Quote:
Esen Isik, who already won the prestigious “Quartz” in 2012 for Du&Ich, presented her debut feature film, Köpek, a glimpse at an Istanbul held prisoner by its own contradictions, at this year’s Zurich Film Festival. By portraying the everyday lives of three ‘marginal’ characters who fight to find love (or simply a glimmer of humanity) in a city that rejects them, Esen Isik paints us a portrait of an entire society that wants to be modern in spite of the preconceptions that risk choking it.Read More »

Plot:
Francisco Goya (1746-1828), deaf and ill, lives the last years of his life in voluntary exile in Bordeaux, a Liberal protesting the oppressive rule of Ferdinand VII. He’s living with his much younger wife Leocadia and their daughter Rosario. He continues to paint at night, and in flashbacks stirred by conversations with his daughter, by awful headaches, and by the befuddlement of age, he relives key times in his life, particularly his relationship with the Duchess of Alba, his discovery of how he wanted to paint (insight provided by Velázquez’s work), and his lifelong celebration of the imagination. Throughout, his reveries become tableaux of his paintings.Read More »

Plot synopsis:
Cencio, a Roman pilferer, is periodically in prison. He’s a genius at scams. He loves his childhood sweetheart Cesira, who, in order to get herself out of the slum’s life, soon becomes his partner in crime. With Cesira’s help, Cencio is successful in several swindles. In the meantime, Cesira finds her true love. Cencio then tries the big hit in a jewelery. But his lucky break is over…Read More »

Quote:
sometimes you have to cross the line to know where the line is. just ask any two-year-old.

maybe this is what happens when you spend too much time with a movie: you start thinking about it when it’s not around, and then you start wanting to touch it. i’ve been watching 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY regularly for four decades, but it wasn’t until a few years ago i started thinking about touching it, and then over the holidays i decided to make my move. why now? I don’t know. maybe i wasn’t old enough to touch it until now. maybe i was too scared to touch it until now, because not only does the film not need my—or anyone else’s—help, but if it’s not THE most impressively imagined and sustained piece of visual art created in the 20th century, then it’s tied for first. meaning IF i was finally going to touch it, i’d better have a bigger idea than just trimming or re-scoring.Read More »

“French companies never seemed to learn that Godard would never make anything like a traditional advertisement, so when the Darty appliance chain commissioned a pub from the mischievous director, they were in for trouble: a daring deconstruction of consumerism, rejected by its funders.”Read More »

Synopsis wrote:
A young flapper tricks her childhood sweetheart into marrying her. He really loves another woman, but didn’t marry her for fear the marriage would end in divorce, like his parents’. Complications ensue.

aclassicmovieblog wrote:
To contemplate Clara Bow and Gary Cooper together onscreen is to fear these irresistibly watchable stars will cancel each other out. After all, what else could happen when two performers who consistently steal scenes in other films appear with each other? In the 1927 silent Children of Divorce, nothing quite that dramatic happens, it’s pure pleasure to see them together. Now the film is available in its DVD/Blu-ray world premiere, in what is also the 50th release for the always meticulous Flicker Alley.Read More »

Quote:
There are places in Europe that have remained as painful memories of the past – factories where humans were turned into ash. These places are now memorial sites that are open to the public and receive thousands of tourists every year. The film’s title refers to the eponymous novel written by W.G. Sebald, dedicated to the memory of Holocaust. This film is an observation of the visitors to a memorial site that has been founded on the territory of a former concentration camp. Why do they go there? What are they looking for?Read More »

An experimental documentary comprised of regional vignettes about faith, force, technology and exodus. Eleven parables relay histories of settlement, removal, technological breakthrough, violence, messianism and resistance, all occurring somewhere in the state of Illinois. But the state is a structural ruse, and its histories are allegories that ask what belief might teach us about nationhood. In our desire to understand the inscrutable, whom do we end up blaming or endorsing?Read More »

When an opera singer loses her voice, her husband embarks on an odyssey through Miami’s dark underworld to recover it through supernatural means. Read More »