A young model runs away from the set of a commercial spot she’s filming, and enter the mansion of Araucaima, where its dwellers indulge in strange rites.
Filled with symbolism, this metaphorical drama by Colombian director Carlos Mayolo is centered on an old mansion, isolated and ambiguous in its actual location. Revolving around the mansion is a static society made up of a pilot, landowner, priest, soldier, and other people representative of professions or occupations. Read More »
Yuko is 35 years old, single, out of work, and on medication from her psychiatrist to combat her manic depression. Living in Kamata Town, Yuko divides her time between a variety of men friends, each with his own peculiarities. Her university classmate, Homma, suffers from impotence. “K”, whom she meets on the net, is a self-confessed pervert. Then, there is a young gangster, Yasuda, who is a fellow manic depressive. Her cousin, Shoichi, is also on the scene, having left his family to pursue his mistress, only to be given the cold shoulder by her, too. Yuko seems to create a different persona depending on whom she is talking to at the time. Human contact is just as important for her as for anyone else, but sometimes her condition makes it difficult for others to relate to her for as long as she would like.”Read More »
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A look at the problems two couples, Kohei and Kinuko, and Manabe and Hijiri, have in their relationships, and the solutions they try to devise as a way out. Kohei and Kinuko, despite their age difference, seem like a happy pair, but their is an insurmountable distance between them. Kohei is married to another woman, and Kinuko, though she know he will never divorce, can’t bring herself to break off the relationship and start anew. Manabe and Hijiri, meanwhile, start off happily enough, but eventually their passion begins to wane as Manabe starts looking to other women for sex. Hijiri, feeling rejected, moves into an apartment next door to Kinuko, where she plots to break up the mismatched couple to her own advantage.Read More »
The movie is centered around five friends as they end up spending the summer of 1962 shackled up together in a tiny studio apartment in Tokyo. The five friends are Eisuke – the manga artist, Shoichi – the singer, Ryuzo – the novelist, Kei – the painter and Yuji – the 5th wheel. The friends spend the summer in pursuit of their own ideals of personal freedom – being able to do what they want. In the process of pursuing their dream they learn firsthand that however ideal it may seem, its not as easy as they think.Read More »
“Robert Guédiguian is well-known for his idiosyncratic slices of life set
in his beloved Marseille, in films such as Marius et Jeannette (1997)
and À la place du coeur (1998). Whilst most of Guédiguian’s films are set in this historic
French port they span a remarkable range of genres and encompass a
dizzying assortment of themes, including noir-style thriller intrigue,
classic romance and pressing social issues. Ki lo sa?, Guédiguian’s
third feature, is one of his more unusual films in this series, a
surprisingly dark and mystical work which explores various
existentialist concerns through the interlocking prisms of black comedy
and social realism.Read More »
NYFF wrote:
The Dardenne Brothers won this year’s Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival for this brave new work, another intimate portrayal-in-furious-motion of a protagonist in crisis. The filmmakers’ radical empathy alights on a Muslim teenager (extraordinary first-time actor Idir Ben Addi) in a small Belgian town who is being gradually radicalized into extremism despite the desperate protestations of his single mother (Claire Bodson), and who winds up hatching a murderous plot targeting his beloved teacher (Myriem Akheddiou). Taking a serious view of a difficult issue—the effect of fanaticism on the body and soul—the Dardennes here remind viewers why they continue to be at the center of 21st-century cinema.Read More »
Debut director Mia Hansen-Love turns seemingly random slices from the life of a disintegrating family unit into a remarkably graceful, natural film about what it is to be human. Perhaps the most persuasive aspect of this hopeful parable of failure is the way casting, acting, script, and camerawork conspire to usher us into an immediately believable world which is observed with a painterly eye yet never seems staged.Read More »
Four friends (two African-American, two Puerto Rican-American) learn a lot about themselves and one another while negotiating a memorable roller coaster of a Friday night out on the town.Read More »
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The interlaced stories of several characters in a small town united by their use of CB (citizen’s band) radio.Read More »