USA

Synopsis:
During his lifetime, Vincent Van Gogh (Tim Roth) has no greater champion of his work than his devoted brother, Theo (Paul Rhys). As an art gallery owner, Theo pushes for the recognition that Van Gogh’s masterpieces deserve, only to meet with abject failure. While Van Gogh struggles with obscurity and mental illness, Theo faces serious financial difficulties due to poor sales. Eventually, both the Van Gogh brothers begin falling apart over the reality of their unrealized dreams.Read More »

The history of nuclear weapons between 1945 until 1963.

“Trinity and Beyond” is an unsettling yet visually fascinating documentary presenting the history of nuclear weapons development and testing between 1945-1963. Narrated by William Shatner and featuring an original score performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, this award-winning documentary reveals previously unreleased and classified government footage from several countries.Read More »

In an avant-garde attempt to explore widely disparate, unconnected subjects dealing with topics as diverse as sex, a broken marriage, artists’ housing in New York, and Central American politics, director Yvonne Rainer meanders through a lot of philosophical and rhetorical territory. In the end, the voyage may be too much for most viewers, although certain segments of the film stand out as quite successful.Read More »

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Outlaw and self-appointed lawmaker, Judge Roy Bean, rules over an empty stretch of the West that gradually grows, under his iron fist, into a thriving town, while dispensing his own quirky brand of frontier justice upon strangers passing by.Read More »

In “Landscape Suicide” Benning continues his examination of Americana through the stories of two murderers. Ed Gein was a Wisconsin farmer and multiple murderer who taxidermied his victims in the 1950s. Bernadette Prott was a California teenager who stabbed a friend to death over an insult in 1984. Benning’s distanced approach to such grisly material is as far removed as possible from sensationalism, however. Although the acts of murder are both bizarre and violent, Benning dwells on them only minimally, emphasizing instead the details of psychological motivation, which in both cases seem frighteningly mundane. Benning has created a script which is a masterpiece of understated colloquial writing, and the actors he employs to re-enact confessional testimony and incidents recounted in trial transcripts perform with a flatly convincing lack of affect reminiscent of Gary Gilmore. Read More »

[B]The Magician’s House[B] 2007, 5:45 Both a letter to a cancer stricken, alchemist-filmmaker friend, and a quiet tribute to the vanishing art of celluloid, “The Magician’s House” is full of ghosts. Including that of Athanasius Kircher, inventor of the Magic Lantern or “Sorcerer’s Lamp”. The music, La lutte des Mages (The Struggle of the Magicians), was composed by Armenian mystic Georges Gurdjieff and Thomas De Hartmann. Gurdjieff thought of man as a kind of “transmitting station of forces.” To him, most people move around in a state of waking sleep, so he sought to provide aural conditions that would induce awareness.Read More »

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In Removed, Naomi Uman physically erases the female body from old 16mm porn using nail polish remover and household bleach. This gorgeous attack of beauty and domestic product on celluloid results in a series of animated white ‘holes’ writhing orgasmically in the place of porn stars. The leering men are captured in various inadequate poses and the original dialogue tracks remain, complete with badly dubbed exchanges. The hole in the film becomes an erotic zone, a blank on which a fantasy body is projected. This brilliant work is unusually precise: it is politically subversive, pornography in its own right, sassy and extremely funny.Read More »

Brandy Kirby and crooked Lawyer Vincent Mailer plan to rob William and Maida McIntyre by producing a convincing double for their long-lost son. Brandy charms gambler Lefty Farrell into impersonating the missing son. Kathy, the McIntyre’s niece, who likes Lefty, introduces him to the McIntyres who soon become convinced he is their son, but the old man refuses to change his will. Lefty balks at killing McIntyre and exposes Mailer’s attempted swindle. Brandy and Lefty end up together as “two of a kind.”Read More »

After receiving a series of chilling letters from her reclusive father, Arletty (Mariana Hill, High Plains Drifter) drives to the remote seaside town of Pointe Dune to discover the reason for her father’s developing madness. As she searches for him in vain, she encounters an interesting trio researching an old legend about a “Blood Moon.” They soon learn the secret of the town, one that has turned the local dead into eye-bleeding, flesh-eating zombies who terrorize all in this slow-paced, peculiarly moody classic of low-budget American independent filmmaking.Read More »