Description: A major new talent in international avant-garde cinema, Zwartjes creates hermetic, obsessive, and “decadent” universes, in which desperate, dissociated males and females, though inextricably bound to each other, never “connect”. Here an impassive, Keaton- like figure engages in a sexual, ominous food orgy with voluptuous, half-nude women whom he paws impotently. A mysterious, powerful tension informs the action. Despite non-communication and mutual defilement of the grossest kind, a profoundly humanist statement emerges; compassion for these victims, “partners” in loneliness. Expressionist style, make-up and lighting as well as complex montage heighten the effect of the tragic tableaux, in which tortured non-heroes operate impotently in hostile space, facing us blindly, nakedly, with all defenses down; compelling us, perhaps, to confront ourselves in like manner.Read More »

Documentary by Werner Herzog on the Making of the Music to CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS
recorded July 2010 at Protestant Church of Haarlem, The Netherlands
With composer and musician Ernst Reijseger and music producer Stefan Winter
2010, 40 min.Read More »

IMDb:
An anticipation of Blasetti’s style. A great movie about the Siena Palio. Guido Celano (Zarre) is a very good actress and Leda Gloria too. The Tuscany environment is very well depicted. The performing style is influenced by the period, but it is quite good anyway. It is a very uncommon movie and the best representation of Palio, a religious and sporting event in Siena. Blasetti, then, after Il Palio and Terre Sole, start a wonderful career as director and will anticipates the “neorealism” with his 1942’s movie “Quattro passi fra le nuvole”. Very impressive the opening scene with Zarre riding a horse in the Siena countryside.Read More »

A man who returns to Los Angeles to wrap up his mother’s estate sets out in search of the mysterious woman named in her will.Read More »

Quote:
Perhaps the reason why this movie is getting such a bad rap is mainly a fault of its well-meaning, but still incoherent style and narrative structure. I have not read any articles on this movie or interviews with the director to know what his overt intention was, but in the end I think the movie falls short of its mark due to Kim’s perennial fixation on obsession, whether it was his intention to delve into this subject matter or not. On most levels, obsession is a largely private affair, and any exegesis of obsession enmeshed within the loaded geopolitical situation that is now Korea would require a broader vision and canvas matched with a technical command of story telling than any that Kim has been able to provide here or elsewhere.Read More »

Le Vent de la Nuit bears little resemblance to the first film in our series, Les Amants Réguliers, made only six years later. The latter, with its rich, fathomless depths of black-and-white photography and insular, period setting stands in stark relief to the former’s auburn-tinged, deep-focus, wide-angle lensing of modern-day Paris, Naples and Berlin. Even so, Le Vent is unmistakably a film by Philippe Garrel, with its deliberate pacing, recurring themes of bitter regret, lost love and longing across generations and relentless focus on the emotional landscape of its three central characters, all which immediately connect it to his other work.Read More »

Time to stretch… Swap from fiction to documentary. Enjoy the master of suspense!

REVIEW ALLMOVIE
A rare glimpse into the mind of the notorious cagey master filmmaker, this documentary was shot on the set of Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie. With remarkable candor Hitchcock discusses his career and his passion for movies. — Jonathan CrowRead More »

This prison camp drama by director and co-scripter Armand Gatti, his first film, reflects the early ’60s resurgence of interest in the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis in World War II. (In another year, the Adolph Eichmann trial would be the first ever seen live on American television.) Gatti focuses on two men in a German concentration camp who have been cruelly penned inside an enclosure. One of the men, Karl (Herbert Wochinz), is a strong, bitter anti-Nazi German — a target of the Gestapo. The SS wants information on a rumored organization of resistance fighters inside the prison and they know he has it. The other man, David (Jean Negroni) is a Jew. If one of the men dies within a certain time then the other will be released. He will not be killed. Otherwise, both will be executed. The resistance fighters in the prison try to help the two as best they can, while the pair inside the enclosure slowly come to know each other as though they were brothers. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie GuideRead More »

Romances end in blood and the frail hopes of individuals are torn apart in a vile karmic continuity of colonialism…
Address Unknown (2001) is Kim Ki-Duk’s most political film so far which traces the scars left by the Korean war of the 1950s and its contemporary reverberations on a US Army base.Read More »