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“Valmont,” Milos Forman’s spin on “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” is sumptuous suds, a broadly played trivialization of de Laclos’s 18th-century novel of boudoir intrigue. With its callow cast and playful tone, there is nothing dangerous about Forman’s variation on the novelist’s schemes. It’s a naughty costume dramedy in which the erotic conquests of bored libertines are transformed into children’s kissing games.

Colin Firth and Annette Bening play the story’s sexual strategists, the smarmy Vicomte de Valmont and the devious Marquise de Merteuil, whose machinations sully the virtuous Madame de Tourvel (Meg Tilly) and the virginal Cecile de Volanges (Fairuza Balk). A generation younger than the cast of Stephen Frears’s “Dangerous Liaisons,” the actors’ ages more closely mirror those of the novel’s young adults and teenagers, but they seem less bedroom Machiavellians than members of a 1700s Breakfast Club, not tragically flawed, hopelessly jaded, ultimately doomed and self-destructive, just wet behind the leers.Read More »

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The tragic life of Slava Raškaj, a turn-of-the-century painter born deaf and mute who is viewed as a kind of Croatian Frida Kahlo, is sketched in “100 Minutes of Glory.” Young helmer Dalibor Matanić (“Fine Dead Girls”) adopts a suitably avant-garde, quasi-surrealist style that injects a large amount of visual interest in this tale of a rebellious-but-doomed woman, while Raškaj’s affair with fellow artist Bela Čikoš structures the narrative nicely. Last half hour, however, spins off in superfluous threads about Čikoš that leave the feeling the film is far too long and cripple things for general audiences.Read More »

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It’s the 22nd of December. Sixteen years have passed since the revolution, and in a small town Christmas is about to come. Piscoci, an old retired man is preparing for another Christmas alone. Manescu, the history teacher, tries to keep up with his debts. Jderescu, the owner of a local television post, seems not to be so interested in the upcoming holidays. For him, the time to face history has come. Along with Manescu and Piscoci, he is trying to answer for himself a question which for 16 years has not had an answer: “Was it or wasn’t it a revolution in their town?”Read More »

The experimental film takes place in North-Caroline. In the last days of the American civil war three characteristic figures of the 1849 Hungarian emigration fight: the geographer artillery officer Fiala János, the rational scientist, Vereczky Ádám, the heroic fatalist and the attendant of Fiala: the emotional Boldogh, who struggles with homesickness. The fate of all the “”slowed down”” revolutionaries is hopeless. The boasting Vereczky dies a meaningless death on a huge swing which he was able to survey with the theodolite. Boldogh longs for home, maybe to die, while there is only one possibility for Fiala: he can participate in the construction works of the Pacific railway.Read More »

Toma and Ana meet as students in the literature faculty, and quickly fall in love.
The story of Ana and Toma and the thread of Ana’s mental illness, which runs through their relationship – their extremely challenging situation molds the life they share.

Who’s to blame when Toma’s girlfriend Ana, a college student, goes off the rails with incapacitating panic attacks? Tracing the causes of her mental ills back to her early family life, including a father who defected to the West, the film proposes various cures that range from prescription drugs to confession in church and — just a short step beyond that — the couch. It’s a smart film with engaging moments.
The games people play with each other and the trap of co-dependency are the main focus. As shrewd a psychologist as any therapist, Netzer adopts a warm approach to his characters but doesn’t let them off the hook when, on closer observation, their altruistic actions are revealed as controlling and manipulative. Read More »

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A MANIFESTO FOR THE UN-COMMUNAL is a poem, a documentary, a video diary and a propaganda piece in praise of the outlandishly living.

Shot in Germany, Israel, Greece and Denmark, A MANIFESTO FOR THE UN-COMMUNAL is the convergence of the voices, the stories and the living landscapes of seven+ characters that live against the warming comfort of the self-righteousness of their herd. People undefined by their class, undefined by their education, revolting against any sense of state or non-state, polyglottes and polyfucked, traitors, un-marginalized and always out of the margin. Or, as Homer would put it, “the Lawless, those without Hearth or Clan” (Iliad, 9.63).Read More »

Synopsis:
There is a problem with foreign nationals using Cuba as a convenient jumping off point for illegal entry into the United States. So U.S. Immigration Service Agent Peter Karczag (John Hodiak) is sent to Havana posing as a Hungarian frustrated with the legal immigration process and open to an alternative. By this means he uncovers the human smuggling ring run by Palinov (George Macready). He also meets concentration-camp refugee Marianne Lorress (Hedy Lamarr), a Viennese working in a nightclub and one who has paid to be smuggled into the United States. When Karczag falls in love with her, he becomes conflicted, not wanting her to be among those he plans to have captured in his operation. So he tries to persuade her to stay in Cuba instead of being secretly flown to the United States. Will he succeed? What if his cover is blown? Read More »

Press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, with the virtual participation of Jean-Luc Godard via FaceTime. It took place on May 12, 2018. [Dual audio, original french in the first track, english translation in the second track]Read More »

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A short excerpt from the Booklet essay by Daniel Bird

Trzecia część nocy (The Third Part of the Night, 1971) is a film by Andrzej Żuławski, the enfant terrible of Polish Cinema. It is also a film about the Polish experience, but one made by a filmmaker too young to remember the War. It was made in 1971, before the so-called Polish cinema of moral concern of Holland, Kieslowski and Zanussi. It is based (in part) on the life of Żuławski s father, Miroslaw, during the Second World War. It is perhaps the first (and probably the last) film about Weigl Institute in Lwow. But above all else, it is the debut film of one of cinema s true visionaries.Read More »