Description: When Konstadinos misses a flight and returns home unexpectedly, he finds his wife in bed with his best friend. Shocked, he leaves the house without letting them know what he saw and begins wandering in the streets of Athens…

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/39264AA5EFB3567/o-kaliteros-moy-filos.avi
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/501AE4D4A5E5AC3/o-kaliteros-moy-filos.srt

Language(s):Greek
Subtitles:English(srt)

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The post Giorgos Lanthimos & Lakis Lazopoulos – O kalyteros mou filos AKA My Best Friend (2001) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis

filmfestival.gr wrote:
Kinetta. A defunct Greek resort town, inhabited during the off-season by migrant workers. A plain-clothes cop, with a passion for automobiles, tape recorders and Russian women, investigates a series of recent murders in the area. He enlists the help of a photo-store clerk, a loner type who is a part-time videographer, and a young hotel maid, who will be performing the role of the female victims. This oddball trio engages in a succession of murder re-enactments, directed by the cop with exhaustive attention to detail but questionable scientific purpose.

filmref.com wrote:
“Something of a hybrid between Tsai Ming-liang’s eccentric, temp morts snapshots of human idiosyncrasy crossed with the glacially paced visual abstraction of Sharunas Bartas by way of Philippe Grandrieux’s murky, destabilized, and defocused gaze”

Review
d-kaz.com wrote:
Giorgos Lanthimos’ feature film debut enwraps a fascinating premise with undeveloped, elliptical, and near wordless banality. The starting point—which is so good it essentially carries the film—is that in a Greek vacation town during the off-season a policeman (Costas Xikominos) enlists a cameraman (Aris Servetalis) and a hotel maid (Evangelia Randou) to help him restage several unsolved murders. The policeman verbally walks the maid through the scenes step by step— “Now he grabs for her right arm as she turns to crawl away, she kicks up with her left foot hitting him in the chest” that kind of thing—with himself playing the murderer. The reenactments are brutally slow, as if the people are rehearsing a fight sequence that they will later film with more fluidity, even though the cameraman is filming these awkward, stilted reenactments. The retarded movement of the “actors” aligns itself to Kinetta’s distinctive photography, by Thimios Bakatatakis, which is entirely handheld and often quite zoomed in. The effect is one of constant jittering and intended unsteadiness, a visual feeling that makes the characters’ “normal” movement through space look nearly as bizarre as their slow motion groping during the forensic scenes. […]

It’s like Lanthimos crammed together several how-to crib sheets from various types of oblique art films: suffocating anonymity and social alienation, deadpan and quirky character traits, unrequited passions and desires muted through passivity and effacement of identity. All suggested; none used. The problem may be that these are all thematic and audio-visual motifs of urban films, and this film distinctly takes place nowhere near the rest of humanity. If these characters were plunked down in a city their behavior would all be signatures of urban malaise, however poorly written; in Kinetta it comes off simply as small town boredom.

The most interesting feature of the movie is, of course, the “forensics.” The fact that no one actually seems to want to, or try to, solve the crimes, is not only amusing but it seems to place the re-enactments as moviemaking, playacting, fantasy, escapism, and physical interactive specificity at the forefront of Kinetta. But it is never clear what anyone gets out of their hobby, aside from the policeman’s desire to direct with authority, the cameraman’s desire for the maid, and the maid’s aimless life briefly put under control. But since the crime/moviemaking aspect of Kinetta is downplayed considerably compared to the oblique “development” of the characters—there are only three re-enactment scenes, and another three intriguing scenes of the maid “practicing” her death—it is difficult to focus on the ingenious scenario device and find the power that clearly exists in it. The play between the practiced violence in the re-enactments and the improvisatory photography is fascinating, especially in a lovely and one-of-a-kind scene in the film where the barely in-focus photography, deeply zoomed in and backed on the audio track by a pop song, shoots the maids bobbing head against the shimmering Greek water, the landscape momentarily coming into beautiful clarity and then going out of focus into starry points of light so we can see the maid’s head. Only in the next cut, a minute later, do we see that the maid is sweeping the floor inside the hotel and she is on the inside of the window, the bobbing of her head due to her physical task at hand. Such play with the way movement is photographed, its implications on character’s professions and desires and uncertaintites, seems at the crux of the crime scenes, but almost everywhere else in the film Lanthimos seems thematically unfocused, firm in his decision to pare away interest in his film’s characters and their lives when clearly each and every one of them is facing a life crisis.

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/6B540A6E015B932/kinetta.avi
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/3F7D5EC354B74E7/kinetta.srt

Language:Greek
Subtitles:English (.srt)

The post Giorgos Lanthimos – Kinetta (2005) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

SYNOPSIS:
A controlling, manipulative father locks his three adult offspring in a state of perpetual childhood by keeping them prisoner within the sprawling family compound.

Dogtooth.2009.576p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-Slope.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 37 min
Size: 	2.87 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x426 
Aspect ratio:  	2.40:1
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 510 kb/s
BPP: 	0.335
Audio
#1:  	Greek 5.1ch AC-3 @ 512 kb/s
#2:  	English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 124 kb/s (Commentary with Angeliki and Christos Passalis)
#3:  	English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 84.8 kb/s (Commentary by Film Critic Adam Nayman)

https://nitro.download/view/2AA19B1E5C028AF/Dogtooth.2009.576p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-Slope.mkv

https://tezfiles.com/file/85d743612cd62/Dogtooth.2009.576p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-Slope.mkv

Language(s):Greek
Subtitles:English, French

The post Giorgos Lanthimos – Kynodontas Aka Dogtooth (2009) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis
A nurse, a paramedic, a gymnast and her coach have formed a service for hire.
They stand in for dead people by appointment, hired by the relatives, friends or colleagues of the deceased. The company is called Alps.
Their leader, the paramedic, calls himself Mont Blanc. Although Alps members operate under a discipline regime demanded by their leader, the nurse does not.
alpsfilm.gr

Reviews
Life is a baffling but also intriguing imitation of itself in Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ follow-up to well-received arthouse hit Dogtooth. Scarcely less bizarre than that droll excursus about a family that lives, loves and even speaks at one surreal remove from the rest of the world, Alps denies us such traditional cinematic handholds as rounded characters with backstories; a plot with an identifiable moral arc; neatly tied narrative ends; an easy-to-read ‘message’. Yet the film only very occasionally feels like a piece of self-indulgent arthouse mystification: most of the time, this story of a team of melancholy, oddball characters who help (or profit from) the bereaved by standing in for departed loved ones holds us emotionally and intellectually – and ends by saying something profound about a world in which ‘reality’ is just another TV format…
Lee Marshall, Screen Daily.com

Alps is a film peculiar beyond all understanding, based on a premise that begs belief. It takes itself with agonizing seriousness, and although it has the form of a parable, I am at a loss to guess its meaning. Yet I was drawn hypnotically into the weirdness…. Although Alps is provocative and challenging, it is so completely self-contained that it has no particular emotional payoff. There is no greater world in which to evaluate its contents. When mourners are comforted by therapists who propose to represent the loved one, you’d think deep feelings would be stirred up. But Alps has the effect of a sterile exercise.
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

…Both a companion piece to and in many ways a reversal of Dogtooth, Alps finds Lanthimos building on that film’s surreally terse style and notions of communication and identity without diluting its singularity or concentration. Working with cinematographer Christos Voudouris, he composes his images (with characters frequently decapitated by off-center framing or liquefied into out-of-focus background forms) to conjure up an atmosphere of dread that hangs over even the most deceptively tranquil scenes. By swathing every relationship in layers of hierarchical pretense and distortion, Lanthimos envisions social order itself as a continuous performance, an existential variation of Shakespeare’s dictum about the human race as players on the world’s stage…
Fernando F. Croce, Slant Magazine

…Like Dogtooth, Alps works by systematically unsettling our sense of what is normal and habitual in human interactions. Would grieving parents or spouses really be comforted by the performances of the Alps, whose services they seek out and pay for? It is both an obvious question and one the film waves away. To appreciate what Mr. Lanthimos is doing —to accept his invitation to rethink some very basic assumptions about identity and feeling — you need to accept his peculiar and suggestive premise…
A.O. Scott, NY Times

It’s all too easy to get lost in Alps, a deadpan, absurdist ghost story of sorts from the ingenious Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos. Even the title is a bit of a decoy. No sooner have the lights dimmed than we are pitched, without a map, into a landscape that is not steep and snowy but flat and black. But follow the film-maker. Let him lead you by the nose. Lanthimos knows exactly where he’s going.
Xan Brooks, Guardian

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/90C39053BB0AB7A/alpeis-giorgos-lanthimos-2011-.avi
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/77628550B81BA1F/alpeis-giorgos-lanthimos-2011-.english.srt

Language:Greek
Subtitles:English

The post Giorgos Lanthimos – Alpeis AKA Alps (2011) first appeared on Cinema of the World.