Drama

Kelly Reichhardt’s latest is concerned with three eco-activists Josh, Dena and Harmon (Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, Peter Sarsgaard) who have decided to go further than their documentary-making, organic vegetable-farming compadres and blow up a dam. As they plot to do so, their conflicting characters, backgrounds and motivations are revealed. The operation is a success, of a kind, but has unintended consequences. Confident, ballsy Dena becomes an emotional wreck, sensitive, taciturn Josh grows more and more paranoid, and the conflicts become chasms.Read More »

Review
Highly stylized
Noted Mexican filmmaker Arturo Ripstein (Deep Crimson) presents a highly stylized, almost stagebound, erotic melodrama about life in the 1940s in Mexico (filmed in the lush style of 1940s melodramas). It’s based on the story by Max Aub and penned by Alicia Paz Garciadiego. The narrative is in the form of a repetitious parable that is overlong, hitting many dull spots and at times insufferable to watch. It stays on message to show a series of themes (colonialism, class warfare, racial and idealogical divisions and revolutionary fervor in both Franco’s Spain and Mexico) based on real historical events and combines it with the fictional story of the willing enslavement to the upper-class of the peasant Indian Mexican named Nacho (Luis Felipe Tovar).
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In this boxing drama, a prizefighter is left by his money-grubbing showgirl wife who aspires to be a movie star. The fighter’s manager is tickled by the turn of events and immediately snaps the boxer out of his love-struck funk and sets him a challenging training program. Sure enough the fighter makes a strong comeback. As soon as the fame and fortune starts rolling in, the avaricious wife shows up at his door. She fires his manager and hires her secret lover in his place. Soon the fighter begins losing again. Just before the championship bout the old manager proves that his wife is being unfaithful. That is only the beginning of the end for the champ. ~allmovie.comRead More »

Synopsis
Four seasons in the life of an orphaned family: such is the topic of Nobody Knows, the new film by Kore-eda Hirokazu, who was already noticed in Cannes in 2001 with Distance, which was presented in the section “Certain Regard”. The interior universe of four children left to themselves after their mother abandons them. A film about the difficulties of childhood, drawn from a news story.Review
Four seasons in the life of an orphaned family: such is the topic of Nobody Knows, the new film by Kore-eda Hirokazu, who was already noticed in Cannes in 2001 with Distance, which was presented in the section “Certain Regard”. The interior universe of four children left to themselves after their mother abandons them. A film about the difficulties of childhood, drawn from a news story.Read More »

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Marianne, some thirty years after divorcing Johan, decides to visit her ex-husband at his summer home. She arrives in the middle of a family drama between Johan’s son from another marriage and his granddaughter.

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Roger Ebert
August 4, 2005
Ingmar Bergman is balancing his accounts and closing out his books. The great director is 85 years old, and announced in 1982 that “Fanny and Alexander” would be his last film. So it was, but he continued to work on the stage and for television, and then he wrote the screenplay for Liv Ullmann’s film “Faithless” (2000). Now comes his absolutely last work, “Saraband,” powerfully, painfully honest.Read More »

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In the foothills of the Kurdish territories of Turkey, Jîn (Deniz Hasgüler), a young, red-scarfed rebel, slips away from her small guerrilla band to attempt a return to her family and a normal life. Hiding from both her comrades, to whom she is now a traitor, and the Turkish army, which views her as a terrorist, Jin takes refuge with the animals of the forest, who are themselves struggling under the brutality of war. In the silence, amongst the eternity of nature, Jin tends to the animals’ needs, and they, in turn, stare implacably back at her; their blank stares, understanding and accusatory all at once.

With her red head scarf, her encounters with grandmother, and her need to return to family, Jîn slips easily into the Red Riding Hood mould but this is not so much an update as it is a return to the tales rustic and very cautionary roots. Writer/director Reha Erdem has constructed a reality that nods to the past but eases back on the levels of codification that obscured the tales original purpose. Primarily, and most powerfully, Erdem reinstates men into the role of the wolf. And not just one. At every turn, Jîn is faced with a violently gropey suitor. Every (male) hand extended to her inevitably bares its claws.Read More »

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Sanja the Bandit, after a particularly vicious shootout, stumbles into the musician Oleg at the local banya. Following a retelling of a semi-mythological story, the pair decide to make a pilgrimage to a “bell-tower of happiness”.Read More »

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A dejected beauty salon owner enters into a tenuous friendship with her shy, pre-operative transsexual neighbor in director Pernille Fischer Christensen’s simmering tale of affection and compassion. Thirty-two year old Charlotte (Trine Dyrholm) may own a successful beauty salon, but her failing relationship with increasingly unstable live-in boyfriend Kristian (Frank Thiel) has found her opting to strike out on her own for a change. As Charlotte embarks on a series of strictly sexual one-night stands upstairs, downstairs neighbor Veronica (David Dencik) – born Ulrick – earns her keep as a dominatrix while taking female hormones, awaiting approval for gender reassignment surgery, and occasionally accepting provisions from his doting mother (Elsebeth Steentoft). When Charlotte requests the help of her downstairs neighbor in moving some furniture and carelessly identifies Veronica as a male, the depressive pre-op laments her chances for surgery and attempts to overdose on pills. Her suicide-attempt unexpectedly announced to her neighbors thanks to her whimpering dog Miss Daisy, Veronica is subsequently saved when Charlotte hears the animal’s desperate cries and rushes her ailing neighbor to the hospital. Her selfless favor returned when Veronica defends her against a drunken Kristian shortly thereafter, lonely Charlotte eventually finds herself developing strong feelings for her neighbor despite her longstanding preference for the opposite sex.
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As Frédérique lies dead on her kitchen table at the hands of Christophe, police try to piece together the events that led to the gruesome killing. Frédérique’s teenage daughter narrates the tragic tale of love gone wrong.

From IRO:
Review by Kevin Vu: Though it possesses the voice of a notorious auteur, “Perfect Love” is one of Catherine Breillat’s lesser works. Despite being her sixth feature, the film seems like an early and minor effort, containing recurring elements explored in more accomplished films (e.g. “Fat Girl” and “Romance”), not to mention the sex and flesh that marries her reputation with vulgarity and controversy. Although Breillat has since found alternative outlets for her provocation and feminine rage, such as costume drama and fairytale, she has always challenged the conventional notions of sex using facets of the human body and soul that she strips bare – figuratively and literally. The plot here is not a matter of boy meets girl, and it never is for Breillat as she continues to reveal human depravity through sexuality.Read More »