An opening title card from director Thom Andesen’s new feature film, The Thoughts That Once We Had, directly identifies the cinematic writings of philosopher Gilles Deleuze as the project’s primary subject and inspiration. Deleuze’s two volumes on film, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985), are today synonymous with a certain modernist school of thought that, while integrated in academia to such a degree as to be all but understood, remains quite radical. Unquestionably dense and provocatively pedantic, the French empiricist’s filmic texts integrate an array of theories and conceptualizations into a fairly delineated taxonomy, and are therefore fairly conducive to Andersen’s established approach to essay filmmaking—and particularly to the director’s latest, which finds him deliberating on Deleuzian dogma while charting an alternate, personal path through film history.Read More »

IMBD synopsis:
In his twilight years, Silvio Vega, a child of the destitution and violence of Columbia’s countryside, takes a trip with his two grandchildren to force them to kill him instead of dying of old age.Read More »

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Atom Egoyan’s ongoing search for his own best form makes no real breakthrough in “Remember,” a state-hopping Nazi-hunt mystery that puts a creditably sincere spin on material that is silly at best. At worst, tyro writer Benjamin August’s screenplay is a crass attempt to fashion a “Memento”-style puzzle narrative from post-Holocaust trauma. Toggling variables of disguised identity and dementia, as Christopher Plummer’s ailing German widower travels across North America in search of the camp commander he recalls from his time in Auschwitz, the pic is riddled with lapses in logic even before a stakes-shifting twist that many viewers might see coming. Crafted in utilitarian fashion by Egoyan, “Remember” does little to earn the poignancy of Plummer’s stricken performance — though that asset, plus a button-pushing premise, could attract reasonable interest from older arthouse auds.Read More »

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A fictitious love story loosely inspired by the lives of Danish artists Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener. Lili and Gerda’s marriage and work evolve as they navigate Lili’s groundbreaking journey as a transgender pioneer.Read More »

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In May, 1816 narrator passes through a small station. At the station, Dunia, Beauty daughter of the superintendent, serves tea. On the walls of the room hang pictures of the story of the prodigal son. The narrator and the superintendent and his daughter together, drink tea, before leaving the stranger kisses Dunya in the hall (with her consent). A few years later, the narrator again falls on the same station. The superintendent is very old. When asked about his daughter, he does not respond, but after a glass of punch is talkative. He says that 3 years ago, a young hussar (Captain Minsky) spent several days at the station, pretending to be sick and bribing a doctor. Dunya nursed. Recovering, the captain is going on the road, called a lift Dunya to the church and drives her away. Having lost a daughter, aged father becomes ill from grief.Read More »

In a small valley, riders pursue and kill a man. A horse thief, so his assassins claim. But for his ten year old son Issa, the disappearance of his father causes an avalanche of problems. With the family name stigmatized, Issa is bullied by the other children in the village. While his mother fights to clear her husbands name, Issa is left to his own devices. But unexpectedly, his solitude gives birth to his freedom, his real passion, horses.Read More »

Synopsis:
Nouvelle Vague marks the beginning of a period in Jean-Luc Godard’s career in which he made films that looked back on his previous work. In these retrospective films, Godard asked himself whether it is possible to continue as a film director under the conditions imposed by international commercial cinema. Appropriately enough, Nouvelle Vague concerns the return of a man (Roger Lennox / Richard Lennox, played by Alain Delon, superstar of 60s and 70s international cinema) who may or may not have returned from the dead.Read More »

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A school window is broken, and kids can’t concentrate because the rain is getting in. The culprit isn’t allowed back into class until he mends it. So he carries a large pane of glass by hand across the countryside in a gale. The wind blows; but will he crack? In the hands of writer Abbas Kiarostami and director Mohammad Ali Talebi, this simplest of stories becomes an epic quest, poetic and breathtakingly beautiful. It has big-hearted humanism, but Hitchcockian tension too. An edge-of-seat masterpiece. Unmissable.Read More »

P l o t S y n o p s i s
An unexperienced young actress is invited to play a role in a film based on Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Possessed’. The film director, a Czech immigrant in Paris, takes over her life, and in a short time she is unable to draw the line between acting and reality. She winds up playing a real-life role posing as the dead wife of another Czech immigrant, who is manipulated by the filmmaker into commiting a political assasination. (Review from Yuri German)Read More »