Imdb:
Holy Steampunk, Sherlock Holmes! Screen idol Takeshi Kaneshiro is back and this time hes showing his respect for Lupin, Raffles and all the great thieves and masked penny dreadful heroes of the turn-of-the-century in this massive steampunk blow-out directed by Shimako Sato, one of the few female directors in the big budget end of the Japanese film industry.Read More »
Synopsis:
Sultry courtship display between a waitress and customer in a café.
At nine o’clock in the morning, the Santos Palace coffee bar opens its doors. The waitress pours her first cup of coffee for an unknown elderly man. They circle each other a little, in a kind of sultry courtship display. When the other, younger waitress arrives, jealousy ensues.Read More »
Die Parallelstraße is one of the most mysterious pioneer films of the New German Cinema. It was produced by GBF, a production company for innovative industrial and promotional films and received awards in inter national film festivals. French critic Robert Benayoun called it “a philosophical thriller, a western of meditation which compensates for a whole year of inevitable manifestations of stupidity,” Jacques Rivette put it on his list of the most important films of 1968. The DVD presents for the very first time this “unjustly forgotten masterpiece of the New German Cinema” (Martin Brady) as well as several rare shorts by Ferdinand Khittl (1924-1976) which show his talent for innovative film experiments.Read More »
Synopsis:
As every year, chief inspector Paul Bellamy spends a few days with his wife Françoise in the family house in Nîmes. Jacques, Paul’s stepbrother, turns up unawares, which is bad news since the fellow is an alcoholic good for nothing. Also annoying is this stranger at bay who asks Bellamy for protection. Farewell peaceful holiday!Read More »
Quote:
Henryk Goldszmit – aka, Janusz Korczak – was born in 1878 to a prosperous, assimilated Jewish family in Warsaw. Convinced from an early age that the rights of children needed defending, he studied pediatrics and organized a number of institutions for children, including a famous orphanage that he was forced to move into the Jewish ghetto after the Nazis invaded Poland. Yet he remained convinced that even the Nazis would not harm his children. Wajda’s moving, wrenching and highly controversial portrait of Korczak ponders the fate of a kind of modern saint in a world in which evil has become the rule. Brilliantly incarnated by Wojciech Pszoniak from a script by Agnieszka Holland, Korczak both fascinates and repulses. The man’s complete, unquestionable dedication to his children is set against a refusal to understand – or perhaps accept – the reality all around him. A thoughtful, provocative work that was clearly a key influence on Schindler’s List.Read More »
At university, Carmen meets Hussain, a young Afghan poet. This encounter changes both their lives: falling in love, they become inseparable. Soon, Hussain learns that his asylum application has been rejected, forcing the couple to hide. However, Hussain starts feeling suffocated and needs to leave.Read More »
Feature film version of Mani Kaul’s film on Dostoevski’s masterpiece that was shown at NYFF.
Synopsis:
Mani Kaul’s adaptation of Dostoevski’s Idiot is his most profoundly affecting film and a “tour de force” (Rajadhyaksha) that co-ordinates actors, settings and situations to a multiplicity. It his most realized attempt at making formalist film by moving the camera,without looking through the viewfinder to make Gilles Deleuze’s reading of cinema as an any-instant-whatever or equidistant instant to an any-space-whatever or any equispatial instant. This equispatial instant is created by destroying the dialectic between required and not-required, sacral and profane. Mani Kaul, analyzing his own films would state that, whereas his earlier works engaged a rarefaction of information, Idiot was the first to encounter a saturation of events.Read More »
After a ten-year-old girl is raped and murdered in a small Brittany town suspicion soon falls on René Sterne, an art teacher who was the last person to see the girl alive. Sterne was once a celebrated artist but he has fallen on hard times and lives with his wife, a nurse whose outgoing personality is the opposite to his own. The only person who is convinced that Sterne is not the killer is Vivianne, the local doctor. Frédérique Lesage, the police officer leading the murder investigation, thinks otherwise. The sudden arrival of a self-loving television journalist, Germain-Roland Desmot, stirs things up even more. It isn’t long before Sterne begins to doubt his own sanity…Read More »
A man returns from World War II to find his desperate wife had resorted to one night of prostitution to pay for their son’s hospital bills.Read More »