Drama

When a bus breaks down in the desert, the passengers decide to stage “King Lear.”

Thinking Inside the Box
Rating * Has redeeming facet

The King Is Alive, directed and cowritten by Kristian Levring, is the fourth film to have the dubious honor of qualifying for certification under the rules of the Dogma 95 manifesto, whose professed aim is to get back to the basics of realism — shooting, for example, in natural locations with handheld cameras, direct sound, and natural lighting. But what’s basic or realistic and what isn’t, in terms of film history and technique? The manifesto also insists that movies be shot in color, a rather ahistorical reading of what’s basic — unless one labels all possible uses of color in film realistic and all possible uses of black and white artificial.Read More »

A dispossessed young couple living in a bleak industrial Belgian town live off unemployment benefits, panhandling and petty theft. Their lives change forever when they have a baby. The father learns how one avaricious decision can affect the lives of everyone in his orbit.Read More »

A thrilling “who-dun-it?” that weaves in and out of the lives of the residents of a small village. Sex and subterfuge bubble to the surface when the young coquettish Mrs Wang (Elaine Chin Yen-ling) disappears. A young girl, Marble (Hsu Ke-ying) says she saw someone falling in the water after a violent quarrel. When the police find no evidence, Marble and her friends launch their own investigation. But Marble is going to get more than she bargained for now that the killer knows there is a witness out there.Read More »

Set in the early 1970s, it tells the story of a Chinese-Japanese student who returns to her native Hong Kong after graduating from a university in London. Once she arrives back home, she and her family begins to fight, largely due to cultural and societal conflicts between her mother and herself.Read More »

Follows a family of Syrian refugees, an English teacher from Afghanistan and a border guard. They all meet on the Polish-Belarusian border during the most recent humanitarian crisis in Belarus.Read More »

En Kærlighedshistorie AKA Dogme # 21

REVIEW by Scott Tobias (from avclub.com):
The 21st film to receive official Dogme certification, and one of the few unharmed by its minimalist limitations, Ole Christian Madsen’s powerful Kira’s Reason: A Love Story could be the undercard to A Woman Under The Influence, John Cassavetes’ seminal study of a marriage and mental illness. Beginning with a wife’s return home after time in a psychiatric ward, both films gain their tension from the strained attempt to return to normalcy after everything has irrevocably changed, a transitional phase made all the more painful by brief flashes of the couple’s old dynamic. Though Madsen’s middle-class heroes have little in common with Cassavetes’ more combative blue-collar counterparts, their reunion is similarly raw, painful, and unexpectedly romantic, as they try to redefine their relationship around a new set of terms. Looking and acting uncannily like a young Genevieve Bujold, Stine Stengade gives a touchingly unhinged performance as the title character, a madwoman who tries to find her footing as a wife and mother after being committed for an unspecified condition.Read More »

Quote:
In the plains of central Greece, Byzantine monasteries are perched atop sandstone pillars, suspended between heaven and earth. A young Greek monk and a Russian nun have devoted their lives to the strict rituals and practices of their community, but a growing affection for one another puts their monastic life under question. Torn between spiritual devotion and their human desire, they must decide which path to follow.Read More »

Manpyou Daisuke is one of the country’s most powerful financiers. He asserts absolute control over his family as he has worked to expands his house’s influence through less than honest means. However, he has always harboured doubts over his eldest son Teppei’s parentage. One day Teppei makes a disastrous business mistake…

An epic-length film adapted from the novel of the same name.Read More »

Oshima, a rich girl married Shinzo, and her cousin girl Sawa has been jealous of Oshima deeply. Sawa cursed Oshima so Shinzo could not hold her and do anything at all. Shinzo hated Oshima, and he made love with Sawa.Read More »