Amidst a backdrop of growing violence and intimidation, independent cab drivers struggling against a consolidated juggernaut rally around hot-tempered Matt Nolan. Nolan is determined to keep competition alive on the streets, even if it means losing the woman he loves.Read More »
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Truffaut and Godard gave a bad name to the “quality” French cinema that preceded them. This film was one of their pet examples of what they saw as staid, boring, unadventurous cinéma de papa. Without an axe to grind, it is actually a breathtakingly bold modernization of the Faust legend, ravishing to look at with its highly stylized sets (Trauner on LSD) and containing multi-layered undercurrents, including a message on the unthinking destructiveness of youth which seems almost like a prescient reply to its New Wave critics.Read More »
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Kurt Gerber, an intelligent high school student is in his senior year. He is burdend with personal and scholastic problems. Since his weak subject is math, Professor Kupfer who teaches his course and is also his class teacher, uses every occasion to humiliate the bright and self-assured boy. Even though the odds are against him, Kurt fights back and his struggle with the sadistic teacher develops into a matter of life and death. A faithful version of the best-seller novel by Friedrich Torberg which was published in 1930.Read More »
Francis Vanverberghe, aka “Francis le Belge”, was shot to death in September 2000 in a bar on the Champs Elysées. An old relic of the French Connection, his death sealed the faith of the french organized crime. He was a pimp, a drug smuggler and a multifaceted man risking his life and those of others every day, until the last day. Through his daugther’s eyes, this film reveals the man behind the myth. A female look into a world where women don’t belong…Read More »
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Rudaali is a 1993 Hindi film directed by Indian director Kalpana Lajmi, based on the short story written by famous Bengali litterateur Mahasweta Devi. The film was selected as the Indian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 66th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee.
The film is set in a small village in Rajasthan, India. It tells the story of a woman named Shanichari, who was abandoned by her mother shortly after her father’s death. Bad fortune follows her throughout her life.Read More »
The film centres on Clara, who is happily married to a promising lawyer and lives in Paris. After their mother’s sudden death, Clara has to assume responsibility for her younger sister, Lily, whose extreme sensitivity makes her vulnerable to the outside world and prevents her from being autonomous. Living in the family home in the countryside, in the provinces, Lily has created her own unique world, which she finds difficult to leave as she has found a certain sense of balance there. But she needs protection. Clara, whose life has taken shape away from her sister, has to make some choices and learns that normality is a very subjective idea.Read More »
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The opening scene is a single shot showing a family and their dog descending a hill, a large tree in the foreground, the distant countryside vanishing into the rolling fog. The camera pushes in imperceptibly, but continuously from the beginning. On the soundtrack, possibly diegetic, a sole woman sings. Meanwhile, the film credits scroll up over the scene. The family and dog, upon reaching the area in front of a hut, stop moving. Verdi’s Messa da Requiem fades in, overlapping for a brief moment with the woman singing. Once the foreground tree fully disappears, the scene freezes; the credits continue until the title appears, and the scene fades to black. The Requiem continues an audible transition to the second scene.Read More »
Two Soviet partisans on a mission to gather food contend with the winter cold, the occupying Germans, and their own psyches.
Letterboxd review by Lara Pop ★★★★½:
It rarely gets bleaker than The Ascent. Larisa Shepitko’s tale of perseverance in the face of imminent death surprised me on several counts. For the first half of the movie, I couldn’t figure out the significance of the title. If anything, Shepitko presents its exact opposite. The barren, snow-covered landscape, where death lurks in every grinding step man takes, devours the movie in its all-consuming white death. The shaky camera movement enhances every sound made in the white silence as the camera zooms in on man’s face and outlines the thin crust of ice scratching his cheek with its cold tendrils, stretching, reaching, with one goal in mind: to get to the innermost layer: the spirit; and to break it. It is a tableau of a frostbitten feast, an icy infusion of a deathly descent, straight into the vein. I couldn’t figure out why I was watching a film named its exact opposite.Read More »
The story takes place in Germany at the beginning of the last century. Edouard, the wealthy baron and Charlotte, who had loved each other since their youth, could only marry after both became widowed. Edouard invites his childhood friend, Captain Otto to manage the reconstruction work of the castle.Read More »