“He who becomes slowly wise.”

SPOILER.
The Structure of Lyric:
Baillie’s to Parsifal
Alan Williams

It’s difficult to say exactly where or how To Parsifal is a lyric film and where or how a narrative work. For this reason, ordinary critical vocabularies (based on certain “types” of films) do not apply with much usefulness to Bruce Baillie’s abstractly assembled color images, nor to the nature and functions of his sound track. To get a sense of how this film works it will be necessary first to break it down, outline it, in order to see how the (implied) viewer puts it together.Read More »

A short documentary that follows director Charlie Tyrell as he tries to uncover a better understanding of his deceased father through the random objects he inherited, including a pile of VHS dirty movies.Read More »

Feminism, Victoria Benedictsson, Leandro N. Alem, the Radical Party in Argentina, suicide, stunts, Edgar Allan Poe, the complicated relationship between low-budget films with a political message and the film industry, Robert Louis Stevenson, fiction, facts, greed, gold treasure left by the Jesuits in Argentina, the 19th century vs. the present and the search for truth and wisdom form the background for this portrait of a clash between a Swedish artist and an Argentinian director (Viennale)Read More »

What could have been just another of the countless coming-of-age tracts churned out on the indie-sector conveyor belt each year becomes a deeply nuanced drama full of original angles in Michael Cuesta’s accomplished feature bow, “L.I.E.”

SYNOPSIS
Central character, adolescent Howie (Paul Franklin Dano), is introduced precariously balancing on the expressway overpass, his voiceover recalling the number of lives claimed on the road, from celebrities like Harry Chapin and Alan J. Pakula to his mother years earlier. He barely communicates with his building contractor father, Marty (Bruce Altman), who’s preoccupied with sleeping with his girlfriend and his mounting legal problems over a fire probe into the use of unsafe materials.Read More »

Dysfunctional family and culture run amok in Toilet, which had an absolutely packed house last night at the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival and had many of the cast & crew in attendance at the screening. The film certainly has it’s Toronto roots showing as it was filmed here (although it’s actually set in the US), with familiar faces & locations on screen. We follow a family through a dysfunctional and eccentric set siblings Ray, Lisa and Maury and their grandmother from Japan, however a language barrier exists between the generations. It’s not the only barrier here as there are strong emotional barrier in each of the characters, all of whom have their own issues to work though. It’s an interesting tale of the individual journeys with the collective family journey, which although unintended become completely intertwined.Read More »

Plot summary:
A woman, married with an artist, starts a relationship with one of her students, who has already got a mistress of his own. The two rivals meet.Read More »

Meet Rio de Janeiro… through the eyes of Jano!
Jean Leguay, working under the pseudonym Jano, is a pop French visual artist. He teamed up with Bertrand Tramber to create his first comic, ‘Kebra’, for the magazine B.D. in 1978. When the magazine folded, the ‘Kebra’ series was continued other magazines like Métal Hurlant, Charlie Mensuel, Rigolo, L’Echo des Savannes and Zoulou.

In late 2000, he visited Rio de Janeiro in order to make this book. Jano immersed himself completely in the “Rio de Janeiro life style”, going to places that will never be showed on post cards, meeting people from all layers of society, observing, experimenting, interacting.Read More »

Breast cancer has become the poster child of corporate cause-related marketing campaigns. Countless women and men walk, bike, climb and shop for the cure. Each year, millions of dollars are raised in the name of breast cancer, but where does this money go and what does it actually achieve? Pink Ribbons, Inc. is a feature documentary that shows how the devastating reality of breast cancer, which marketing experts have labeled a “dream cause,” becomes obfuscated by a shiny, pink story of success.Read More »

“Kağıt” (Paper) stars Öner Erkan as Emrah, a young man with a passion to make movies. As he directs his debut film, he hits bureaucratic roadblocks, first in receiving a certificate of eligibility to film on the grounds that it threatens the unity of the state, and later when he finally tries to release the film, the shooting of which proved so difficult. Bureaucrat Müzeyyen (Asuman Dabak) becomes the symbol of Çetin’s dysfunctional and autocratic state, turning every stage of filmmaking into hell. Emrah takes revenge on the woman by kidnapping her.Read More »