Synopsis
Today the North Pole is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. The Arctic ice cap is less than half the size it was 50 years ago. This radical climate change has thus begun to open the ice-packed Northwest Passage between Europe and Asia, and some scientists predict that the transoceanic maritime route will soon be permanently ice free during its ever-longer summers.Read More »
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A car with two passengers plunges into the sea. The man dies, his wife (Kaori Momoi) is barely scratched. So did she or didn’t she? Shima Iwashita stars as her lawyer.
1982 Mainichi Film Awards Best Screenplay. Fourth place on Kinema Junpo’s 1982 top ten.Read More »
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Something of a hybrid between the sardonic humor of a talkative Otar Iosseliani or Béla Tarr and the vérité-like, social realism of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is a thoughtful and incisive slice-of-life comedy on the impersonalization (and desensitization) of institutional health care. Exploring similar issues of entrenched bureaucracy as Moussa Bathily’s Le Certificat d’indigence that serve to impede the proper dispensation of proper medical care (and, more importantly, lose sight of the face of humanity behind human suffering), the film unfolds as an absurd subversion of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych in which the isolative process of dying becomes occluded in the pettiness, moralizing, helplessness, and coincidental distractions that invariably occupy everyday life as the lonely widower and retired engineer, Larazescu, is scuttled from one hospital to another throughout the evening after suffering from a bout of migraine and nausea. As in Tolstoy’s novella, the process of death does not alter the process of living, but rather, becomes only a momentary distraction in an eternal – and seemingly interminable – human comedy.Read More »
When Herra, a Czech woman, falls in love with Nazir, an Afghan man, she has no idea about the life that awaits her in post-Taliban Afghanistan, nor about the family she is about to join.Read More »
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“Ride tonight!” – In the south of Sweden, some farmers get into trouble when the German Count is forcing them to perform day labor for him. But a man refuses to bow to the German Count.Read More »
On a huge farm in the Vendee, the death of the patriarch leaves behind 3 brothers and a sister. The eldest brother refuses to consider dividing the property. In order to cement his hold on the family, he uses his authority to keep his siblings from marrying… La Ferme du pendu is a well-built, intense rural drama portraying the relentless determination of a man whose attachment to the land becomes a destructive obsession. It also serves as a near-documentary depiction of peasant life between the wars. Dréville keeps a certain distance from his characters and avoids all overblown drama. The cast is remarkable: Charles Vanel brings great intensity to the ensemble, but all the roles are perfectly portrayed. La Ferme du pendu was also the first credited film role for Bourvil, playing a small role as a shopkeeper which still allows him to sing his famous song, “Les Crayons” during the wedding scene.Read More »
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You cannot help but think of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre during a shot in The Ordeal where the camera spins across the leering, giggling faces of a twisted inbred family and their blood-covered, shrieking victim, and you really cannot help but think of it when they cut to an extreme close-up of the victim’s eye darting nervously back and forth. We’ve seen this movie before, where an innocent (played here by Laurent Lucas) has his car break down in the middle of nowhere. He is taken in by an eccentric innkeeper (Jackie Berroyer), and for a while The Ordeal is an intriguingly freakish character study of an older man falling in love with a younger man, believing him to be his dead wife. But their insinuating dialogue eventually gives way to a sadistic (and familiar) torture tale. Read More »
A few short hours after President Lincoln has been assassinated, Dr. Samuel Mudd gives medical treatment to a wounded man who shows up at his door. Mudd has no idea that the president is dead and that he is treating his murderer, John Wilkes Booth. But that doesn’t save him when the army posse searching for Booth finds evidence that Booth has been to the doctor’s house. Dr. Mudd is arrested for complicity and sentenced to life imprisonment, to be served in the infamous pestilence-ridden Dry Tortugas.Read More »
At the age of 13 Joris Ivens was fond of Cowboys and Indians stories, so he decided to invent one himself. He made a script and used a camera from his father’s shop. This became his first film Wigwam, with his own family as cast. Black Eagle, a bad indian, kidnaps the daughter of a farmer’s family. Flaming Arrow, played by the young Joris Ivens, saves the child from the kidnapper and brings it back to her family. No better conclusion than smoking a peace pipe.Read More »