Synopsis:
Balancing between feverish dreamlike hallucinations of a tormented past and a grim disoriented reality, the grizzled Joe–a traumatised Gulf War veteran and now an unflinching hired gun who lives with his frail elderly mother–has just finished successfully yet another job. With an infernal reputation of being a brutal man of results, the specialised in recovering missing teens enforcer will embark on a blood-drenched rescue mission, when Nina, the innocent 13-year-old daughter of an ambitious New York senator, never returns home. But amidst half-baked leads and a desperate desire to shake off his shoulders the heavy burden of a personal hell, Joe’s frenzied plummet into the depths of Tartarus is inevitable, and every step Joe takes to flee the pain, brings him closer to the horrors of insanity. In the end, what is real, and what is a dream? Can there be a new chapter in Joe’s life when he keeps running around in circles?Read More »

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A prestigious Stockholm museum’s chief art curator finds himself in times of both professional and personal crisis as he attempts to set up a controversial new exhibit.Read More »

Synopsis
Leon Prochnik adapted the evocative Robert Moresco play Child’s Play for the screen, with Sidney Lumet assuming directorial duties. Beau Bridges stars as a young teacher at an exclusive Catholic boy’s boarding school named Paul Reis. An outbreak of violence and brutality among the students has Reis perplexed. He suspects that one of the older professors is responsible for inciting the mayhem. The two most likely suspects, played by James Mason and Robert Preston, are long-standing rivals who blame each other for the student turmoil. One of the old enemies goes so far as to discredit the other — but his motives are at great odds with the religious doctrine taught within the school’s walls.Read More »

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In spite of the palpable ubiquity of misogyny across many diverse quarters of the Arabic world, filmic representation of the Middle Eastern female subaltern often feels reductive, and at its most egregious it can seem a subtle endorsement of the very behavior it ostensibly means to penetrate and vilify. Though not quite an unintentional apologia for sexism, the Turkish film Bliss is an illustration of how inadequate fiction can be at tackling the über-sober topic of sexual victimization. Mere hours before the movie’s first scene, young adult Meryem (Özgü Namal) is brutally violated and left for dead on a pastoral beach adjacent to her small village; despite the glaringly nonconsensual nature of the forced coupling she’s endured, her community ostracizes her as a strumpet per tradition and has her ushered out of town to be executed by Cemal (Murat Han), a male cousin returning from military service. In the first two acts Cemal wrestles with his own demons (mostly yawningly recondite combat flashbacks) as he struggles to maintain cultural dignity at the cost of committing what he clearly views to be senseless murder, and Meryem is a tangle of frayed nerves that we suspect obscure some painfully trite twists (we’re correct).Read More »

The film shows the unique world of artist Sergei Parajanov, whose brilliant images in films and collages aroused the suspicion of Soviet authorities. Unexpectedly, this last all-embracing interview, given at the 1988 München Film Festival, has become a film legacy.

Sergei Parajanov was born an Armenian in Georgia. He studied at the Moscow Film School and worked as a director in the Ukraine. His stylistic vitality and “plasticism” – a term he used to describe his films – enabled him to creative universal images.Read More »

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René Clair’s exuberant anti-capitalist satire À nous la liberté was one of the early triumphs of sound cinema and is still considered one of the all-time greats of French cinema. The film is a light-hearted comic tour de force, erupting into unbridled farce in a few places, and yet it also offers an intelligent reflection on one of the major social preoccupations of the time: the gradual dehumanisation of mankind through technological progress. In characteristically humorous vein, Clair gives us a speculative glimpse of the future in which human beings are reduced to quasi-machines to meet the remorseless capitalist imperative for ever greater efficiency and increased output. The demoralising repetitiveness of life on the factory production line mirrors the endless monotony of the prison scenes at the start of the film, and both contain echoes of the Fascistic nightmare that would overrun most of Europe in the 1930s. In an era of immense social and technological change, Clair poses a timely question: what is man’s destiny, to be a free individualist or a robotic slave to corporate greed?Read More »

The dark web changed how the world takes drugs. Before, if you wanted to buy, say, a gram of MDMA, you had to know someone who sold it, or, like, ask around – which is a fairly conspicuous thing to do when what you’re after is a controlled substance – or just go to a club, scan the room for people actively trying to dislocate their own jaws and hope for the best.

When crypto-markets began to pop up online, however, the drug market was democratised; anyone who could be bothered to work out how to buy Bitcoin was able to scroll through pages of vendors and buy peer-reviewed products, which would then be delivered straight to their door. It’s the kind of thing you can imagine pillheads of the past dreamed of as they fell victim to drug dealer time-keeping, twiddling their thumbs for hours, parked up in some suburban side street.Read More »

Two days in the life of priest Father Fred Stadtmuller whose New Mexico parish is so large he can only spread goodness and light among his flock with the aid of a mono-plane. The priestly pilot is seen dashing from one province to the next at the helm of his trusty Piper Club administering guidance (his plane, the Flying Padre) to unruly children, sermonizing at funerals and flying a sickly child and its mother to a hospital.Read More »

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Narcisa Hirsch (Berlin, 1928), a pioneer of experimental cinema in Argentina, produced continuously in various media since the 60s. In the beginning, as a painter and illustrator, her works were exhibited at the Gallery Lirolay, which, like the Instituto Di Tella, was the most important art gallery in Buenos Aires in the 60s. She conducted performances and happenings, and was part of the group of filmmakers formed by Marie Louise Alemann, Claudio Caldini, Horacio Vallereggio, Juan Villola and Juan José Mugni, exhibiting their films outside the circuit of theaters and institutions, with the exception of the Goethe Institute, an organization that during the last military dictatorship in Argentina accompanied this movement and gave a formal context to it.Read More »