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Memoire des Apparences is a highly unconventional, metafictional adaptation of Calderon de la Barca’s play Life is a Dream. Director Raul Ruiz combines the 17th-century Spanish drama, about a man raised in a prison who discovers he is his country’s rightful prince, with a modern-day story of Chilean political intrigue. During the violent, anti-Allende coup of the early 1970s, literature professor Ignaccio Vega is entrusted with memorizing a list of 15,000 resistance members. Read More »

Six-year-old Jenny rescues a collie dog, the only survivor of a plane wreck. A tag on the dog’s neck states that it is en route to a medical laboratory where its blood will be used for spotted fever vaccine. Dr. Steven Webster meets both Jenny and the dog and “adopts” them both. His fiancée Susan isn’t too fond of either the girl or the dog. Webster wants to get a hospital for the town but he is suppressed by the town mayor. In the arguments that follow, Webster’s lab is wrecked and ticks infected with spotted fever escape. The town is in a panic and all want to be vaccinated. Jenny is infected and is about to die. Written by Les AdamsRead More »

Variety.com wrote:
Set in ’69, “A No-Hit, No-Run Summer” gets to first base, at least, with its modest tale of B-team squirts who play in old hockey jerseys but eventually hold their own against the well-named Aristocrats. Third feature by Quebecois helmer Francis Leclerc (“Girl at the Window”) is formulaic and insubstantial, but pleasant and occasionally more as it asserts the sandlot’s rejuvenating power for pint-sizers like 12-year-old Martin (Pier-Luc Funk), whose dad (Patrice Robitaille) takes up coaching duties for the summer. Movie is far milder than either version of “The Bad News Bears,” for better and worse; grosses will follow suit.Read More »

Publisher’s synopsis:
Somewhere to Disappear is a 57 minute documentary in which Alec Soth is the hero.
For his project “Broken Manual” Alec undertakes to write a guide that will provide the basic tips on how to disappear in America.

We follow him on his search for men who live on the margins of society. People who ran away from their natural environment, to find their own world. As modern day hermits, they find peace in unaffected places of the country, whether it be a cabin in the mountains, a dark cave or in the expansive desert. Each of these people chose to live in a different way. We wanted to find out why they live like this: did they deliberately make this choice? Do they regret it? What are they really looking for? Did they find it?Read More »

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A once-promising athlete whose career was cut short due to a tragic injury turns to a life of crime, and receives an unusual gift that leads him to make a series of rash decisions. Lesha Shultes is only twenty-five years old, but his best days are already behind him. He was set to take the world of sports by storm when a serious car accident rendered him unable to compete on the playing field. Now, the only way Lesha can communicate with the outside world is by stealing. In between bouts of picking pockets on the streets, Lesha visits his ailing mother and his brother in the Army. Lesha has been effectively cut off from all human emotion. It’s only when he receives a video from a girl that he previously robbed that Lesha begins to feel something oddly familiar somewhere deep within.Read More »

“A selection of Andersson’s droll little capitalist nightmares (‘the best in the world’ according to Ingmar Berman) featuring color-drained people who have ceased to be consumers and become the consumed. Middle-aged newlyweds pound one another’s skulls with appliances; new purchases bring disasters; and an infamous ad for Sweden’s Social Democratic Party rhetorically asks ‘Why Should We Care About One Another’ as nurses offhandedly toss patients around rooms, teachers shake down kids for lunch money, and commuters kick a man while he’s down” (Jason Sanders, Pacific Film Archive).Read More »

Quote:
Between 1957 and his death in 1976, Marcel Broodthaers made approximately fifty films. The exact number is difficult to determine: Several no longer exist; some are multipart “programs” assembled from groups of short films (many appropriated from industrial or otherwise “authorless” sources); and others are subtle variations on previous works. A recent exhibition at pioneering curator and collector Thomas Solomon’s new gallery, Solo Projects, paired a 16-mm silent film, Un Voyage en Mer du Nord (A Voyage on the North Sea), 1973-74, with a thirty-eight-page, French-bound book that shares its title and ostensible subject matter: the pairing of a late-nineteenth-century amateur painting of an archetypal European ship and a twentieth-century photograph of a pleasure boat against a modern urban backdrop. The roughly four-minute film is projected on a retractable home-movie screen–a Broodthaers motif–and the book displayed on a simple wooden shelf, lit by a single spotlight.Read More »

By chance, fifty-year old Thomas finds himself back in the little town of his childhood. While visiting his mother’s grave he faints and wakes up to find himself in the past. Thomas is 14 again, an adolescent who has kept all his adult experience and character. He meets up with his classmates, the girl with whom he was secretly in love, and above all his parents – his mother, so young and full of life; his father, who had disappeared back then, never to return. Thomas tries to find out the real reasons for his father’s departure. But can he relive his past without changing it?Read More »

Plot Synopsis from allmovie.com
Romanian director Cristian Nemescu’s comedy California Dreamin’ unfolds against the backdrop of the Kosovo War, circa 1999. A NATO train rolls through a Romanian hamlet, transporting a plethora of weapons across the country – without official documents, and equipped only with the verbal consent of the Romanian authorities. The transport thus grows intensely vulnerable to the locals – particularly the head of the railway station, who moonlights as a mobster.Read More »