A young married couple in today’s Moscow: He’s an unemployed guy who gets some money by giving rides to strangers at nights (the illegal taxi driving so common in Russia). She’s a young graphic designer who just got her first job. The film tracks their unstable relationship throughout a year. Both have different backgrounds and pursue different goals in life, and gradually the differences, no matter how insignificant, become fatally important for their relationship.
Oxana Bychkova makes a poignant portrait of a young, immature love and subtly shows how feelings inevitably become routine, against the will of the lovers. This unsentimental and touching drama unfolds gradually but its pace is engaging and has genuine tension.Read More »

Synopsis:
Young-nam was a promising graduate of the police academy before she was transferred to the small seaside village, which was caused by her misconduct. On her first day to the village, she encounters with Dohee who is the girl living in the town, seeming to have somewhat gloomy looking face. As Young-nam tries to accommodate with her new surroundings, an accident of Dohee’s grandma getting killed by falling in the seashore cliff happens. As to protect the girl from her stepfather’s abuse, Young-nam let Dohee stay at her place but things turn out to be more mysterious as she gets to know her.Read More »

A radio, a warning repeated in a loop, intuition of a catastrophe that slowly approaches through the ruins and houses of a tropical rainforest. A natural disaster is coming, a natural disaster is coming, a natural disaster is coming… The paradox and its danger are served: a warning endlessly repeated may become a strange peace message. Read More »

We Utopians are happy / This will last forever”

Loosely framed by Plato’s invocation of the lost continent of Atlantis in 360 BC and its re-re-resurrection via a 1970s science fiction pulp novel, Atlantis is a documentary portrait of Utopia — an island that has never / forever existed beneath our too-mortal feet. Herein is folk song and pagan rite, religious march and reflected temple, the sea that surrounds us all. Even though we are slowly sinking, we are happy and content.

“Atlantis interrogates this space of fabulation without ever leaving the real island behind, finding itself caught between a portrait of place and the conjuring of a drowned paradise.”

–Erika Balsom, ArtforumRead More »

Quote:
Abandoned by their girlfriends for the summer, teenagers Tenoch and Julio meet the older Luisa at a wedding. Trying to be impressive, the friends tell Luisa they are headed on a road trip to a beautiful, secret beach called Boca del Cielo. Intrigued with their story and desperate to escape, Luisa asks if she can join them on their trip. Soon the three are headed out of Mexico City, making their way toward the fictional destination. Along the way, seduction, argument and the contrast of the trio against the harsh realities of the surrounding poverty ensue.Read More »

X Femmes (English: X Women) is a French television series of short films shown on Canal+ in 2008–2009. They were shot by female directors with the goal of producing erotica and soft-core pornography from a female point of view.

Episodes

Season 1 – Original air date 25 October 2008

1. Le bijou indiscret (The jewel indiscreet).
Director: Arielle Dombasle.
Stars: Arielle Dombasle, Jérémie Elkaïm and Paz de la HuertaRead More »

Quote:
During her Italian vacation, a young and beautiful American tourist finds herself as a guest in a coastal villa inhabited by a bunch of odd people.Read More »

The Wind That Shakes the Barley is a 2006 British-Irish war drama film directed by Ken Loach, set during the Irish War of Independence (1919-1922) and the Irish Civil War (1922-1923). Written by long-time Loach collaborator Paul Laverty, this drama tells the fictional story of two County Cork brothers, Damien O’Donovan (Cillian Murphy) and Teddy O’Donovan (Pádraic Delaney), who join the Irish Republican Army to fight for Irish independence from the United Kingdom. It takes its title from the Robert Dwyer Joyce song “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” a song set during the 1798 rebellion in Ireland and featured early in the film.

Widely praised, the film won the Palme d’Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Loach’s biggest box office success to date,[4] the film did well around the world and set a record in Ireland as the highest-grossing Irish-made independent film ever.Read More »

Quote:
One of the longest-running series in film history began with Ishiro Honda’s grim, black-and-white allegory for the devastation wrought on Japan by the atomic bomb. As his visual metaphor, Honda uses a 400-foot tall mutant dinosaur called Gojira, awakened from the depths of the sea as a rampaging nuclear nightmare, complete with glowing dorsal fins and fiery, radioactive breath. Crushing ships, villages, and buildings in his wake, Gojira marches toward Tokyo, bringing all of the country’s worst nightmares back until an evil more terrible bomb — capable of sucking all the oxygen from the sea — returns the monster to its watery grave. The original film is chilling, despite some rather unconvincing man-in-a-suit special effects, and brimming with explicitly-stated anti-American sentiment. All of that was removed for the U.S. release directed by Terry Morse. It was replaced with bad dubbing and tedious added footage starring Raymond Burr. The resulting edit was just another monster movie, but was still popular enough to assure future Toho Studios monster films a wide American release. Gojira No Gyakushu (1955) was next in the series.Read More »