Drama

“From the opening rain-swept scene, in which a distraught woman, Ann (Huppert), follows her longtime b.f. Thomas (writer-director Xavier Beauvois) to his mistress’ house, actress and camera coexist in urgent lockstep. Ann’s refusal to process her lover’s betrayal radically disconnects her from any sense of continuum, her jerky, determined movements mirrored by disruptive closeups, and gaps in time and space open up between scenes as every action fades to black.

Ann discards all vestiges of her successful career as a composer/pianist — walking out in the middle of a concert, burning her sheet music and celebrated CDs. She sells her austerely luxurious Paris apartment and disposes of everything in it, turns off her phone, closes out her accounts and disappears, the camera recording every painstaking phase of the unexpectedly hard work involved. The only link she retains to her past is a long-lost childhood friend (Jean-Hugues Anglade), whom she unexpectedly runs into on the night she discovers her b.f.’s infidelity.
Read More »

Plot:

Michael Gordon never intended to be a boxer. But after he decks a burly brawler at a nightclub, a ring promoter encourages him to give the fight game a shot. Gordon, whose career as an artist is going nowhere, agrees. Besides, it will bring him closer to the woman who has KO’d his heart – the promoter’s wife. The corrupt world of boxing was a staple of postwar Hollywood in well-known works like Body and Soul, The Set-Up and Champion and in lesser yet admirable works like Whiplash. Romantic melodrama and noirish atmospherics combine in this tale starring Dane Clark, Alexis Smith, Zachary Scott, Eve Arden and other reliables. Future The Mickey Mouse Club host Jimmie Dodd has an uncredited role as a piano man. From Warner Brothers!
Read More »

The Marquis de Sade in a More Complex Guise
Raving lunatic or subversive bad boy? Revolutionary intellectual or fiend from hell? The Marquis de Sade is such an inflammatory figure that when you contemplate his life, the imagination tends to run wild. But as embodied by the French actor Daniel Auteuil in ”Sade,” Benoît Jacquot’s smart, cool-headed costume drama, the marquis is a disturbingly recognizable figure: a sly, charming, ruthlessly arrogant bon vivant with a scary current of rage zipping like a live wire under his reptilian surface.

When Sade casts a hard, beady-eyed gaze on a virginal young woman, his expression is the cold, evaluative stare of a jaded predator. In his too-glittering eyes, you can almost read the graphic sexual scenarios dancing through his mind. Mr. Auteuil’s Sade, with his mixture of tense, coiled civility and ferocious willfulness, has almost nothing in common with the histrionic madman played by Geoffrey Rush in ”Quills.” Mr. Rush’s Sade, for all its high dramatic flourishes, conveniently excused the viewer from having to judge the Marquis. Because his character was so obviously crazy, he was not one of us.Read More »

A married man leaves his wife for a teenage girl.

The Constant Nymph is a 1933 British drama film directed by Basil Dean and Victoria Hopper, Brian Aherne and Leonora Corbett. It is an adaptation of the novel The Constant Nymph by Margaret Kennedy. Dean tried to persuade Novello to reprise his appearance from the 1928 silent version The Constant Nymph but was turned down and cast Aherne in the part instead.
Read More »

Blessed with several large rivers, interconnected streams and springs, Japan’s ancient capital, Kyoto, anoints the land with a bountiful source of water. In this tranquil setting, three women join the flow of a small community with the subtle presence of a spring breeze. Setsuko , the proprietor of a whiskey-only bar; Takako, the owner of a coffee shop along the waterway; Hatsumi, a maker of tofu so delicious it seems to spring forth from the clear water. Under their subtle influence, other townspeople gradually begin their own streams too: Yamanoha, a local worker for a furniture workshop; Otome, the owner of a neighborhood public bath; Jin, a young man who assists him at the bath; Makoto, a wayfarer about the town. Among their daily lives, there is Poplar, a small child with a perpetually friendly smile.Read More »

Michelangelo Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman is a body- and soul-baring voyage into one man’s artistic and erotic consciousness. After his wife leaves him, a film director finds himself drawn into affairs with two enigmatic women: at the same time, he searches for the right subject and actress for his next film. This spellbinding antiromance was a late-career coup for the legendary Italian filmmaker, and is renowned for its sexual explicitness and an extended scene on a fog-enshrouded highway that stands with the director’s greatest set pieces (-Criterion)Read More »

Released from jail, Nanni (Checchi) punches prison guard Stefano (Ninchi) who has
denounced him. In order to take revenge, Stefano suggests the suspicion that, during his
absence, his wife has had business with the Count Paolo (Rimoldi). A few days later, at
night, a deadly ambush will be prepared.Read More »

Quote:
Pierre Leduc leaves his job as a university lecturer in an effort to escape the world, only to have his plans thwarted as two family members reach out to him: first, his dying father, who wants to leave him a fortune of ill-gotten gains, and then the young daughter whom he abandoned years ago.

Québécois cinema has often explored the bonds that keep us together, but rarely has the subject been addressed so elegantly or so powerfully. An obsessed scholar attempts to withdraw from the world but finds personal ties drawing him back into the family he had left behind, in this novelistic, beautifully modulated drama from acclaimed Québécois filmmaker Bernard Émond. Tout ce que tu possèdes is characterized by a meditative style, a novelist’s eye for detail and startlingly beautiful grace notes. @TiffRead More »

Quote:
Analyzing the intricacies and variances between differing film titles is something of an indulgence for film critics, especially when they’re searching for a quick, utilitarian lead into otherwise complex films. Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s film à clef revisitation (or, rather, a cinematic palimpsest) of a violent 1974 encounter from his past as an angry young fundamentalist went by the title A Moment of Innocence in its European and American releases, but its original Farsi title was actually Bread and Flower. The latter title refers to the two objects that play into the all-important remembered event, when Makhmalbaf stabbed one of the Iranian Shaw’s policemen in an attempt to snatch his gun away, an attack that led to the future director’s incarceration. (Makhmalbaf hid his knife under a circle of flatbread; the policeman was holding a flower he intended to offer the entrancing young girl who, unbeknownst to him, was actually a decoy intended to distract the cop so Makhmalbaf could steal his firearm.) Some 20 years later, while a reformed and de-radicalized Makhmalbaf was directing Salaam Cinema, the now former-policeman approached Makhmalbaf again, their meeting (and triggered memories) spurning A Moment of Innocence, a title of which seems to echo the film’s aura of reflective enlightenment and mutual cooperation between the two men (as opposed to the Farsi title’s emphasis on the fragmented multiplicity of memory).Read More »