Drama

Quote:
Based on Herman Bang’s 1902 novel of the same name, Dreyer’s film is a fascinating fin-de-siècle study of a “decadent” elderly artist (Benjamin Christensen) driven to despair by his relationship with his young protégé and former model, Michael (Walter Slezak). With suffocatingly sumptuous production design by renowned architect Hugo Häring (his only film work), this Kammerspiel, or “intimate theatre”, foreshadows Dreyer’s magnificent final film Gertrud, by forty years with its “Now I may die content, for I have seen great love” epigraph.Read More »

The thirteen survivors of a catastrophe by a tunnel’s collapse tries to balance their experience trapped along 15 days inside it with their day-by-day outside it.Read More »

Quote:
The most intriguingly circumscribed romance of the year, In Between Days locates two Korean teens at a precarious point in their relationship. Director So Yong Kim deliberately shuns cultural specificity, keeping her camera tight around Aimie (Jiseon Kim), a recent immigrant from Korea, in order to stress the sense of suffocating remove that might affect a lonely young person living within the walls of a foreign city’s Koreatown. The director’s experiment in non-description can be frustrating (where are we? United States? Canada?), but it is also very poetic and humane (totally Dardennian), getting as it does to the core of the pain that comes with cultural assimilation. In Between Days is also an oddly gripping show of sexual one-upmanship, and something of a fuck-you to reprocessed cheese like When Harry Met Sally that passes for an authentic depiction of the way genders relate to one another. Read More »

Her boyfriend John procures the ambitious journalist Jennifer Barron an interview with the Democratic presidential candidate Michael Ashton. But before she can talk to him, he twice becomes target of attempts on his life. After the second John is found near the site, dead, with the weapon in his hand. Jennifer has to accept that she lived with a secret agent for the last 4 years. While she tries to learn more about a list of names she found on one of John’s floppy disks, she becomes target herself in this deadly intrigue. Only her knowledge in self defense keeps the tough woman alive.Read More »

It was always likely that Eldar Shengelaia would end up in film. His father Nikoloz was one of the early pioneers of Georgian cinema, his mother Nato an acclaimed actor. Younger brother Giorgi was an accomplished director in his own right, noted for his 1969 biopic on the Georgian primitivist artist Pirosmani. Both Shengelaia brothers won admission to the VGIK film school in Moscow, the USSR’s most prestigious, graduating a few years apart, and Eldar’s first directorial efforts were produced while working at Mosfilm in the late fifties – The Legend of the Frozen Heart (1957) and A Snowy Tale (1959).Read More »

Quote:
Bae Yonggyun is one of the most mysterious figures in the history of Korean cinema. He made two films on his own outside the film industry and then retreated to live largely in seclusion. This highly meditative film, deeply rooted in history and memory, is one of the highlights of New Korean Cinema. It follows a man who returns to his hometown after living overseas for many years. He roams like a sleepwalker through the bleak town, getting into conversations with people who could be dead or alive. An extraordinary ‘ghost story’ unprecedented in Korean cinema. (Un-seong Yoo, Sight and Sound December 2022 issue)Read More »

Quote:
Wild Reeds (Les Roseaux Sauvages) 1994- André Téchiné’s coming-of-age drama, set in a quiet provincial town in 1962, is the best French film in years. The young characters are all deeply confused about their political, intellectual, and sexual identities; the director sets up their conflicts with masterly ease, and, using smooth, complex tracking shots, carries them toward resolutions that are tentative but real. The movie flows like a river. Téchiné simply takes his characters from one point to another-from juvenile ignorance to a place where they can see themselves, and others, a little more clearly-and he makes that short journey look momentous. Few movies dealing with teen-agers have been so accurate about the moral and emotional urgency of adolescents’ attempts to understand their lives, or so forgiving of their failures. Gaël Morel, élodie Bouchez, Stéphane Rideau, and Frédéric Gorny play the main characters, and they’re all terrific.Read More »

Kinema Jumpo “Best movie”-winner of 2000.

Quote:
Veteran director Shinji Somai lensed this heart-warming family drama about a shabby looking coot claiming to be the father of an elite salaryman. Hiroshi Nirasaki (Koichi Sato) is a securities broker desperately trying to keep the fact that his company is about to go belly-up from his high-strung upper-class wife (Yuki Saito). One day, while walking home from a particularly bad day at work, he gets accosted by an old bum (Tsutomu Yamazaki) who demands to be taken in by his son. Though his mother told him that his dad died when he was born, the drunken geezer knows enough about him and his short order cook mother (Sumiko Fuji) that he is almost convinced. Read More »

Plot:
A would-be novelist with no ideas of his own mines the tragedies of an unsuspecting woman to his advantage in this drama. Robert (Ulrich Matthes) is a college professor and struggling writer living in Konstanz, a town in Southern Germany. Robert has been working on a novel for years, but beyond a rough idea about life in Germany before the Berlin Wall came down, he has no worthwhile ideas and doesn’t have much to show for his efforts; as Robert edges into his mid-forties, he’s begun to worry his literary career will never get off the ground. Robert happens to meet a young woman named Inga (Anna Maria Muehe) who was raised by her grandparents after her mother died soon after she was born; Robert senses there’s something in her story that would make for a good novel, and he begins drawing her out, trying to find out more about her and her childhood that he can use as source material for his book. As Robert digs deeper, it becomes clear he’s learned a few things about Inga’s past that she doesn’t know — and not everything she’s been told about her mother is the truth. Novemberkind (aka November Child) was the first feature film from writer and director Christian Schwochow.Read More »