Mystery

Winner of the top prize at last year’s Locarno Film Festival, Yeo Siew Hua’s third feature is a clever, evocative shape-shifter that begins as a kind of dreamy noir and ends up a sober, politically incisive work of social realism. First we follow gruff, disenchanted detective Lok (Peter Yu) as he searches for Wang (Liu Xiaoyi), a missing construction worker from mainland China. We’re then ushered back in time to see Wang’s life before his disappearance—and what had seemed a typical noir scenario instead turns out to be far more in line with reality as we know it today.Read More »

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In a remote beach house on a cliff, a woman (Sigourney Weaver) rewards the doctor (Ben Kingsley) who gave her lawyer husband (Stuart Wilson) a lift home on a stormy night by tying him to a chair, stuffing his mouth with her panties and holding a gun to his head. A twisted romantic triangle? You might have thought so from Mike Nichols’ lightweight 1992 production of Ariel Dorfman’s play with Glenn Close, Gene Hackman and Richard Dreyfuss. You won’t think so now. Director Roman Polanski restores the play to the pulsepounding political thriller it is. His electrifying film nearly jumps off the screen.Read More »

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Ekman’s favorite of his own films, and an enduring classic in Scandinavia, “Girl with Hyacinths” examines the mysterious suicide of a young woman (Eva Henning, Ekman’s wife at the time) through a Wellesian multiplicity of points of view. Visually striking, with extreme long takes and images that drift into a dreamlike surrealism, the film reveals its secrets with grace and sympathy, moving toward a final revelation that seems at least a generation ahead of its time.Read More »

As a mother and daughter struggle to cope with the terrors of the post-revolution, war-torn Tehran of the 1980s, a mysterious evil begins to haunt their home.
Shideh (Narges Rashidi) and her family live amid the chaos of the Iran-Iraq war, a period known as The War of the Cities. Accused of subversion by the post-Revolution government and blacklisted from medical college, she falls into a state of malaise. With Tehran under the constant threat of aerial bombardment, her husband (Bobby Naderi) is drafted and sent to the frontlines by the army, leaving Shideh all alone to protect their young daughter, Dorsa (Avin Manshadi).Read More »

Plot Synopsis by Hal Erickson
Beyond This Place is a tame murder mystery based on a novel by A. J. Cronin. Van Johnson is cast as an American citizen whose British father has supposedly been dead for years. On a visit to London, Johnson discovers that his father is very much alive, serving a life sentence for murder. Johnson inaugurates his own investigation, retraces the trail of circumstantial evidence, and unearths the real culprit. Director Jack Cardiff was not happy with his work on Beyond This Place, possibly because he was obliged for box office purposes to use an American star in an essentially British story. The film was released in the US as Web of Evidence.Read More »

On the Oaxacan coast of Mexico, rumblings of previous times are never far from the surface. Tales of shapeshifting, telepathy and dealings with the Devil are embedded in the colonization and enslavement of the Americas. Characters from the Faust legend mingle with the inhabitants, while attempting to colonize and control nature through a seemingly never-ending building project. Through literature, myth and local entanglements, the frontier between reality and fiction, and the seen and unseen, no longer apply.Read More »

Synopsis: The head of the Green Manors mental asylum Dr. Murchison is retiring to be replaced by Dr. Edwardes, a famous psychiatrist. Edwardes arrives and is immediately attracted to the beautiful but cold Dr. Constance Petersen. However, it soon becomes apparent that Dr. Edwardes is in fact a paranoid amnesiac impostor. He goes on the run with Constance who tries to help his condition and solve the mystery of what happened to the real Dr. Edwardes.Read More »

“A war. A girl. A dream”.

“Bailaora” is the third and last short film in the trilogy “Luz & Oscuridad ” (Light & Dark).
Nominated for Best Fiction Short Film at the Goya Awards 2019Read More »

A sharpshooter kills two prisoners in a police van at night. The guard on the van is suspended for six months; he’s Tamon, an upright, modest man. He begins his own investigation into the murders. Who were the victims, who are their relatives and girlfriends, who else was on the van that night? As he doggedly investigates, others die, coincidences occur, and several leads take him to the Hamaju Agency, which may be supplying call girls. Its owner is in jail, his daughter, the enigmatic Yuko, keeps turning up where Tamon goes. Tamon believes he can awaken good in people, but has he met his match? Will he solve the murders or be the next victim? And who is Akiba?Read More »