Romance

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Based on Herman Bang’s 1902 novel of the same name, Dreyer’s film is a fascinating fin-de-siècle study of a “decadent” elderly artist (Benjamin Christensen) driven to despair by his relationship with his young protégé and former model, Michael (Walter Slezak). With suffocatingly sumptuous production design by renowned architect Hugo Häring (his only film work), this Kammerspiel, or “intimate theatre”, foreshadows Dreyer’s magnificent final film Gertrud, by forty years with its “Now I may die content, for I have seen great love” epigraph.Read More »

It was always likely that Eldar Shengelaia would end up in film. His father Nikoloz was one of the early pioneers of Georgian cinema, his mother Nato an acclaimed actor. Younger brother Giorgi was an accomplished director in his own right, noted for his 1969 biopic on the Georgian primitivist artist Pirosmani. Both Shengelaia brothers won admission to the VGIK film school in Moscow, the USSR’s most prestigious, graduating a few years apart, and Eldar’s first directorial efforts were produced while working at Mosfilm in the late fifties – The Legend of the Frozen Heart (1957) and A Snowy Tale (1959).Read More »

An affair–parenthesis in the dull life of two people (Angelos Antonopoulos and Alexandra Ladikou), who meet by chance on a railway trip and spend a few hours together while the train is stuck in a station.Read More »

Unmade Beds is a minimalist drama about two newcomers to London searching for love in all the wrong places.Read More »

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Mélanie (Aurélia Alcaïs), a Parisian young student, plans to lay (bare) for a photographer.Read More »

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Julien and Marguerite de Ravalet, son and daughter of the Lord of Tourlaville, have loved each other since childhood. But as they grow up, their affection veers toward voracious passion. Scandalized by their affair, society hounds them until, unable to resist their feelings, they flee. A contemporary fairytale about desire, passion, hope, love and death.Read More »

A young couple marry in France in the 1940s and the film follows the arc of their marriage over the next decade. As France recovers from the trauma of the war, the wife finds herself increasingly caught up in acquiring material possessions while the husband prefers a more traditional lifestyle.Read More »

Synopsis: The painter Balz, who sits jealously in Italy and harasses Clara, the actress, by telephone because of a lover. Balz wishes the rival all bad – and promptly he falls unhappily on his nose. When he succeeds in closing his mouth with a simple and very understandable wish, as required by his girlfriend, who has meanwhile arrived with him and is constantly babbling, the Italian driver realises that it is a brandy that helps his evil desires to come true. But she also discovers a magic potion that gives her the strength to transform things, day in night for example. She takes pleasure in taking advantage of it when Balz is at the wheel.Read More »

Berthe, an elderly widow, is forced by her declining health to close the French farmhouse where she has spent much of her life. She moves in with her daughter Émilie and son-in-law Bruno, who share a legal practice and have two grown children: Anne, a law student, and Lucien, who was adopted. In spite of Émilie’s efforts, Berthe is not happy in her daughter’s bourgeois home in Blagnac. She sits by the swimming pool in the middle of the night talking to herself and finds the house pretentious. Worried about her mother’s physical and mental health, Émilie pays a visit to her unmarried younger brother, Antoine, a neurosurgeon. They have not seen each other for three years, since they quarreled at their father’s funeral. Émilie informs Antoine of their mother’s condition and invites him to Christmas dinner with the family.Read More »