Review by Scott Tobias:

A giant pet stork, with scanning eyes that quietly observe the human folly surrounding it, lends sanity and stability to Otar Ioseliani’s cracked comic roundelay Farewell, Home Sweet Home, perhaps because it’s the only character comfortable with its lot in life. The others, mainly members of a wealthy Parisian family, are leading absurd double lives in secret, illustrating the cliché, “the grass is greener on the other side.” With exceptionally fluid camerawork and a gently mocking touch, Ioseliani’s virtually plotless slice-of-life borrows elements from several great directors at once, combining the class-conscious irony of Luis Buñuel and the near-silent comedy of Jacques Tati with the daisy-chain elegance of Max Ophüls’ The Earrings Of Madame De… It takes time to get oriented to the peculiar rhythms of Ioseliani’s world, which establishes characters through behavior rather than dialogue, and takes only a slightly skewed perspective on the repetition and tedium of everyday life. There are no punchlines, no dramatic outbursts, and no traditional three-act structure, just an association of events that poke fun at the fickleness of human nature. Centering on the inhabitants of a suburban château, the characters attempt to escape their own lives by taking on separate identities. A well-to-do 19-year-old (Nico Tarielashvili) moonlights as a lowly dishwasher at a Paris bistro and hangs out with scruffy beggars; his mother (Lily Lavina), a businesswoman who flies to and from work in a helicopter, fancies herself a singer; and her father (Ioseliani) plays with a child’s train set while drinking himself into a stupor. Meanwhile, a penniless sailor (Philippe Bas) dresses up in a suit and picks up women in a rented Harley Davidson, including a pretty barmaid (Stephanie Hainque) who rebuffs Tarielashvili’s advances. There are at least another dozen other minor players, connected by the gliding camera movements that seamlessly link one comic vignette to the next. With its assured, breezily unassuming design, mapped out with architectural precision, Farewell, Home Sweet Home may sound like the work of an egghead formalist. But Ioseliani’s warm, open-ended style, combined with his remarkably adroit use of non-actors, impresses with the unpracticed spontaneity of real life.Read More »

Plot synopsis:
Dennis, a collega dropout, arrives to stay with his unemployed Coors drinking stepbrother Charlie. Charlie has athleitc sex all over a house with his mistress (top billed redhead Sharon Kelly) and later with a blonde. Dennis has sex with his neglected sister in law, then with Kelly. A detective hired by Charlie does it with another blonde on a couch. The music includes sappy soft rock songs. The scenes are within typical 70s decors.

Summers and Kelly wents on to become 80s hard X stars.Read More »

Quote:
Lucio Fulci and Edwige Fenech? Yep, that’s right. Like so many other Italian directors of the time Fulci did a lot of sex comedies so perhaps it was inevitable that at some point he would have crossed paths with one of the leading actresses. In La Pretora (the French release title translates as The Judge and the Whore) Fenech plays twin sisters, one a judge and the other a porn star. Enemies of the judge devise a plan to confuse the two and create problems. Or at least that’s what seems to be happening since there’s no subtitles and they would be helpful in parts. It’s a bit slow going at first but there’s a good bit of Fenech later in the film (the screenshot of Fenech combing her pubic hair kept being deleted by the image host so I left it out). For Fulci fans this is only for completists because it’s not very Fulci-ean and has zero horror elements. It could have been done by numerous directors. Fenech fans, though, will consider it a must.Read More »

James Benning’s latest is a three hour+ shot featuring light, clouds and the much anticipated return of a BNSF train. Only info about this on the net is that a recent intended screening was cancelled.Read More »

SYNOPSIS
On the eve of the First World War, a wealthy count, Forbek, builds a rocco pleasure dome in the French countryside. He invites his wife and his friends to live a life of idyllic seclusion inside the dome. In 1982, the same dome is the venue for a teaching seminar attended by a number of teachers with some radical ideas for educating children. Both Forbek and the seminar’s organisers are striving for similar things, the creation of a better world. Both are doomed to failure…
taken from here
Read More »

Quote:
A young girl’s life is turned upside down when her mother brings home a new boyfriend

Quote:
From the start, I knew the British director Andrea Arnold had captured something volatile and splendid in Fish Tank. A girl named Katie Jarvis plays 15-year-old Mia, who in the first shots stares out the window of a high-rise, working-class tenement in London’s East End — the window of a vacant flat where she practices her hip-hop moves to the sound of music from tiny speakers.Read More »

Quote:
The Forty-First, Boris Lavrenyev’s novella, written in only two days, has proven enduringly popular. It tells the story of a young woman snarpshooter fighting with the Reds in Turkestan. She misses her forty-first victim, a handsome White lieutenant, and ends up escorting him, by boat, into captivity across the Aral Sea. A storm, however, strands the two on an island. Sick with pneumonia, the lieutenant is nursed back to health by his Red escort, and the two fall in love. At the last, however, Mariutka shoots him dead when he tries to escape, thus making him “the forty-first.”
Sorok pervyy had been filmed as a silent, from the author’s own script, by Yakov Protazanov in 1927.Read More »

Synopsis
In La Goulette, a small harbour town in the Tunis suburbs, Youssef, the Muslim, Jojo, the Tunisian Jew, and Giuseppe, the Sicilian Catholic, are as inseparable as their three 16-year-old daughters, Meriem, Gigi and Tina. In a fit of provocation the three girls all swear that they’ll lose their virginity on the day of the feast of the Madonna, each with a boy from a religion different to hers ! Once this taboo is brought out into the open, all three families fall out. But the friendship between the three fathers is so strong that it reconciles them, closer than ever before… until the eve of the Israel-Arab Six Day War in 1967 that forces apart Jews and Arabs all over the world.Read More »

The newest documentary from, probably, the world’s greatest living journalist- John Pilger- looks at the “dysfunctional relationship” that Australians have developed with the indigenous Aborigines. Read More »