Zoltai (Andras Balint) is a Hungarian professor who returns home after a visit to the United States. Following a television interview, he commits suicide and leaves a note for his longtime friend Dr. Bardocz (Gyorgy Cserhalmi).The doctor and Zoltai’s colleague Komindi (Jozsef Madaras) join the police in investigating what drove the man to suicide in this surrealistic drama.Read More »
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Dorothy Segda essays three roles in the Hungarian-made My 20th Century. The film begins with the birth of twin girls to a Budapest mother (Dorothy Segda) in 1880. Orphaned early on, the girls are forced to sell matches on the streets until both are adopted by two separate families. Flash forward to 1900: Having lost track of one another, the grown-up twins take separate compartments on the Orient Express. One of the girls (Segda again) has become the pampered mistress of a wealthy man; the other (Segda yet again) is a bomb-wielding anarchist. Director Ildiko Enyedi evidently intended My 20th Century as an allegorical statement concerning the status of women in the modern mechanical age. The experiences of the twins are interspersed with shots of Thomas Edison (Peter Andorai), whom we see at the beginning of the film perfecting his incandescent light bulb on the very day that the sisters are born. The more technological advances made by Edison, the more confused the twins become in establishing their own roles in an advancing civilization. Adroitly avoiding cut-and-dried symbolism, Ildiko Enyedi keeps the audience wondering what she’s up to by including such surrealistic vignettes as a caged chimpanzee recounting the day of his capture!Read More »
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The official British Palme d’Or entry at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, Symptoms is a sophisticated modern gothic horror film exploring the themes of sexual repression and psychosis.
Larraz’s dark and stylish film tells of a young woman (Lorna Heilbron) who is invited by her girlfriend (Angela Pleasence) to stay at her remote English country mansion. Events take a disturbing turn when a menacing groundkeeper (Peter Vaughan) interrupts their time together, and a woman’s body is found in the mansion’s lake.Read More »
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After refusing big and prestigious awards all over the world, Mr. Mantovani, Literature Nobel Prize winner, accepts an invitation to visit his hometown in Argentina, which has been the inspiration for all of his books. It turns out that accepting this invitation is the worse idea of his life. Expect the unexpected when you have used real people as characters in your novels!Read More »
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For 50 minutes or so Pictures presents a series of static, or gently swaying images which are sometimes bucolic landscapes but more often industrial ones (sludgy harbours, power lines, abandoned railway stations or deserted factories). The interplay between the two sets of imagery is not simple. Wyborny photographs his modern ruins at their most ravishing – at dawn or sunset, partially reflected in the water or glimpsed through the trees. Shots recur throughout, optically printed into brilliant colours or else, given the washed out quality of fifth generation Xeroxes. As there are few people shown, one’s impression is of a planet that is populated mainly by cows, barges and hydraulic drills.Read More »
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Hana Doda, still a girl, escapes from her destiny of being wife and servant which is imposed on the women in the inhospitable mountains in Albania. She appeals to the old law of the Kanun and swears her eternal virginity thus becoming a “sworn virgin”. She turns into a man, takes up a rifle and becomes Mark, Mark Doda. It is in exchange for this sacrifice that Hana is allowed to be considered at the same level as other men. Her battle does not only mean that she must rebel against what destiny has been writing on her body for centuries, but she must also reject, in name of this rebellion, every form of love. A refusal that becomes her prison. After more than ten years spent in solitude in the mountains as a man, she becomes brutish and she transforms to survive the hardship, the cold and misery, until something returns to awaken her again… Hana decides to change life and painstakingly regain her body.Read More »
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A wife finds her life transformed after a torrid affair in this story of murder. Katia is a rather dull young woman who types manuscripts for Irina, her husband’s mother and successful writer of romance novels. Katia’s husband is a real momma’s boy. They go to Irina’s summer house to work. There Katia encounters the intense and sexy Serguei who creates passionate longings with in her. Overcome she and Serguei engage in vigorous love-making upon a windowsill where Irina sees them. Irina has a weak heart. Quiet Katia, having rediscovered the joys of sex, changes and becomes more assertive and flighty. Serguei quickly loses interest in her. Strange and deadly things begin happening at the summer house which calls the attention of a judge who is extremely familiar with Irina’s writing. ~ Sandra Brennan, RoviRead More »
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Nathalie teaches philosophy at a high school in Paris. She is passionate about her job and particularly enjoys passing on the pleasure of thinking. Married with two children, she divides her time between her family, former students and her very possessive mother. One day, Nathalie’s husband announces he is leaving her for another woman. With freedom thrust upon her, Nathalie must reinvent her life.Read More »
Two ecologists (played by Veronica Ferres and Gael Garcia Bernal) are sent to South America as part of a U.N. investigation into an ecological disaster. They are quickly kidnapped by the villainous CEO (played by Michael Shannon) of a large company held responsible for the ecological disaster. But when a supervolcano nearby begins to show signs of erupting, they must unite to avoid a disaster.
Salt and Fire is a 2016 internationally co-produced thriller film directed by Werner Herzog. It had its premiere at the Shanghai International Film Festival. It was selected to be screened in the Special Presentations section at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival. – wikiRead More »