Drama

Quote:
LEAD: EARLY in ”The Sea and Poison,” the harrowing Japanese movie now at Film Forum 1, a surgical team performs a lung operation on a young woman. It is probably the most graphic view that most of its audience will ever have had of the scalpel and forceps doing their work, and you may find yourself joining the young intern Suguro, who confesses, ”Today in the operating room, I had to close my eyes.

EARLY in ”The Sea and Poison,” the harrowing Japanese movie now at Film Forum 1, a surgical team performs a lung operation on a young woman. It is probably the most graphic view that most of its audience will ever have had of the scalpel and forceps doing their work, and you may find yourself joining the young intern Suguro, who confesses, ”Today in the operating room, I had to close my eyes.”Read More »

A fisherman saves Anada, a woman adrift, from drowning. He takes her to his home, and protects her. Eventually, she occupies a larger place than was to be expected. He commits adultery with her, but his own wife seems to be in love with the strange young woman.Read More »

When an American is murdered in a Japanese inn, Tokyo police Detective Munesue follows the trail of the killer to New York City. There he is joined by Detective Shuftan, and together they sort out the crime.Read More »

A Tom Waits song in movie form, Steve Buscemi’s directorial debut is a semi-autobiographical account of a barfly in his thirties who inherits an ice cream truck. The impressive extended cast includes Carol Kane, Anthony LaPaglia, Mimi Rogers, Seymour Cassel, the lovely Eszter Balint, and many others.Read More »

In the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, everyone is more than they initially seem. May waits tables, raises a son, Henry, and is an aspiring actress. She needs a roommate and takes in a pizza deliverer named Jonathan, an aspiring songwriter. In the adjoining flat is August, an Austrian body sculptor who appears in a deodorant commercial and dreams big dreams. May takes a job delivering singing telegrams as a stripper, Jonathan invites Henry to tag along with him on deliveries, August gets into trouble with the police who call his father in Austria, and the friendships, frustrations, and love affairs of everyday life come to a head.Read More »

Quote:
For 35 years Doña Flor has worked as a clerk in a government office. Each day she attends dozens of people who sit across from her and hand her their documents. For 35 years she has been invisible to these people, a mere cog in the machine. She has grown so accustomed to this invisibility that she seems to have become invisible even to herself except for the brief pause at the pool each day where she watches the children swim and remembers her daughter. One morning Doña Flor awakens to find her cat has died in the night. Unable to accept the loss of her sole companion, Doña Flor tries to continue her routine as always, but the loss opens up the much deeper wound left by the downing of her daughter. She decides to swim seeking solace in the water, but finds herself paralyzed by fear. As Doña Flor faces her fear of the water, she faces her of life. One day in the shower room another woman unexpectedly washes her back in a simple gesture of compassion that resuscitates her. “Everything Else” is a poetic and lyrical story about a woman’s second coming of age as she reawakens to her self at sixty-three.Read More »

Written, directed and produced by René Féret, MOZART’S SISTER is a re-imagined account of the early life of Maria Anna “Nannerl” Mozart (played by Marie Féret, the director’s daughter), five years older than Wolfgang and a musical prodigy in her own right. Originally the featured performer, Nannerl has given way to Wolfgang as the main attraction, as their strict but loving father Leopold tours his talented offspring in front of the royal courts of pre-French revolution Europe. Approaching marriageable age and now forbidden to play the violin or compose, Nannerl chafes at the limitations imposed on her gender. But a friendship with the son and daughter of Louis XV offers her ways to challenge the established sexual and social order.Read More »

OUR DAY WILL COME Review

by Todd Brown, September 12, 2010 1:53 PM
Though it remains to be seen whether he will be loved our hated by audiences at large – and both seem equally likely – there is no doubt at all that Our Day Will Come announces the arrival of Romain Gavras as a significant new talent in world cinema. Though working with a very different style, Gavras embraces the same sort of fuck you abrasiveness that has made Lars Von Trier such a polarizing presence on the world scene and we should expect nothing less from Gavras.Read More »

Synopsis:
‘When a German U-Boat captain is sent on a spying mission to the North of Scotland during World War One, he finds more than he bargained for in his contact, the local schoolmistress.’
– Ian HarriesRead More »