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In Goran Dukic’s Wristcutters: A Love Story, limbo is imagined as a place where no one ever smiles, where furnishings and cars all seem second-hand, where the colours are all drab and faded. “Everything’s the same here,” as one character puts it, “but it’s just a little worse.”Read More »
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An adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel, set in modern Helsinki. Slaughterhouse worker Rahikainen murders a man, and is forced to live with the consequences of his actions.
Aki Kaurismäki’s narrative directorial debut. He chose this project after reading François Truffaut’s interview with Alfred Hitchcock, where Hitchcock claimed Crime and Punishment was the one book he would never adapt, because “it would be to difficult.” Kaurismäki later admitted it was too difficult.Read More »
A couple deals with the aftermath of an adoption that goes awry as their household falls apart.Read More »
The idea is simple: A married woman and a single man meet. They love, they argue, fists fly. A dog strays between town and country. The seasons pass. The man and woman meet again. The dog finds itself between them. The other is in one, the one is in the other and they are three. The former husband shatters everything. A second film begins: the same as the first, and yet not. From the human race we pass to metaphor. This ends in barking and a baby’s cries. Read More »
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Shortly after Muzamil was born, the village’s holy man predicts that he will die at age 20. Muzamil’s father can’t stand the curse and leaves home. Sakina raises her son as a single mother, overly protective. One day, Muzamil turns 19.Read More »
On Mother’s Day, 1946, in San Francisco, Ziggy Brennan thinks back on the events which have brought her to this day.
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Raised as a grifter by her single mother, a San Francisco girl (Mona Freeman, in the role that should have made her a star) learns to adjust her priorities when she is left a young war widow, with a child of her own to take care of. Unaccountably overlooked, this resonant, formally inventive film was the final work of the director Alfred Santell as well as the last leading role of Oscar-winner James Dunn.Read More »
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Gabe Klinger’s Porto deals with the post-one-night-stand fallout between an American drifter working abroad, Jake (Anton Yelchin), and a forlorn French woman, Mati (Lucie Lucas). Less a city symphony than a muted impressionist painting of urban drifting, the film takes place within the shadowy side streets, modest corner bars, and nondescript 24-hour diners of the eponymous northwest Portuguese city, where Jake is burning time as a manual laborer and flannel-clad somnambulist. Wandering one night, Jake spots Mati and strikes up an exchange, which leads to a charged evening that gets played and replayed throughout the film, each time at slightly greater length and with a different emotional inflection. Stitching these sense memories together are jazz piano-backed montages of a disappointed Jake stumbling around their earlier haunts as though in a Resnais-like time loop.Read More »
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Touko Laaksonen, a decorated officer, returns home after a harrowing and heroic experience serving his country in World War II, but life in Finland during peacetime proves equally distressing. He finds peace-time Helsinki rampant with persecution of the homosexual men around him, even being pressured to marry women and have children. Touko finds refuge in his liberating art, specializing in homoerotic drawings of muscular men, free of inhibitions. His work – made famous by his signature ‘Tom of Finland’ – became the emblem of a generation of men and fanned the flames of a gay revolution.Read More »
With ABOUT ENDLESSNESS, Roy Andersson adds to his cinematic oeuvre with a reflection on human life in all its beauty and cruelty, its splendour and banality.Read More »