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Nathalie teaches philosophy at a high school in Paris. She is passionate about her job and particularly enjoys passing on the pleasure of thinking. Married with two children, she divides her time between her family, former students and her very possessive mother. One day, Nathalie’s husband announces he is leaving her for another woman. With freedom thrust upon her, Nathalie must reinvent her life.Read More »
Synopsis
A bankrupt telecoms engineer, employed by his ex-boss to investigate a phone-hacking operation, gets trapped into paying off either his economic or his moral debts.
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“Wild Duck” is the story of Dimitris, a telecommunications engineer who’s forced to shutter his business after running up a considerable debt with a local loan shark. He and his buddy Nikos, another telecommunications expert working for a big outfit, decide to get to the bottom of a big scandal. Their research leads them to a certain apartment, whose tenant Panagiota becomes the focus of their attention. Dimitris is now facing some major dilemmas and a trip to his hometown will help him clear his head and look at himself under a different light.Read More »
Synopsis:
I am Twenty is notable for its often dramatic camera movements, handheld camerawork and heavy use of location shooting, often incorporating non-actors (including a group of foreign exchange students from Ghana and the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko) and centering scenes around non-staged events (a May Day parade, a building demolition, a poetry reading). Filmmakers Andrei Tarkovsky and Andrei Konchalovsky both play small roles in the film. The dialogue often overlaps and there are stylized flourishes that echo the early French New Wave, especially François Truffaut’s black and white films. The screenplay, co-written by Gennadi Shpalikov, originally called for a film running only 90 minutes, but the full version of the film runs for three hours.Read More »
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One of the masterworks of 1960s cinema, La notte [The Night] marked yet another development in the continuous stylistic evolution of its director, Michelangelo Antonioni — even as it solidified his reputation as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. La notte is Antonioni’s “Twilight of the Gods”, but composed in cinematic terms. Examined from a crane-shot, it’s a sprawling study of Italy’s upper middle-class; seen in close-up, it’s an x-ray of modern man’s psychic desolation. Two of the giants of film-acting come together as a married couple living in crisis: Marcello Mastroianni (La dolce vita, 8 1/2) and Jeanne Moreau (Jules et Jim, Bay of Angels). He is a renowned author and “public intellectual”; she is “the wife”. Over the course of one day and the night into which it inevitably bleeds, the pair will come to re-examine their emotional bonds, and grapple with the question of whether love and communication are even possible in a world built out of profligate idylls and sexual hysteria.Read More »
The Edukators (German: Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei) is a German-Austrian film made by the Austrian director Hans Weingartner and released in 2004. Nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival,[1] it stars Daniel Brühl, Stipe Erceg and Julia Jentsch.
The original German title, Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei translates literally as “the fat years are over”. Die fetten Jahre is a German expression originating from the story of Joseph in Egypt as found in the Luther Bible, meaning a period in which one enjoys considerable success and indulges oneself heavily. The official translation of the statement as used in the film and the subtitle to the English-language release was “Your days of plenty are numbered.”
The film was generally well received by critics. Based on 74 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an overall approval rating from critics of 69%, with an average score of 6.5/10. By comparison, Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 top reviews from mainstream critics, calculated an average score of 68, based on 28 reviews.Read More »
Math, JP, Pacman and Marie belong to the same crew of skate kids in Paris. Every day they meet up at The Dome – behind the Museum of Modern Art, opposite the Eiffel Tower – skateboarding, goofing off or getting stoned as they ignore the smart crowd of art lovers. Math and JP are inseparable, bound by complicated family ties. Boredom, the lure of easy money and the anonymity of the Internet all play a part in tearing their world apart.Read More »
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The debut feature from the great Andrei Tarkovsky, Ivan’s Childhood is an evocative, poetic journey through the shadows and shards of one boy’s war-torn youth. Moving back and forth between the traumatic realities of WWII and the serene moments of family life before the conflict began, Tarkovsky’s film remains one of the most jarring and unforgettable depictions of the impact of violence on children in wartime.Read More »
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The new movie written and directed by Jim Jarmusch is a total fantasy. This in spite of being shot on the streets of the New Jersey city in which it is set, and for which the movie itself and its lead character are named. It’s as much of a fantasy as Jean Cocteau’s “Orpheus,” another great film about a poet that was at least partially set in the “real” contemporary world. It’s maybe not as much of a fantasy as the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.Read More »
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Carrington is the true story of the tragic relationship between the English painter Dora Carrington and writer, Lytton Strachey. Between the First World War and the early 1930’s, they experimented with a way of life beyond the conventional standards of their time, a life which broke all the taboos of society of their desire to live as freely and honestly as they could. They acknowledged openly what most of us are aware of but still reluctant to discuss: that a great many differences can exist between spiritual love and physical desire.Read More »