I could be bounded in a nutshell and call myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams…

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Hamlet is a 1996 film version of William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, adapted for the screen and directed by Kenneth Branagh, who also stars in the titular role as Prince Hamlet. The film also features Derek Jacobi as King Claudius, Julie Christie as Queen Gertrude, Kate Winslet as Ophelia, Michael Maloney as Laertes, Richard Briers as Polonius, and Nicholas Farrell as Horatio. Other notable appearances include Robin Williams, Gérard Depardieu, Jack Lemmon, Billy Crystal, Rufus Sewell, Charlton Heston, Richard Attenborough, Judi Dench, John Gielgud and Ken Dodd.Read More »

Canadian director Guy Maddin (THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD) takes his quasi-documentary strain of filmmaking to a satisfying, and deliriously inventive, extreme with MY WINNIPEG. The film follows Maddin, who narrates and plays the character … Full Descriptionof Darcy Fehr, as he tries to escape the Canadian city of Winnipeg. Maddin grew up in Winnipeg and spent his entire life there. The city seems to be casting a magnetic hold over him, so he decides to film his way out. He moves a cast of actors into his childhood home, asking them to recreate pivotal moments from his upbringing. Here the family gathers to undertake mundane chores and to watch a TV show named “Ledge Guy.” The show stars Maddin’s mother as a woman who tries to stop her son from committing suicide in each episode. Maddin couples these scenes with a warped history of Winnipeg, which include stories of a legendary racetrack fire and the sad tale of the city’s ailing ice hockey team. MY WINNIPEG finds Maddin sticking closely to the filmmaking style that he developed in features such as COWARDS BEND THE KNEE. The film apes silent-era techniques; shots fall in and out of focus; and Maddin uses Super-8, 16mm, and even a cell phone camera to help drive his vision.Read More »

Glorious (2009, Canada, 12 min.)
Glorious tells the story of an aging crime family patriarch, holed up in a derelict apartment block. Maddin pulls out all the stops as the film unfolds into an orgy of paranoia, bursting ammo shells, rackety disarmaments and oral gratification from beyond the grave. Featuring the music of British/Dutch composer Richard Ayres.Read More »

Fancy, Fancy Being Rich combines Guy Maddin’s favorite film fetishes and is thus instantly recognizable as one of his flamboyant creatures. His visual technique replicates the scratched and scarred silver nitrate skin of the silent films he idolizes. His works have an operatic flavor, as if perfectly located on a melodramatic borderline between repression and release. Perhaps this also explains the hilarious sexual symbolism that runs rampant through his intricately imagined and riotously perverse mise en scene.Read More »

While their mother is dying in the modern Gimli, Manitoba hospital, two young children are told an important tale by their Icelandic grandmother about Ainar the lonely, his friend Gunnar, and the angelic Snjofrieder in a Gimli of old.Read More »

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Belle Epoque, or the Last Waltz in Sarajevo (Belle epoque, ili poslednji valcer u Sarajevu, 2007) by Nikola Stojanovic is a historical film, which means it is film as history. But it is also film history (as in the study of film)—the work of a film historian. The historical context of the film is made explicit immediately, through the use of pre-credit intertitles questioning what happened in the turn-of-the-(20th )-century Balkans. A subsequent title of dedication “to the pioneers of film” marks the work as a love letter to cinema. In this case, the “belle époque” mentioned in the title refers most closely to the formative years of cinema. It is the subtitle “the last waltz in Sarajevo” that is aligned with the political history of the film. This extended opening intertitle sequence continues, posing the possibility that to understand the wars of secession in Yugoslavia at the end of the twentieth century, we can study the beginning of that same century, where its historical roots lie. So begins a unique film that is an attempt to resurrect history at the same time that, reflexively, the film’s very existence as a finished product is one of resurrected film history itself.Read More »

Guy Maddin (Sullivan Brown) reluctantly returns to his childhood home, an abandoned Canadian island, where his parents ran an orphanage. As Guy fulfills his dying mother’s request to paint the lighthouse which served as the orphanage, memories of strange events there overpower him. An undercover investigation by child author/detective Wendy (Katherine Scharhon) and a revolt by the repressed children, blew open a cover-up by Guy’s parents. Wendy disguised herself as her brother Chance and discovered that Maddin’s inventor father performed outro scientific experiments on the orphans. In black and white, with title cards, plus narration by Isabella Rossellini. In the film’s opening weeks, some showings included live narrators (such as Crispin Glover, Lou Reed, Barbara Steele), an orchestra, a castrato, and costumed sound effects techs.Read More »

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“The screenplay is a mess, with enough plot holes to drive the latest-model SUV through. Still, the film is colorful and chock-full of energy and several standout moments. It ain’t perfect, yet it’s far from boring.
The bottom line here is whether 8 Million Ways to Die is worth seeing. It is. A guilty pleasure of mine for over sixteen years, it can provide a whopping good time if you’re willing to overlook its many flaws, and just let the innate craziness of it all work on you. Nothing in it is the least bit logical; then again, there’s not a whole lot about it that’s stiff — there’s an aliveness, a pulsating sense of sleaze and profaneness permeating throughout it that can be quite liberating…
Forget the logical lapses and just revel in its quintessential profaneness.”
— Jack Sommersby, efilmcritic.comRead More »

The Little White Cloud that Cried is an explicit tribute to legendary underground queer filmmaker Jack Smith (link). The film centers around an epic transsexual orgy, and it is very graphic.

It was commissioned for the Jack Smith festival “Five Flaming Days in a Rented World ” in Berlin.Read More »