Synopsis
Angela Schanelec’s first feature since 2010 is the much-anticipated Der traumhafte Weg, a serious work that is deliberately constructed image upon image and allows the viewer to read a seemingly realistic, yet artificially created world as it is being experienced, yet ultimately works against any simple narrative comprehension. The best way to tackle Der traumhafte Weg is to proceed, scene by scene, with a description of the shots, of how within the shots the characters are framed, how the characters gaze, how they hold their bodies… In other words, it is an Angela Schanelec film, where attention is required and rewarded, and the characters are at the mercy of the elements of chance.Read More »

Plot summary:
A white South African sets out with her grandson and coloured cook and chauffeur for her weekly visit to her sister’s farm, unaware that a black uprising is taking place.Read More »

On a post-war peaceful day in Japan, Toyomatsu Shimizu, a barber as well as a good father and husband, is suddenly arrested by the Prefectural Police as a war criminal and sued for murder. According to the accusation by GHQ, Toyomatsu “attemped to kill a US prisoner”, which was nothing but an order by his superior and failed after all with hurting the prisoner by weak Toyomatsu. Also, Toyomatsu was driven to corner at the trial by the fact that he fed the US prisoner some burdock roots to nourish him. Toyomatsu believes nothing but being not guilty, but he is sentenced to death by hanging. Prior to the execution, Toyomatsu writes a long farewell letter to his family, the wife and the only son: “If I ever incarnate, I hate to be a human being any more…. Oh yes, I would like to be…a shellfish living on the rock-bottom of the sea.”Read More »

A woman’s face disappearing behind, and emerging from, a pair of hands. Flashing lights. An empty building full of dark hallways.

A film that could be a unified scheme produced by layering together a number of axes of semiotic systems. With the frame as the basic unit, the film is composed by designing an accumulation of symbols representing reactions to light.Read More »

Set of rapid telescopic images of a gym, in fast forward, traveling through itself, space and time.

700 continuous still photographs which are re-photographed frame by frame with linear, circular, and parabolic movements going up and down. This creates a crazy roller coaster out of this peaceful gymnasium shot in the dark.Read More »

Quote:
Directed by Matti Ijäs and written with Arto Meller, Räpsy & Dolly aka Paris Waits (1990) is a tragicomic love story of a petty criminal and a former cabaret dancer. Detective Karisto (Kari Väänänen) releases Auno “Räpsy” Pirilä (Matti Pellonpää) from prison, who in turn has to calve his childhood friend Börje (Pertti Sveholm) from criminal activities. Alcoholic Dolly (Raija Paalanen) takes Räpsy to live in Kallio, Helsinki, and hopes to move to Paris with her in the spring.Read More »

Introduction
A chronicle of the enthralling, against-all-odds story that transfixed the world in 2018: the daring rescue of twelve boys and their coach from deep inside a flooded cave in Northern Thailand.Read More »

Lawrence Garcia, Cinemascope wrote:
In the seven years since P’tit Quinquin, it has become impossible to continue tagging Bruno Dumont with the longstanding clichés of Bresson criticism. Epithets like “ascetic,” “severe,” “punishing”—already limited descriptors of his first two works, La vie de Jésus (1997) and L’humanité (1999)—have only become more obviously incapable of describing Dumont’s recent films, from the carnivalesque contortions of Ma Loute (2016) to the musical extremes of his Jeanne d’Arc movies. Still, as Dumont’s methods (particularly his increasingly frequent use of professionals alongside non-actors) have ostensibly moved away from those of Bresson, the deeper affinities between the two filmmakers have only become clearer. Read More »

Quote:
Based on a gekiga (adult orientated manga) penned by Kazuhiko Miyatani,this is director Ikeda’s first movie after leaving Nikkatsu over censorship disagreement. It’s a unique variation of the standard vengeance theme,sort of classy (albeit very bloody) version of I Spit On Your Grave. A fisherman,opposed to the construction of a nuclear power plant,is murdered by a gang of right-wing extremists who are puppets of the corrupt contractor.The dead man’s devoted wife concocts a plan of revenge.She slaughters the men in the goriest,the most grisly ways imaginable,thus removing any suspicion from her.In fact,the newspapers soon begin reporting stories of “a blood-fiend from the lake” and “a ghost mermaid.”Read More »