Kent is turning 50 and his plans for a fun birthday weekend with Sarah are upended when his friend Kev arrives to build him a wall. Joe Swanberg (“Hannah Takes The Stairs,” “Drinking Buddies,” Netflix’s “Easy”) returns to his no-budget roots for “Build the Wall,” a low-key relationship comedy/drama set in the woods of Vermont. After drunkenly agreeing to let Kev build him a stone wall for his upcoming milestone b-day, Kent is surprised and frustrated when a pile of stones shows up to his house, and work on the wall begins. This conflicts with his more soberly devised plan to host a friend from L.A., Sarah, to discuss an artistic partnership and possibly a romantic connection.Read More »

Synopsis
The passing away of their mothers makes Catarina and her own father meet in an emotional place that is different from the one most fathers and daughters know.Read More »

Plot:
Julia (Cyndi Williams) works in a bingo-hall near her home, in a suburb of Houston, Texas. A haggard-looking mother of two daughters, Julia is perhaps in her mid-30s but could pass for a decade older. Her husband Bobby (Kenneth Wayne Bradley) is sympathetic and attentive, but Julia is rapidly reaching the end of her tether. Christmas is looming; she’s underpaid and overworked; is underappreciated at home; conscious that she’s getting no younger, no thinner, no happier. Read More »

Quote:
Tensions are already mounting during a family celebration on a riverboat when Markus (Andreas Döhler) has a sickening flash of a long-repressed memory. His mother, he realises, sexually abused him, and it’s only now that the thirty-nine-year-old husband and father is beginning to grasp the enormity of the events that his child’s mind shuttered long ago.Read More »

Below is an apt “user comment” from the film’s IMDB page. For my money, LA MATERNELLE is an even greater film than ZERO FOR CONDUCT, which is saying a lot.

“Until I saw this film at a Cinema Conference in Aberdeen in 1995 I was ignorant of the fact that a woman director had produced poetic and social cinema comparable with Vigo’s ZERO DE CONDUITE (certainly one of the greatest films ever). Vigo in 1933 is revolutionary anarchist with modernist poetry at his finger tips; Epstein in 1933 is warm-hearted popular front realism with magnificent performances by nursery school kids, though the main schoolgirl is a little older (and in love with her teacher, like the protagonist in Leontine Sagan’s MAIDENS IN UNIFORM 1931). Read More »

Quote:
Lunch Break features 42 workers as they take their midday break in a corridor stretching nearly the entire shipyard. Contrary to her previous films, the camera is untethered and, as it slowly moves down the corridor, we experience what was a brief interval in the workday schedule expanded into a sustained gaze. Lined with lockers, the hallway seems not only an industrial nexus but also a social one, its surfaces containing a history of self-expression and customization.Read More »

Quote:
Sharon Lockhart’s film Rudzienko was shot over two years in collaboration with the residents of the Youth Center for Sociotherapy in Rudzienko, Poland. Building on the relationship she established in 2009 with Milena, who later moved to the center, Lockhart conceived of a series of workshops to empower the young women. The group worked together to develop dialog and movements to be enacted on camera based on their collective activities. The resulting film features a range of conversations, from the philosophical to everyday teenage concerns, and depicts actions both theatrical and mundane that voice the girls’ rich humanity. The Polish-language film proposes an innovative approach to the relationship between image and language by offsetting the spoken conversations with their written translations. (lockhartstudio.com)Read More »

Francisco is rich, strict on principles, and still a bachelor. He meets Gloria by accident, and is intent on marrying her and courts her until she agrees. Now he is a dedicated husband, but his passion starts to exhibit disturbing traits.Read More »

Using archive images, Sergei Loznitsa revisits the gala evenings organized at the Palais Garnier in the fifties and sixties. Between prestige and protocol, these evenings gathered both celebrities and ordinary people who came by the thousands from the Place de l’Opéra to watch this spectacle, of which the director amusingly brings out the irony…Read More »