Fantasy

A girl on the verge of womanhood finds herself in a sensual fantasyland of vampires, witchcraft, and other threats in this eerie and mystical movie daydream. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders serves up an endlessly looping, nonlinear fairy tale, set in a quasi-medieval landscape. Ravishingly shot, enchantingly scored, and spilling over with surreal fancies, this enticing phantasmagoria from director Jaromil Jireš is among the most beautiful oddities of the Czechoslovak New Wave. (Criterion)Read More »

Plot Outline: Dark fairytale about a demonic doctor who abducts a beautiful opera singer with designs on transforming her into a mechanical nightingale.Read More »

Synopsis
In his adaptation of Hattie Naylor’s play Ivan and the Dogs, experimental filmmaker Andrew Kötting travels to the Chilean desert to recreate the life of the young boy who left his Moscow apartment to live with a pack of wild dogs. A crossover between narrative film and contemporary art piece.
Read More »

Quote:
Taking in the whole spectrum of pre-millennial new age phenomena, the bizarre August in the Water (whose English language release title is a direct translation of the Japanese, though is not to be confused with Yoichiro Takahashi’s identically titled Mizu No Naka No Hachigatsu, a 1998 coming of age drama which did the Festival circuit under the English language title of Fishes in August) is a bit of a mixed bag. Thematically, it’s a real inspiration. The X-Files notwithstanding, this sort of imaginative pseudo-scientific fantasy stands fairly uniquely amongst contemporary cinematic output. Visually the film is also a wonder, with impressive use of natural lighting in the bright exteriors, and beautifully composed Zen-like static shots of the assorted esoteric ephemera alternating with rapid multiple-angle edits and abstracted close-ups of the natural phenomena.Read More »

A village in the mountains of Northern Pakistan. One day, a landslide congested a river. Thousands of homes and fields were inundated. Villages vanished. What is left are the people and their stories, passed on from one generation to another. And the ghosts, that are still roaming the region.

Quote:
A documentary fairy-tale about the struggle for identity in the Hunza Valley set in a village located in the Northern-Pakistan somewhere between the past and the future. A magnificent turquoise lake in between rough, steep cliff surrounds the small village. But the lake hasn’t been always there. One day, an enormous landslide blocked a river. In a few months, this river turned into a huge lake, which is now up to 30km long. Thousands of homes and fields were flooded. Entire villages disappeared forever. Thousands of people got dislocated and had to look for different places where to live. What is left are the stories of those that once used to live there which are passed on from generation to generation. Weaving together the past and the future, myths and sketches of everyday life, director Daniel Asadi Faezi creates a rich tapestry of images that create a sensual and textured dance of death and resurrection. And the ghosts that still roam the cliffs and the valley, join the humans in their dance.Read More »

Directors Sergei Paradzhanov and Dodo Abashidze resurrected an old Soviet Georgian folktale as the basis for their film The Legend of Suram Fortress. The fortress in question is forever under construction, and forever collapsing before the last brick can be laid. The advice of a fortuneteller is sought out; the young fellow sent out to seek this advice happens to be the son of a man who years earlier had jilted the fortuneteller. Out of pique, she tells him that he must be walled up in the fortress’ wall, else the structure will continue to tumble. So many ancient legends are based upon self-sacrifice that one would think that Legend of Suram Fortress would have nothing new to offer–and one would be quite unfair to this well-crafted film to think along those lines. Never as brilliant as the critics made it out to be, Suram Fortress is still an immensely satisfying work from a gifted filmmaking team. ~ Hal Erickson, RoviRead More »

Quote:
In this surreal retelling of the ancient myth of the Medusa, bizarre, clothed statues of men are appearing all over Greece. Only Perseus, the leader of a gang of modern Athenian thieves, holds the answer to the mystery. It has something to do with a beautiful, long-haired woman in black who is connected with his troubled childhood. One night his gang breaks into a deserted house in the countryside looking for goods to steal. What they find is entirely unexpected and leads Perseus on a dangerous journey into his past. Read More »

Quote:
For a film so widely and indelibly remembered, Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan has confounded a surprising number of critics over the years. Ever since its release in 1965, there have been those who have found it too long, too artificial, too self-consciously exotic, not socially minded enough for the director of The Human Condition (1959–61) and Harakiri (1962), not scary or gory enough to qualify as a horror film. To be sure, this four-part adaptation of four renowned ghost stories by Lafcadio Hearn—not quite comparable to any other film, regardless of genre or country of origin, and unique in Kobayashi’s oeuvre—defies easy categorization. That is perhaps why it has remained for countless viewers such a singular experience, clinging to memory like an unshakable dream, a glimpse into some alternate zone where light falls differently on faces, time moves by a different measure, and terror blends disturbingly with beauty.Read More »

David Cairns wrote:
I’ve now seen the film, and I thought it was excellent. Imperfect, yes, but fascinating and unique. The closest comparison I can come up with is Strange Cargo, Frank Borzage’s weird religious allegory which deals with a gang of convicts escaping from a tropical prison island, finding salvation along the way. But The Passing of the Third Floor Left brings its rogues’ gallery into contact with the numinous in a modern London hotel.

What both films have in common is Jesus, encorpsified (to use Flann O’Brien’s word) as a convict in the Borzage and as a myseterious tenant in Berthold Viertel’s film. More to the point, embodied by the august personage of Conrad Veidt, whose presence makes Viertel’s expressionist touches seem wholly legitimate and rooted in the old world of Caligari.Read More »