Sweden

With ABOUT ENDLESSNESS, Roy Andersson adds to his cinematic oeuvre with a reflection on human life in all its beauty and cruelty, its splendour and banality.Read More »

Two sweethearts take a walk into the woods. This is one of Lasse Braun’s better films.Read More »

Synopsis
A shopping center along a large highway is the scene of an apocalyptic musical. Animation with a strong sense of form set to auto-tuned music by Klungan. About liberation through great catastrophy.Read More »

Quote:
Scenes from a Marriage chronicles the many years of love and turmoil that bind Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson), tracking their relationship as it progresses through a number of successive stages: matrimony, infidelity, divorce, and subsequent partnerships. Originally conceived as a five-hour, six-part television miniseries, the film is also presented in its three-hour theatrical cut. Shot on 16 mm in intense, intimate close-ups by cinematographer Sven Nykvist and featuring flawless performances by Ullmann and Josephson, Bergman’s emotional X-ray reveals the intense joys and pains of a complex bond.Read More »

It’s time for conscription training outside the small town of Lillköping. The bank clerk becomes an officer – the bank manager an ordinary soldier. Everybody seems to be trying to get a date with Elsa, who makes their food. Nobody takes the training seriously.Read More »

By Roger Ebert / March 20, 1972
The young man looks at the empty lives of the people living on his block, and writes an angry book about the way they’ve been treated. A publisher invites him to Stockholm to discuss the manuscript, but finally patronizes him: “There is a cry of rage here, but it is still inarticulate.” Sobbing with frustration, the young man tells a sympathetic neighbor girl: “Sometimes a cry is so loud it cannot be heard.” They make love that night, the girl becomes pregnant, and before long the young man believes that he has been trapped just as his parents were.Read More »

Merab has been training since a young age at the National Georgian Ensemble with his dance partner Mary. His world is suddenly turned upside down when the charismatic and carefree Irakli arrives and becomes both his strongest rival and desire. In this conservative setting Merab finds himself having to break free and risk it all.Read More »

A young lady explores a dungeon of a castle.

Some information from Lasse Braun: The Official Website:

In February 1977, while LB was shooting some movies in London, his archive cellar was flooded, but since no one knew about that secret locations and the use of it, LB discovered the disaster when it was too late. […] Water and mud had flooded into the archive areas from an adjacent cellar belonging to other people through a breach in the dividing brick wall. Unknown thieves had obviously entered the LB cellar and stole all the paintings and valuables, which were placed above the crates with the film material. Read More »

Quote:
In recent years, The Seventh Seal has often been honored more for its historical stature than its prevailing vitality. Those who attended its first international rollout and were changed forever by the experience are now second-guessing their attachment to a work so firmly ensconced in the realm of middlebrow clichés. Its Eisenhower look-alike Reaper, emblematic chess game, and Dance of Death have been endlessly emulated and parodied. Worse, The Seventh Seal quickly assumed, and has never quite shaken, the reputation, formerly attributed to castor oil, of something good for you—a true kiss of death. A movie that’s good for you is, by definition, not good for you.Read More »