USA

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Young married couple Tim and Lee have planted the seeds of a family in their East L.A. duplex. Three years after the birth of their son, they’re still adjusting to the joy and pain of life with kid, navigating potty talk at the dinner table, disagreeing over preschools, and putting off doing their taxes. For a change of pace, they decide to house-sit for one of Lee’s Westside yoga clients. Once there, Tim discovers something suspicious in the yard that gets the wheels in his head turning, and Lee, worried that he will become obsessed with digging deeper, decides to drop their toddler off with her mother for a much-needed night out on the town. Sans-wife, Tim invites his buddies over, and a “boys-will-be-boys” scenario ensues, full of drinking, awkward joint-passing, and perhaps getting a bit too close to a girl who isn’t the mother of his child.Read More »

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A film mass, dedicated to nobility and excellence.

‘No chance for me to live, Mother, you might as well mourn.’ – Sitting Bull, Hukpapa Sioux Chief.

Applause for a lone figure dying on the street. INTROIT. A long lightly exposed section composed in the camera. KYRIE . A motorcyclist crossing the San Francisco bridge accompanied by the sound of a Gregorian chant, recorded at the Trappist monastery in Vina , California.The EPISTLE is in several sections. In this central part the film becomes gradually more outrageous, the material being either from television or the movies, photographed directly from the screen. Read More »

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An early film made for an Oakland school for mentally disturbed children.

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From the 1910s through the 1950s newsreels were a staple of American
Moviegoing experience. Released nationally to theaters once or twice a week and running about 10 min., newsreels highlighted the events of the day – politics,sports,
scandals, ceremonies – and generally included at least one human-interest story.
Sometimes local theaters made their own, thrilling audiences by profiling hometown
personalities. With Here I Am Bruce Baillie brings this inclusive approach
to the avant-garde.Read More »

“He who becomes slowly wise.”

SPOILER.
The Structure of Lyric:
Baillie’s to Parsifal
Alan Williams

It’s difficult to say exactly where or how To Parsifal is a lyric film and where or how a narrative work. For this reason, ordinary critical vocabularies (based on certain “types” of films) do not apply with much usefulness to Bruce Baillie’s abstractly assembled color images, nor to the nature and functions of his sound track. To get a sense of how this film works it will be necessary first to break it down, outline it, in order to see how the (implied) viewer puts it together.Read More »

What could have been just another of the countless coming-of-age tracts churned out on the indie-sector conveyor belt each year becomes a deeply nuanced drama full of original angles in Michael Cuesta’s accomplished feature bow, “L.I.E.”

SYNOPSIS
Central character, adolescent Howie (Paul Franklin Dano), is introduced precariously balancing on the expressway overpass, his voiceover recalling the number of lives claimed on the road, from celebrities like Harry Chapin and Alan J. Pakula to his mother years earlier. He barely communicates with his building contractor father, Marty (Bruce Altman), who’s preoccupied with sleeping with his girlfriend and his mounting legal problems over a fire probe into the use of unsafe materials.Read More »

Breast cancer has become the poster child of corporate cause-related marketing campaigns. Countless women and men walk, bike, climb and shop for the cure. Each year, millions of dollars are raised in the name of breast cancer, but where does this money go and what does it actually achieve? Pink Ribbons, Inc. is a feature documentary that shows how the devastating reality of breast cancer, which marketing experts have labeled a “dream cause,” becomes obfuscated by a shiny, pink story of success.Read More »

Six-year-old Jenny rescues a collie dog, the only survivor of a plane wreck. A tag on the dog’s neck states that it is en route to a medical laboratory where its blood will be used for spotted fever vaccine. Dr. Steven Webster meets both Jenny and the dog and “adopts” them both. His fiancée Susan isn’t too fond of either the girl or the dog. Webster wants to get a hospital for the town but he is suppressed by the town mayor. In the arguments that follow, Webster’s lab is wrecked and ticks infected with spotted fever escape. The town is in a panic and all want to be vaccinated. Jenny is infected and is about to die. Written by Les AdamsRead More »

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In Bujalski’s new film (notable director of Computer Chess, Funny Ha Ha, and Mutual Appreciation), the general manager at a highway-side ”sports bar with curves” has her incurable optimism and faith, in her girls, her customers, and herself, tested over the course of a long, strange day.Read More »

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In 2003, a man with a lifelong cannibalistic obsession placed an advertisement on the Internet in search of a victim to eat. Unbelievably he received a replay from a willing victim, whereby the stage was set for one of the most awful and depraved crimes of modern times. The gruesome incident was captured on camcorder and the footage formed part of the evidence at the trail of the world’s most infamous cannibal.Read More »