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A great feel-good type of film. Campanella lives up to promise and delivers yet again, as he dives head first into the story of a forty-something going through a mid-life crisis. Ricardo Darin (Rafael Belvedere) shows us why he’s one of South America’s biggest stars as he puts in a performance to rival “Nine Queens” (another great Argentinian film). He’s complemented by Natalia Verbeke who plays his girlfriend (and who is in possession of the world’s greatest smile) and Héctor Alterio and Norma Aleandro who play his parents. Aleandro in particular contributes some magnificent scenes, playing an aged woman struggling to cope with mental illness. A really good film that will restore your faith in humanity….A bit corny?? oh well…. Funny, original, and well put together. Recommended for everyone!!Read More »

he sufferings of a martyr, Jeanne D’Arc (1412-1431). Jeanne appears in court where Cauchon questions her and d’Estivet spits on her. She predicts her rescue, is taken to her cell, and judges forge evidence against her. In her cell, priests interrogate her and judges deny her the Mass. Threatened first in a torture chamber and then offered communion if she will recant, she refuses. At a cemetery, in front of a crowd, a priest and supporters urge her to recant; she does, and Cauchon announces her sentence. In her cell, she explains her change of mind and receives communion. In the courtyard at Rouen castle, she burns at the stake; the soldiers turn on the protesting crowd.Read More »

This is an intense, romantic, deeply human, dramatic, realistic and surprising film about the japanese AV industry, and about the feelings of a very young couple.

[Source: Japan times]

“You oughta be in show business, baby!” That’s been a pickup line of “producers” since the days of D.W. Griffith, though in Japan today the pick-up artists are likely to be young men with stylishly coiffed, tea-colored hair, tanned pretty-boy faces and dressed in dark designer mufti. They prowl places like Shibuya, Harajuku and Ikebukuro, hitting on one woman after another with a coaxing, teasing, wheedling urgency.
The men are usually selling, not themselves, but an arubaito in the AV industry, with “AV” standing for “audiovisual,” but meaning porn. Called “scout men,” they are the subject of “Pain,” an excellent new film by Masato Ishioka, a veteran porn director himself, who spent two years researching his subjects. Though weathering serial rejections that would wither the average male ego to the size of a quark, the scout men at first shied away from Ishioka. “They didn’t take me seriously,” he told me after a screening. “It took a long time to win their confidence.”Read More »

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A mysterious visitor (Kentucker Audley) spends the night at an apartment belonging to a young engaged couple (Sophia Takal and Lawrence Michael Levine) and their friend (Kate Lyn Sheil.) Over the course of the night and the following day he sleeps with all three roommates and then disappears, leading to conversations about God, life and filmmaking.

Starring: Sophia Takal, Lawrence Michael Levine, Kate Lyn Sheil, Kentucker Audley, Joe SwanbergRead More »

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Sergej Moya is a German actor, writer and director who had the idea for the movie. The 23-aged filmmaker appreciates erotic films which celebrate emotional relationships and depict explicit sexual actions as part of an interesting and demanding love story. So he created the ambitious project HOTEL DESIRE. In his film he wants to tell the story of a woman who is longing for more in her life than only the daily business. It’s an attempt to explore human aspiration for explicit sexuality and to present it as an intriguing story with erotical feelings and sensual pictures.

It’s said that women think about sex every 60 seconds on average during the day, men every 52 seconds,” he says. “However, I could not find any data on how many seconds, minutes or hours we think about murder and homicide every day. I want to make a film that does justice to sexuality as an expression of human joy of life. A film that confidently borrows from the porn genre, but that is not a porn film.”Read More »

“For the first decades of their existence, movies were seen not as works of art deserving preservation but as disposable commodities. The notion that they might be preserved, collected and studied was in the air by the mid-1930’s, but it took the pluck and persistence of a single eccentric Frenchman to make the idea a reality. The name of Henri Langlois — subject of “Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinémathèque,” a long, affectionate documentary directed by Jacques Richard — is not as well known as those of some directors whose work and reputations he saved from oblivion. Still, Mr. Richard’s film makes a persuasive case for Langlois as one of the most important figures in the history of film and therefore in the history of 20th-century art. And he was, after his own fashion, an artist — a collector and curator with the temperament of a poet. A shabbily dressed, chain-smoking walrus of a man, Langlois emerges in the course of this fascinating film as a maddening, inspiring figure, afire with intelligence and passion.”Read More »

Mike Pinsky, DVDVerdict wrote:
Russian film poet Evgeni Bauer combined the technical virtuosity of D.W. Griffith with the haunting terror of Edgar Allan Poe and the artist’s eye of Johannes Vermeer. He is — perhaps — the greatest film director you have never heard of. During his brief four-year career, Evgeni Bauer created macabre masterpieces. They are dramas darkly obsessed with doomed love and death, astonishing for their graceful camera movements, risqué themes, opulent sets and chiaroscuro lighting. Tragically, Bauer died in 1917, succumbing to pneumonia after breaking his leg.Read More »

The latest effort from a slow-cinema auteur known for his epic running times, “From What Is Before” is a longer sit than “Norte” (250 minutes) but a brisk jaunt compared with the likes of “Melancholia” (450 minutes), “Death in the Land of Encantos” (538 minutes) and “Evolution of a Filipino Family” (593 minutes). As ever, the effectiveness of Diaz’s approach depends on his finding a subject worthy of sustained rumination, and in this film, which he aptly describes as “a memory of a cataclysm,” it is the very act of remembering, of recalling the specific texture and atmosphere of his lost childhood, that seems to determine the duration of every shot and the placement of every cut. A poet-historian of longform cinema, Diaz seeks not merely to relay a series of events, but to draw us into a fully inhabited world.Read More »

(Chicago reader capsule ) :
“Released in three parts, Patricio Guzman’s epic documentary The Battle of Chile (1975-’79) captured such critical events as the bombing of the presidential palace during the 1973 military coup, but it wasn’t screened in Chile until the 1990s. That belated premiere inspired Guzman to make this 1997 documentary, in which clips from the earlier film are threaded among interviews and powerful sequences showing the reactions of Chilean viewers. Whereas The Battle of Chile uses voice-over narration to summarize its on-the-spot footage, manipulated only minimally by editing, Chile, Obstinate Memory is more expansive. Without ignoring or hyperbolizing the way politics affects our sense of the past, it presents many galvanizing moments; at one point a viewer who was a child during the coup shamefacedly recalls his pleasure at being allowed to stay home from school”Read More »