Shelly Winters is great at playing unhinged characters. In WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH HELEN?, she teams up with Debbie Reynolds in a tale about two mothers of convicted killers who move to california in order to escape the publicity and threats against them. Helen (Winters) begins to slowly unravel, revealing the true psychotic within. Haunted by the death of her husband, she becomes increasingly dangerous to herself and others, especially Adelle (Reynolds), who may or may not survive. There are some snappy dance routines (highlighting Debbie Reynolds’ talent and cuteness) scattered throughout. Watch for Dennis Weaver (Duel) as Adelle’s love interest.-WHOEVER SLEW AUNTIE ROO?- has Shelly Winters as Roo, the rich widow of a famous magician.
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The first film of Tizuka Yamasaki, a young Brazilian woman of Japanese ancestry, Gaijin: Roads to Freedom is based on the experiences of Yamasaki’s own grandmother in coming to Brazil in the wave of immigration at the turn of the century, when Japanese were encouraged to join the Brazilian labor force during that country’s coffee boom. In an effort to comply with the immigration agents’ preference for family units, a very young Titoe marries Yamada, a man whom she has never met, and the two leave for Brazil. Life on the plantation is close to slavery: workers, forced to buy food at the plantation store, are presented with falsified accounts, and at the end of the year are still in debt to the plantation. The film treats relations between Brazilian plantation owners and foremen and their Japanese laborers (a group which, traditionally, did not cause labor problems), as well as relations between the Japanese and other immigrant groups, in particular the Italians. A compelling story of a woman’s struggle to survive, spanning many years, is juxtaposed with the growing union consciousness among immigrant workers in Brazil. Read More »

A murder and a future teller meet in a desert road. He, driving his chevrolet, a short-cut hair, a rosemary leaf held behind his ear, a yellow shirt of shiny satin. She, walking on the paved road, heavy red lipstick on, a flowery dress with a loose skirt, and red shoes matching the lipstick. He offers her a ride and, after hesitating for a moment, the two of them engage on a bizarr love affair, an outlaw love, where boredom many times gives way to tragedy, raising the agony of a holiday spent in the abyss. Agony originarily means a fighter who fights on the limit of his endurance.
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Synopsis:

An illuminating – and extremely rare – documentary profile of one of the greatest filmmakers of our time, Béla Tarr. Filmed during the production of his final masterpiece, The Turin Horse, this film features clips, behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with longtime collaborators.

From December 2008 until June 2010, Béla Tarr gathered his “cinema family” near Budapest for his last film: The Turin Horse. This shooting family, which has been collaborating with Tarr for years or even decades, includes Tarr’s wife/co-director/editor Agnes Hranitzky, cinematographer Fred Kelemen (himself a director of some renown), scriptwriter Laszlo Krasznahorkai, musician Mihaly Víg, composer Akosh Szelevenyi, and lead actors Janos Derzsi and Erika Bok.Read More »

One of the most exciting films of 2009: Amit Duttas first feature is based on three short stories by Vinod Kumar Shukla and Saadat Hasan Manto. Maybe it indeed is about the problems of masculinity in the modern world (the director says so, at least), but there’s so much more to find in these images. There isn’t one conventional moment in the film. Dutta, one of the most idiosyncratic directors working today, makes every single shot completely his own.Read More »

Quote:
This utterly compelling psychological thriller from Michael Haneke – one of cinema’s most daring, original and controversial directors – stars Daniel Auteuil as Georges, a TV presenter who begins to receive mysterious and alarming packages containing covertly filmed videos of himself and his family. To the mounting consternation of Georges and his wife (Juliette Binoche), the footage on the tapes – which arrive wrapped in drawings of disturbingly violent images – becomes increasingly personal, and sinister anonymous phone calls are made. Convinced he knows the identity of the person responsible, Georges embarks on a rash and impulsive course of action that throws up some unpleasant facts about his past and leads to shockingly unexpected consequences.Read More »

A group of young Londoners struggle to find meaning in their lives while masking their discontent with sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll.Read More »

The face of an exhausted man breathing deeply, his face agitated and, nearby, the sea. A Buddhist monk walks barefoot and incredibly slowly through Marseille – so slowly, that his progress is barely perceptible and he becomes a calming influence in the midst of the town’s goings-on.

More like a performance or installation art project than an ‘art film’, “Le Voyage en Occident” (Xi you) is a follow-up to the 2012 short “Walker” or a kind of second segment, set in Marseille (South France – French Mediterranean coast).
Consisting of only 14 shots of varying lengths – from very brief to a centrepiece of approximately 20 minutes – the film shows two men, narratively unconnected, who finally come together in a sequence that shows off both actors’ physical skills and sense of timing.
Lee Kang-sheng, who features in all Tsai Ming-liang’s films, plays the monk with impressive energy. His uniform slow motion footsteps and devoted posture turn his performance into a veritable tour de force as he unswervingly makes his way from the coast to the market in Noailles (popular market with mixed communities people), like an illusion in his bright red robe. Xi You represents another edition of the director’s series of short films that expand Lee Kang-sheng’s thirty minute slow walking performance at Taipei’s National Theatre into a ‘slow walking expedition’. Unusual, brilliantly chosen camera angles provide a collage of various districts in Marseille, creating a hypnotic space in which this meditative peregrination becomes a surprising journey of discovery.Read More »

Plot synopsis from AMG:

Shot on-location on the streets of Bombay, Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay is the gritty tale of Krishna (Shafiq Syed, a runaway discovered by Nair), a boy kicked out of his home, and abandoned by the traveling circus he had joined. In desperation, he uses the little money he has to buy a one-way ticket to the nearest city, which turns out to be Bombay. “Come back a movie star,” the ticket agent tells him mockingly. In Bombay, Krishna joins a small community of street kids, and gets a job delivering tea. Soon, everyone in the downtrodden neighborhood knows him as “Chaipau” (tea boy). Krishna wants to save five hundred rupees, enough money to get back into his mother’s good graces and return home. Chillum (Raghubir Yadav), a streetwise young man who deals drugs for the local kingpin, Baba (Nana Patekar), takes Krishna under his wing. The sly but cruel Baba has a mistress, Rekha (Aneeta Kanwar), who works as a prostitute. She has a young daughter, Manju (Hansa Vithal), who has a crush on Krishna, but Krishna only has eyes for the girl they call “Sweet Sixteen,” a virginal teenager who is being forced into prostitution. Eventually, Baba fires the surly Chillum, and Krishna finds himself struggling to keep Chillum alive by supporting his drug habit. Many of the roles in the film are played by non-actors, including the street kids, and an actual madame who allowed Nair to film scenes in her brothel. The Harvard-educated Nair began her filmmaking career working on documentaries. Salaam Bombay, her narrative feature debut, won worldwide critical acclaim, and was awarded the Camera D’Or at Cannes.
— Josh RalskeRead More »