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 »
Synopsis wrote:
One of the last great German Expressionist films of the silent era, Joe May’s Asphalt is a love story set in the traffic-strewn Berlin of the late 1920s. Starring the delectable Betty Amann in her most famous leading role, Asphalt is a luxuriously produced Ufa classic where tragic liaisons and fatal encounters are shaped alongside the constant roar of traffic.
thespinningimage.co.uk wrote:
In Berlin, a policeman called Holk is summoned to a jeweller’s shop, where a beautiful young woman has tried to steal a diamond. En route to the police station, the woman takes Holk back to her apartment on the pretext of collecting some papers and ends up seducing him. Soon he finds himself caught between his duty and the woman he is falling in love with.Read More »
“This cult favorite from one of cinema’s richest eras, directed by Academy Award-winning director Joseph Strick, stars Barry Bostwick (The Rocky Horror Picture Show) and Robert Drivas (Cool Hand Luke) delivering bravura performances as a pair of brutish truck drivers who pick up a prostitute on a trip across America. Regina Baff (The Paper Chase) tears at the heart as the beaten and furious hooker who exchanges her body for a ride to New York, only to be further abused. Rejected and scorned, she becomes determined to seek revenge.” – DVD packaging copyRead More »
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Auspiciously set in the nebulous and indeterminate milieu of “Switzerland, in the near future”, Raoul Ruiz’s eccentric, surreal fable opens to the shot of an abstracted and dotty young woman named Livia (Elsa Zylberstein) sitting on a park bench overlooking a fog obscured dirt road that is curiously located near the entrance of the San Michelle mental health institution. While jotting down a series of random, fleeting thoughts into her journal, she meets a cyclist who is abruptly thrown from his bicycle and, convinced that he is an angel (since, as her idiosyncratic theory goes, all angels on earth have fallen), proceeds to explain that tomorrow is destined to be the best day of her life, or rather – as she corrects herself – the most important day, which she comes to realize is not the same thing. Soon after the encounter, Livia is whisked away by her faithful and devoted servant Treffle (Jean-François Balmer) and brought home to the family’s country estate where a crowd of snide and unscrupulously calculating relatives amass near the front steps awaiting her father, Harald’s (Michel Piccoli) return home to celebrate his birthday.Read More »
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Masculinity turns against itself in Simon Jaquemet’s teen violence debut
Home is where the hate is in At War, in which a teenager’s boot camp punishment becomes a kind of perverted camaraderie. Filmed in the spirit of gritty Euro-miserabilists like the Dardenne Brothers and infused with the same show-all/judge nothing ethos, the film has a drive and intensity that pushes it compellingly through its first half before descending into predictability as it doggedly brings its inner logic full circle. But there’s enough of interest happening in that first section to ensure that there’ll be more to come from director Simon Jaquemet when War has done its time on the festival frontline.Read More »
After parodying the idiosyncrasies of community theater devotees in the mock documentary Waiting for Guffman, actor/director Christopher Guest returns with another semi-improvised comedy that casts a satirical gaze on the world of championship dog breeding and training. A television crew is on hand to document the prestigious Mayflower Kennel Club Dog Show, and competition is fierce among the canine devotees vying for top honors. Salesman Gerry Fleck (Eugene Levy), who is cursed with two left feet (literally), and his wife Cookie (Catherine O’Hara) have entered their Norwich terrier “Winky” in competition. Wealthy and neurotic Meg Swan (Parker Posey) and her husband Hamilton (Michael Hitchcock) are on hand with their Weimaraner “Beatrice,” who they fear may have been traumatized by watching them have sex.Read More »
One dramatic event marked the life of the great German artist in particular. At the beginning of the First World War she was already world famous for her etchings, lithographs, carvings and drawings. To her horror, her youngest son, Peter, volunteered to go to war. Within a few weeks she received the dreadful news Peter fell in Flanders. Käthe Kollwitz, who had always sided with the common people, became a committed pacifist and even a socialist. She lived with her husband, a doctor to the poor, in the Berlin working-class quarter of Prenzlauer Berg, where a central square is now named after her. The bloody end of the November Revolution destroyed her hope for swift improvements in living conditions, but strengthened her convictions. The excellently cast DEFA film shows impressive images from the life of a woman who was later to be a vehement foe of National Socialism and whose work still impresses the world today.Read More »
Ishihara Kiyoshi plans to marry the woman he loves, Chiee, a coffee shop girl. After an accident, Chiee loses her memory. A romance movie whose original work by Ayako Sono was made into a melodrama by a combination of Shinoda Masahiro and Terayama Shuji.Read More »