the movie’s inspired wackiness bears the whiff of compromise.Read More »

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A dashing former matador named Diego Montes (Nacho Martínez), prematurely retired after a career-ending injury, rehearses the principal tenets of the art of the kill at a converted classroom on his estate to a group of aspiring bullfighters, including an unlikely, hypersensitive student named Angel Giménez (Antonio Banderas). The training lecture then cuts to the image of a beautiful, enigmatic woman sitting on a park bench, María (Assumpta Serna) as she initiates contact with an anonymous man innocuously passing by, follows him back to an apartment, and, at the height of physical intimacy, stabs him with a long ornamental pin behind the nape of the neck – in the region between the shoulder blades defined in bullfighting as the cleft of the clods. Read More »

A young junior hockey player’s life is shattered by an in-game act of violence. In an instant his life is abruptly turned upside down; torn from the fraternity of the team and the coinciding position of prominence, he is cast as a pariah and ostracized from the community.

Canada is amidst a renaissance of refreshing movies by a new wave of directors. Told with a bold disaffected style recalling Michael Haneke, this debut is at the forefront. Hello Destroyer is an intimate portrait of a young hockey player and an incisive reflection on institutionalized violence.Read More »

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In her latest feature film, Satan Said Dance, which was released in Polish theatres on 5 May by Kino Swiat, Katarzyna Roslaniec once again turns her attention to her favourite type of character. Indeed, in all her films she focuses on young girls from today’s youth whose world revolves around shopping, (often unsafe) sex, alcohol, drugs and building up an image. A model which is pushed to extremes in this new opus.Read More »

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Hsiao-Kang, a Taiwanese film director, travels to the Louvre in Paris, France, to shoot a film that explores the Salomé myth.Read More »

Acquarello wrote:
The Beekeeper opens to a static shot of an extended dinner table festively covered with a white tablecloth and ornamented with rose petals that is sitting empty at the center of the courtyard in the rain, as the sound of Spyros’ (Marcello Mastroianni) affectionate voice is heard recounting to his young daughter the natural selection process of bees that culminates in the majestic queen’s dance. The guests have retreated indoors for what is revealed to be the wedding reception of Spyros’ daughter – now a grown woman – in the family home. From the onset, the middle-aged schoolteacher’s profound disconnection is immediately palpable as he shares a prolonged, uncomfortable silence with his wife (Jenny Roussea) while picking up shards of broken glass from an overturned tray of wine glasses. Dispirited by his inevitable separation from his beloved daughter, Spyros separates from his wife and embarks on his forefathers’ traditional vocation of apiculture. Traveling southward with his bees on an instinctual springtime migration, Spyros encounters a young hitchhiker (Nadia Mourouzi) who, abandoned on a rural truck stop, insinuates herself on the resigned and acquiescent Spyros through intermittent points on his indeterminate journey. Estranged from an unfamiliar modern world where his generation has become a historically incidental relic, Spyros attempts to reconnect with humanity through the promiscuous and rootless young woman and, in the process, retreats further into the solitude of his dying avocation.Read More »