Taken from NY Mag
His 2003 short My Josephine is a lovely, impressionistic look at an Arab man and woman who work in a laundromat, washing American flags for free. That may make it sound like a Message Movie, but it’s not. Told from the perspective of the lovelorn male in this relationship, this is a quiet, unassumingly lyrical film, shot with the kind of detail that reveals both the director’s understanding of human nature and his keen eye for evocative imagery.Read More »
Barry’s BFA thesis film.
Barry Jenkins is a filmmaker born and raised in the inner-city of Miami. After completing a bachelor’s degrees in film and creative writing, he relocated to Los Angeles where he worked as a director’s assistant and development associate for Harpo Films. Barry currently resides in San Francisco, working for the rent check by day and writing, writing and writing by night. He is the writer-director of the short films My Josephine and Little Brown Boy. Medicine For Melancholy is his first feature film.Read More »
Plot: Reeling from a brutal break-up, Kira sleeps with Max, a charming but disheveled wreck already committed to long-term girlfriend Sara. Max (no emotional sophisticate) becomes obsessed, mostly with Kira, but vaguely with his curious lack of conscience as well. Kira, fighting to win a job she hates and running aimless romantic loops, faces the precarious double challenge of choosing a next step and charting a course back to sanity. Good luck leading with your heart, when your heart is an utter emotional idiot.Read More »
David Robinson, The Times of London wrote:
Frumin has [a] gift for discovering the unexpected in every shot and character, and a lifelike way of inextricably mingling farce and tragedy.
-oOo-
One of the best Russian films of the 1990s, Viva Castro! is set in a small Russian town in 1965. “At this time Fidel Castro was as important for the Russian people as Elvis Presley was for the Americans,” says the director, Boris Frumin, who returned to Russia after sixteen years of exile in America to make this film.
Young Kolya is in love with his singing teacher, but his life isn’t easy. His father skips town after stealing some coins from a museum and his mother is sent to a labor camp as punishment. When the father returns a year later, Kolya becomes involved with the pretty young woman hired to nurse him.Read More »
A wry psychological comedy about a man who prefers his cat to his two wives. Some of the most famous Japanese players are the leads: the first wife is the legendary Isuzu Yamada (she was in over 300 movies between 1929 and 1956, had been married six times, and was still playing romantic roles); Kyôko Kagawa, usually a demure heroine, plays the unsympathetic second wife; Hisaya Morishige is the indolent cat-loving husband; the character actress Chieko Naniwa plays the mother. The story (by Junichirô Tanizaki) is set among shopkeepers at a small seaside town near Osaka, in the Kansai district. —Pauline KaelRead More »
Jutka, a young woman who works in a factory, falls in love with Andras, a university student. She pretends to be a student, to him and to his parents, and begins to live a lie. Finally she rebels against Andras and his demands and the social conventions that forced her to live a lie.Read More »
from rottentomatoes:
Born with a horribly disfigured face, and unable to become part of “normal”society, John Sedley turns to a life of crime. But his two fellow gang members trick him and Johnny is sent to prison. There he meets a plastic surgeon who takes sympathy on him and surgically transforms him into a new man. Now unrecognizable to those who once knew him, the once ugly duckling plots a vicious revenge.Read More »
Quote:
“The elegance and indisputable hard punch of Naruse’s storytelling become immediately clear the moment the lovers kiss and the director cuts, midclinch, to an almost identical shot of them kissing in the past, an edit that suggests this is a passion that transcends even time and space.”
– Manohla Dargis, New York Times (October 28, 2005)Read More »
Narrator: Martin Scorsese.
Nowhere else on television is such a genuine love for filmmaking consistently on display as in the Turner Classic Movie documentaries, especially when they have the audacity to stretch beyond household-name stars and directors. So it is with Martin Scorsese’s heartfelt tribute to Val Lewton, the producer responsible for such movie-buff fare as “Cat People” and “I Walked With a Zombie.” As always, the doc is linked to a retrospective of the subject’s work, and “The Man in the Shadows” more than achieves its objective of stoking interest in Lewton’s filmography.Read More »