Quote:
Master Class of Peter Tscherkassky starts with the screening of Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine, premiered at Cannes IFF as part of the independent section, Quinzaine des réalisateurs. The Master Class itself focuses on an analysis of this film.

Peter Tscherkassky was born in 1958 in Vienna. He studied journalism and political science as well as philosophy at the University of Vienna. Tscherkassky began filming in 1979 when he acquired Super-8 equipment and before the end of the year he had scripted and started off the shooting of Kreuzritter. Tscherkassky’s deconstructions of film material reinterpret fragments from the history of cinematography, simultaneously creating entirely unique qualities.Read More »

Quote:
The author Max Zorn, now in his early 60s, is on a promotional book tour in New York when he meets up again with the woman he could never forget. They spend a weekend together. 17 years have passed. Can there be a future for their past?Read More »

This arresting European documentary chronicles the exploits of a radical journalist who joined Germany’s most notorious terrorist group in the 1970s. Through a combination of newsreel clips, television reports, and interviews with friends and colleagues, a complex portrait of the journalist, Ulrike Marie Meinhof emerges. While the media portrays the woman, who committed suicide in prison in 1976, as courageous and tremendously self-confident, her friends remember her much differently. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie GuideRead More »

Quote:
Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing is a work of thriller maximal-ism, a rare case of more actually being more rather than less. In the spirit of other South Korean films like Memories of Murder, The Host, I Saw the Devil, and Park Chan-wook’s early work, among others, The Wailing thrives on genre crosspollination and tonal hyperbole, particularly a destabilizing contrast of broad comedy with ultraviolent portentousness. In American cinema, such a mix often results in a single tone dominating the enterprise, telegraphing to the audience how to feel. By contrast, prominent South Korean thrillers abound in ambiguous tones in which the comedy and the violence are accorded equal prominence, yielding an exhilarating sense of possibility and chaos.Read More »

Quote:
Daisy Kenyon stars Joan Crawford as the eponymous heroine, a Manhattan commercial artist. Daisy is torn between two men: a handsome, married attorney (Dana Andrews) and an unmarried Henry Fonda. Deciding to do the “right thing”, Daisy marries Fonda, but carries a torch for the dashing Andrews. When the lawyer divorces his wife, he calls upon Daisy and tries to win her back. She is very nearly won over, but her husband isn’t about to give up so easily. Both men argue over Daisy, who is so distraught by the experience that she nearly has a fatal automobile accident. In the end, Daisy realizes that she truly loves Fonda, and gives Andrews his walking papers. Daisy Kenyon is given a contemporary slant with a subplot about child abuse (in a Joan Crawford film!); and, in one scene set at New York’s Stork Club, several celebrities (Walter Winchell, Leonard Lyons, John Garfield) make unbilled cameo appearances.Read More »

Quote:
A great Iranian film , unfortunately unknown in and out of Iran, 23 April 2008
Author: Armand Erfanian from United Kingdom

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Farar az Tale is an unknown film out of Iran. Even in Iran nobody remembers of this beautiful little masterpiece. There are so many successful visual and musical devices all along the film. The first one is just at the opening and before the opening credits. A man is dropped on the street. Another man tries to see if he is still alive. In finding that he is not, he turns his head towards Morteza (Behrooz Vosooghi) and by his eye expression lets him know that. All that in silent cinema and taking only 23 seconds. That is truly cinema, The art of image! Then the opening credits start, during which we see Morteza in prison, his moustaches are little by little growing. This is economy of great cinema. Using the time of the credits for letting us know that he is in prison and making us feel the length of his stay. The proper plot will begin now, when he comes out of prison and looks for his beloved woman Mehri (Nilufar). Another great moment of the film is when Morteza is looking for a solution to find somehow the 10 000 tomans that he needs to give to the man who married his beloved to get her divorce. Now wandering in the city and its outskirts he walks, stops and sits and looks at people working. Great music of Rubik Mansuri covers this sequence, and still shots or pans get dissolved to each other and gives us impression of boring time that Morteza is experiencing under the hot sun of the South. Iranian cinema is full of so great films… It is a pity that they don’t get any chance to be known… The actors, Behrooz Vosooghi, Davood Rashidi and Abbas Nazeri are absolutely great.Read More »

Quote:
In what seems to be a post-apocalyptic world, a grubby middle-aged man goes about the business of survival in a derelict building. His solitary, wordless existence changes with the arrival of two ragged, starving young people. The older man, Christic, diabolical and off his head, feeds them eggs along with subversive thoughts, which recognize no conventional moral boundaries, until the boy – reluctantly – and the girl – readily – let go of all inhibitions and interdictions to descend into a lawless, frantic, primal state of blood and lust…Read More »

“The Role” is about a brilliant actor in revolutionary Russia who takes on the greatest role of his life — the role of another man. Influenced by the ideas of symbolism and the Silver Age, he decides to slip into the life of his doppelganger – a revolutionary leader in the new Soviet Russia. First intrigued, then obsessed, he flings himself into the role and lives it to the hilt… even when the play of the life he is writing heads towards a tragic finale. Based on true incidents in the lives of Russia’s symbolists, this gripping film explores how far one man will go for the role of a lifetime.Read More »

Poldo, a lowly security in a publishing firm, dreams to be rich. He becomes the personal bodyguard to his employer’s son, Sonny, when he impresses the latter with his courage and skills during a quarrel where Poldo defended Sonny. Poldo gets a taste of his boss’ carefree and extravagant lifestyle and thinks that he accepts him as a friend. In one of the nightclubs they frequent, Sonny is smitten by dancer Cristy and aggressively pursues her despite a warning from San Pedro, the movie director with whom Cristy has an affair. When they chance upon each other, Sonny and San Pedro fight. Poldo comes to his boss’ rescue and guns down San Pedro. In subsequent circumstances, Poldo would soon arrive at a bitter realization. As he could not see in Sonny the benefactor that he pictured him to be, Poldo finds himself alone, abandoned and betrayed. Read More »