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Against the barren wintry backdrop of a psychiatric hospital, inpatients and authority figures drift through turgid psychological states. We meet the artist Jean and his lover Monica, patients of the facility, and several characters circling its periphery: a guard, an Episcopalian priest, and a church organist. Minimalizing dialogue and plot intricacy, Tregenza concedes only kernels of information, demanding that the viewer breathe dimensionality into his archetypes. Acting out primal instincts of lust, envy, fear, and love, subjects teeter vulnerably on the brink of sanity and insanity, freedom and repression in their attempts to navigate their existence.Read More »

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Varda shot “The Little Story of Gwen From French Brittany” over several years beginning in 1996. The documentary short follows Varda’s friend Gwen Deglise as the two meet in Paris in 1996 and Deglise then moves to Los Angeles. Deglise is now the head programmer for the American Cinematheque. The short film was sent to American Cinematheque accompanied by a letter from Deglise in which she writes about how her life often crossed paths with Varda’s since their first meeting in 1996. It was during this first encounter where Varda asked Deglise if she could follow her around with a camera as Deglise ventured to Los Angles.Read More »

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Based on the same 19th-century novel (Henri Murger’s Scenes de la Vie de Boheme) that inspired Puccini’s opera, the story is about three down-and-out losers doomed to penury and artistic obsession. There’s Albanian painter Rodolfo (Matti Pellonpää), playwright Marcel (Andre Wilms) and composer Schaunard (Kari Väänänen). Their problems are exactly the same: no rent or food money and the futile struggle to be recognized.Read More »

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A paranoid police procedural, a perverse parable about the corrupting elements of power, and a candidate for the greatest predated Patriot Act movie ever, Elio Petri’s stunning thriller makes no attempt to hide the culprit behind the film’s grisly murder: It wants you to know that Gian Maria Volonté’s dapper killer is responsible for the beautiful corpse splayed out on those black silk bedsheets. The shocks here are (a) that the spaghetti-Western stalwart isn’t wearing a cowboy hat for once, and (b) that Volonté is not just the criminal, he’s also the homicide detective heading up the investigation. Deliberately hiding some clues while planting others in plain sight—bloody footprints, a strand of his tie purposefully inserted under her fingernails—the rising-up-the-precinct-ladder cop plays a game of cat-versus-other-dumber-cats, all while ordering copious wiretaps and amassing blackmail fodder against radical agitators. Is he toying with his fellow officers to demonstrate his sociopathic superiority? Or is he trying to take down a rotten system from the inside, debunking the notion that any citizen is above suspicion?Read More »

Harvard Film Archive writes:
One of the Coppola’s most overtly stylized works, Rumble Fish uses its breathtaking black and white, Koyanisqaatsi-inspired time-lapse photography and propulsive original score by The Police’s Stewart Copland to evoke a dream world of alienated youth. A beautiful postmodern art film, Rumble Fish is wonderfully uncertain of its time and place, stranding glittering icons of Fifties Americana – pool halls, flickering neon signs – within an Eighties post-industrial wasteland. The stylistic bricolage shapes the performances too, with Matt Dillon channeling Method Acting as a young man infatuated with the enigma of his self-absorbed brother, played with whispering intensity by a Marcel Camus-meets-Marlon Brando modeled Mickey Rourke. The late Dennis Hopper makes a poignant appearance as the absent even when present father who proves that the center inevitably cannot hold.Read More »

Cinebiography of celebrated historian Sérgio Buarque de Hollanda, who wrote the seminal “Raízes do Brasil” in 1935, with interviews with his large family (including his widow and his seven children, among them famous composer/singer/writer Chico Buarque and singer Miúcha) and scholar friend Antonio Candido.Read More »

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A sympathetic, emotionally persuasive drama describing the friendship of four World War II veterans, their sudden reunion after 25 years and the subsequent effect of this occasion upon their thoughts and evaluations of the past and present. In a way, The Byelorussian Station is reminiscent of the poignant, realistic look at the returned soldier remembered in Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives. In this film, however, the sentiments are leavened by reminiscence and a touch of remorse, and the spectator must be prepared for a deeply moving cinematic adventure. Read More »

A collaboration from popular Israeli composers and rockers Arik Einstein and Shalom Hanoch, this film is a campy, offbeat romp along the lines of the Beatles’ films. Part musical, part mockumentary, the film centers on the making of a great rock album titled “Shablool.” Einstein and Hanoch star in multiple roles in their cinematic creation, which reflects the energy of Israel’s popular music scene in the 1960s. The great Uri Zohar also appears in the film’s highlight as a yiddish speaking nutcase vagabond/karate teacher.Read More »

A story set in the back alleys and nightclubs of Beyoğlu among drag queens and prostitutes, pimps and hopeless lovers…

It shows all the dark corners of Beyoglu, Istanbul. Prostitutes, transexuals and their pimps are the protagonists of this movie, which is quite unlikely for a movie made in 1994. More strange thing is that the director creates a perfect atmosphere with real transsexuals, gay bars and night clubs.Read More »