allmovie:
This Dutch film, based upon the classic 19th century S&M novel, chronicles the relationship between a dominatrix and her slave. Much of the soundtrack includes works by Mahler and Tchaikovsky. Wanda has a number of sado-masochistic encounters with Severin in a variety of locations including a crypt. In the end, he is left branded by another man while she leaves with a woman.Read More »
Synopsis
In August 1991 a failed coup d’e´tat attempt (known as Putsch) led by a group of hard-core communists in Moscow, ended the 70-year-long rule of the Soviets. The USSR collapsed soon after, and the tricolour of the sovereign Russian Federation flew over Kremlin. As president Gorbachev was detained by the coup leaders, state-run tv and radio channels, usurped by the putschists, broadcast Tchaikovsky’s swan lake instead of news bulletins, and crowds of protestors gathered around Moscow’s White House, preparing to defend the stronghold of democratic opposition led by Boris Yeltsin, in the city of Leningrad thousands of confused, scared, excited and desperate people poured into the streets to become a part of the event, which was supposed to change their destiny. A quarter of a century later, Sergei Loznitsa revisits the dramatic moments of August 1991 and casts an eye on the event which was hailed worldwide as the birth of “Russian democracy.” What really happened in Russia in August 1991? What was the driving force behind the crowds on the Palace Square in Leningrad? What exactly are we witnessing: the collapse or the regime or its’ creative re-branding? Who are these people looking at the camera: victors or victims?Read More »
The Sea That Thinks is a 2000 Dutch experimental film directed by Gert de Graaff. The film makes heavily use of optical illusions to tell a “story within a story” revolving around a screenwriter writing a script called The Sea That Thinks. The script details what is happening around him and eventually begins to affect what happens around him.Read More »
Synopsis:
In 1931 the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein travels to Guanajuato to direct his film Que viva México. There he encounters a new culture and its dealings with death; he also discovers another revolution – and his own body. Peter Greenaway depicts Eisenstein as an eccentric artist who travels to Mexico filled with the hubris of being an internationally celebrated star director. Once there, he gets into difficulties with his American financier, the novelist Upton Sinclair. At the same time he begins, in the simultaneously joyful and threatening foreign land, to re-evaluate his homeland and the Stalinist regime. And, in doing so, he undergoes the transition from a conceptual filmmaker into an artist fascinated by the human condition. Under his gaze, the signs, impressions, religious and pagan symbols of Mexican culture assemble themselves anew.
Making use of extreme close-ups, split-screens and a dramatic montage – all to enact the transformation of a hero who presents himself as a tragic clown – Greenaway deliberately quotes and modifies Eisenstein’s own cinematic tools. Scene by scene the film gets closer to Eisenstein the man, who finds himself surprised by an unexpected desireRead More »
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A relatively straightforward genre exercise compared with last year’s Cannes-competing “Borgman,” “Schneider vs. Bax” (which has already opened in its native Netherlands, where it did arthouse business rather than action-movie numbers) likely wouldn’t have interested festivals or foreign distribs if not for the career-rekindling acclaim his previous feature attracted. Van Warmerdam would be the first to admit this follow-up was designed to be as different from “Borgman” as possible. Still, there’s so escaping the macabre and borderline-surreal sensibility that underlies them both, which should earn this pic playdates around the world in venues that would have ignored him a year earlier.Read More »
The career of Federico Fellini lasted for forty years and made him perhaps the most illustrious of all the filmmakers to have come out of Italy. Those forty years saw the appearance of titles that have carved out a permanent niche in the memory of generations of film lovers. Fellini, a richly illustrated book written and edited by Sam Stourdzé, Director of the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne (Switzerland), taps into the sources of his fertile imagination and brings the vital power of his work into the limelight providing insight into the obsessions and motivations of the man behind La Strada, La Dolce Vita and 8¿.Read More »
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Elizabeth, a voluptuous, shy and unpopular girl, is the object of ridicule at school by the cool in-crowd. Her life spirals downward after the death of her only friend, her grandmother. But she has a crush on a popular boy at school, and a deranged plan to make all her dreams come true!Read More »
Synopsis:
Virtuoso application of digital techniques in a feature combining the genres of film noir, art film and porn. Man condemned to death and on the run (Thom Hoffman) has a last intense sexual relationship (with porn actress Mai Hoshimo).
Ian Kerkhof’s new film boldly clashes genre conventions in a digital melt that seeks to invent a new form of film-making appropriate to the new digital age. On this occasion he is working with a Japanese producer and shooting in Japan with the enormously flexible and light DV camera, ‘re-mixing’ his material on the infinitely flexible AVID editing equipment to create a film for the big screen.No surprise, this determined renegade film-maker takes the opportunity to mix crime film, art film and porn movie.Read More »
The film tells the story of sixteen-year-old Nena, who is confronted with the suicide attempt of her handicapped father. At the same time she falls head over heels in love for the first time in her life with Carlo, whose father has just outed himself. Away from prying eyes of the adults – who struggle with failed marriages, blossoming love and insufferable physical decline – they push the boundaries of their friendship, love and sexuality. But while discovering her own lust for life, Nena realizes that her father’s existence is becoming more and more unbearable.Read More »