During a police strike in Nova Scotia’s capital city, a gang of hoodlums end up unintentionally causing the owner of a gay bar to be killed. This escalates into a string of murders with a lone survivor trying to not be next.Read More »

Iris, 17, has been expelled from school and spends the warm days and nights with her two best friends, her cousins, in cramped rooms, playing with her mobile phone or in the empty streets of the city. When Renata, cold and self-confident, enters the picture, Iris is fascinated, and it is not long before they start flirting. But in the area, rumours about Renata’s past are getting stronger.(FILMAFFINITY)Read More »

Edogawa Rampo is a writer whose latest work is censored by the government, deemed too disturbing and injurious to the public to be allowed to be published. However, after burning his drafts, his publisher shows him a newspaper with an account of events just like his forbidden story. As the film progresses, fantasy and reality intermingle in a tale that draws heavily on influences from Poe and Stoker’s Dracula. The film’s strongly Expressionistic direction skillfully combines a variety of media (animation, computer-generated imagery, grainy black-and-white fast film stock, color negatives) for artistic effect.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 »

Cottafavi’s adaptation of Aeschylus’ play.

Michael Billington wrote:
The Persians is the oldest surviving work of Western drama. First performed at the City Dionysia in 472 BC, The Persians takes a nuanced approach to the matter of war and conquest. It was a direct inspiration for the French national anthem, ‘La Marseillaise’. Percy Shelley’s drama Hellas was written in response to it. It’s the only play from the classical era that deals with historical events rather than mythological ones. In short, The Persians is a fascinating play and Aeschylus’ handling of war is worthy of closer inspection and analysis.Read More »

Synopsis:
Little moments in the course of a very brief romance make up the bulk of this tender, lyrical film, the only one ever directed by Gennady Schpalykov, better known as a screenwriter. On a bus filled with young people going for an outing to the theater, Victor (K. Lavrov), a scruffy geologist, and Lena (I. Gulaya), a young factory worker, strike up a conversation. He has traveled to many interesting places, she is young, recently divorced, and has a child. When she invites him to join the group at the theater, he says that he’s too grungy to go there. However, after he gets off the bus, he rushes around getting himself cleaned up, somehow manages to make it into the sold-out theater, and finds Lena. They leave during intermission, and he walks her home. The next day, she brings her daughter along to meet him where he has been staying, and they share a nice lunch together, until he abruptly leaves.Read More »

Quote:
Illegal immigrants from mainland China are smuggled into Hong Kong. They are captured by a gang, then raped, tortured, and murdered.Read More »

A forestry engineer pushes for reforestation measures, against the will of his selfish superiors, and embarks on a search for a mystical healing plant linking him with the ancestral knowledge of his people.Read More »

Martin tried to fight the system and is now on the run. Sara is a conceptual artist. Together, they join the revolutionary commune in the countryside and become the target of the police. Inspector Ambroz knows that the right questions are more important than the answers, because perhaps none of this is true.

Quote:
Exploding the possibilities of animation and genre, Dalibor Barić’s dazzling debut dances from noir to sci-fi, from Philip K. Dick to Tarkovsky with philosophical abandon. Through a vivid array of technical effects, this hyper-sensory rush punches a hole in the fabric of nostalgia and reality.Read More »