Quote:
It all starts when Filip Mosz (Jerzy Stuhr) buys a little 8mm movie camera to film his new-born baby. Like a true enthusiast, Filip enters into the spirit of his new hobby, filming everything that moves and working on the material on a small editing suite. When he is commissioned by his boss to film a reception being held to commemorate the company’s 25th anniversary, he becomes aware of the pressures of outside expectations and even censorship. The film however gets entered into an amateur film festival and wins third prize (second prize really since none were judged good enough to win first prize!) and he soon finds himself caught up in the world of TV and film-making, helped by an attractive film producer.Read More »

Synopsis:
Of the hallowed group of Cahiers du cinéma critics turned filmmakers who transformed French film history, Claude Chabrol was the first to direct his own feature. His absorbing landmark debut, Le beau Serge, follows a successful yet sickly young man (Jean-Claude Brialy) who returns home to the small village where he grew up. There, he finds himself at odds with his former close friend (Gerard Blain)—now unhappily married and a wretched alcoholic—and the provincial life he represents. The remarkable and stark Le beau Serge heralded the arrival of a cinematic titan who would go on to craft provocative, entertaining films for five more decades.Read More »

VADİM MİSTER COOL
With his most recent documentary, Vadim Mister Cool (2016), Parisian writer/director Olivier Nicklaus examines the life and career of another Parisian writer/director, the notorious Roger Vadim. His films were groundbreaking for their depiction of sensuality on the screen, eventually making him a pioneer of the French New Wave. However, Vadim’s work was often held back by his personal life. In his lifetime, Vadim was involved with some of the most beautiful and glamorous women in movie history. This reputation as a ladies’ man, combined with his films, made Vadim the male embodiment of the hedonism of 1960s Europe.Read More »

Quote:
A parody of anthropology, linguistics, and cultural imperialism. The film follows an unlikely team of linguists into the wilds of an ersatz Patagonia to study the last speakers of a dying language. That language apparently consists of a single word, which therefore means everything.Read More »

Synopsis:
Barbara Blandish, a young Kansas City heiress, gets kidnapped by some inept local hoodlums for the diamond necklace she is wearing, and then gets kidnapped a second time by the Grisson gang demanding a million dollar ransom. THe Grissons, a family of depraved, ruthless poor white trash, is led by Ma Grissom, a fury whose mustache and house dress clash, whose belief it is that kidnapping plots go awry because the victim is allowed to live. But plans go haywire when her son Slim, a psychopathic, knife-wielder, falls in love with Barbara. Her billionaire father hires Dave Fenner, a cynical private detective, to find her.Read More »

Quote:
A very intimate documentary depicting the controversial, underground cartoonist Robert Crumb along with most of his immediate family, riddled with psychological issues and sicknesses, mental issues and disturbing events. The documentary shows Crumb in all of his artistic genius while also trying to figure out the unique, complex, artistic, troubling, contradict and sometimes even perverse personality that is Robert Crumb. –Read More »

Cineuropa wrote:

Following on from L [+] (2012) and Pity [+] (2018), Babis Makridis is returning to the International Rotterdam Film Festival, within the Voices line-up, with Birds (Or How To Be One), a film based on Aristofane’s Greek comedy The Birds, exploring the desire for and fear of freedom. The story tells the tale of two men who distance themselves from the rest of humanity in order to find the man-bird Upupa and build a city where birds can live in harmony, far away from humankind. Makridis takes this premise as his starting point to develop a work of an experimental form, bringing together the casting process, rehearsals for a theatre production of the comedy in question (directed by Nikos Karathanos) and interviews bordering on the absurd.
Read More »

“Influenced by avantgarde artist-refugees from Europe, non-representational art dominated the art market after WW2 and pictorial comment on social conditions, popular before the war and still vital in some of Picasso’s work, went out of fashion. For the owners threatened by the appeal of socialism, it had become time to change the subject to pure aesthetics: ‘Rockefeller’s Paintings’ one MoMA show advertised. In a society that allows both non-religious and multi-religious thinking and where opposing beliefs can neutralize each other, an openness to new thinking is possible and a great development in the art did take place.Read More »

Quote:
Based on a true and gripping story: Cuban spies infiltrate exile groups in the 1990s to stop terrorism against the island, but at a high personal cost.Read More »