IMDB User Reviews
20 April 2004 | by bullybyte (United Kingdom)

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

SPOILERS!! The film starts with a woman on the run from her millionaire husband giving birth to a daughter in the home of a washerwoman. The woman dies in childbirth, but the baby survives. The washerwoman leaves the baby in a horsedrawn Parisian taxicab (No. 13). The paperwork of the birth is lost in a huge tome. Sixteen years pass. The tome is bought by a poor student. One day his bookshelf collapses, and the tome opens at the page where the paperwork has been hidden. The student realises that the paperwork relates to a millionaire who has spent the last sixteen years looking for his pregnant wife.Read More »

Paul and Rosine live deep and isolated in the craggy, breathtaking Swiss Alps where they have a small dairy farm. The day-to-day work attendant on this rustic if somewhat modernized two-person operation is punishing and relentless. Life is made no easier by the fact that Paul is an emotionally stunted brute. While treating his cows as tenderly as a family pet, he bullies Rosine mercilessly, both physically and verbally. She finds a few moments of pleasure when left alone to milk the cows or shimmy to the radio while making goat cheese—reveries more often than not interrupted by Paul’s crude appetites.Read More »

Journey to Avebury beautifully reflects Derek Jarman’s fascination with ancient history, paganism, and Celtic traditions.

An IMDB review:
Derek Jarman is often said to be a painter rather than a movie director. Indeed, with his films he makes pictures that seem to be more important than the plot (which is usually unclear or missing at all). But those pieces of art he creates using camera are beautiful and astounding.Read More »

Criterion wrote:
In Arnaud Desplechin’s beguiling A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël), Catherine Deneuve brings her legendary poise to the role of Junon, matriarch of the troubled Vuillard family, who come together at Christmas after she learns she needs a bone marrow transplant from a blood relative. That simple family reunion setup, however, can’t begin to describe the unpredictable, emotionally volatile experience of this film, an inventive, magical drama that’s equal parts merriment and melancholy. Unrequited childhood loves and blinding grudges, brutal outbursts and sudden slapstick, music, movies, and poetry, A Christmas Tale ties it all together in a marvelously messy package.
Read More »

“Just tell me one thing frankly. Is this monkey really your lover?”

It is and it isn’t unlikely material for Nagisa Ôshima. The element of transgressive love is here, but this time, it’s in a dry comedy whose centerpiece is a diplomat’s wife’s extramarital affair with a sensitive, somewhat unstable chimpanzee (aren’t they all?). Charlotte Rampling is the woman, Anthony Higgins is the diplomat, and Victoria Abril is the housekeeper who develops a mysterious allergy, probably but not necessarily to the titular Max.Read More »

Quote:
An erotic drama about complicated love affairs and blackmailing. Dina, the young wife of elderly manager Gantar meets attractive student Luka and falls in love with him. All her further activity is submitted to one and only goal: to get Luka for herself.

Banned for over a decade because of its explicit sexual situations, when this film was released in Yugoslavia in 1983 the explicit scenes had become tame. Other than the notoriety it obtained through censorship, the film has an undistinguished story about the forbidden love affair between the older wife of a sports director and a young athlete.
~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie GuideRead More »

Official website says:
An immersive and enthralling journey through the Sonoran Desert on the U.S.-Mexico border, El mar la mar weaves together harrowing oral histories from the area with hand-processed 16mm images of flora, fauna and items left behind by travelers. Subjects speak of intense, mythic experiences in the desert: A man tells of a fifteen-foot-tall monster said to haunt the region, while a border patrolman spins a similarly bizarre tale of man versus beast. A sonically rich soundtrack adds to the eerie atmosphere as the call of birds and other nocturnal noises invisibly populate the austere landscape.
Emerging from the ethos of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, J.P. Sniadecki’s attentive documentary approach mixes perfectly with Joshua Bonnetta’s meditations on the materiality of film. Together, they’ve created an experience of the border region like nothing you’ve seen, heard or felt before.Read More »

Director Guy Maddin’s interpretation of the Alfred Hitchcock classic Vertigo, pieced together using footage from old films and television shows shot in and around the San Francisco area.Read More »

Quote:

The literal translation of the Taiwanese title is ‘Help Me, God of Love’, since Eros is an artifact of Greece-Roman mythology. The exclamation is a wry reference to the film’s comically cynical perspective on human relationships, in which a wide variety of unlikely subjects – food, marijuana and live eels, amongst others – become substitute objects of comfort and affection for the protagonists. The plea for help is also a strong theme in the form of the suicide hotline.Read More »