When the idea of a film about the tango was proposed to director Carlos Saura by a producer, the director spent several months hammering out a scenario that used dance to propel the story about a dancer, Mario Suárez (Miguel Ángel Solá), injured in a recent car accident and freshly divorced, using a film about the tango to heal some deep personal wounds.

Woven into the dances-within-a-film-within-a-film are pieces evoking the tango as the social glue of Argentinian culture, as well as the music’s function during the dark years under Juan Peron, when tango music was played loud by the secret service to smother the cries of torture sessions.Read More »

Chicago, 1963. As head of the police department’s Major Crime Unit, Lieutenant Michael Torello must deal with the city’s most dangerous criminals. And possibly the most dangerous of all is Ray Luca, a young ambitious street hood who’s out to gain wealth and power by whatever means – including theft, threats, extortion and murder. As Luca begins his ruthless climb up the ladder of organized crime, leaving a growing number of victims in his wake, Torello becomes more and more determined to bring him down.Read More »

“IMDb” wrote:

A young woman is lying asleep on a bed. Her boyfriend, Nicky, gets up, looks out a window, and sees two men in black clothing standing outside by a car… waiting. Disturbed by this, Nicky makes a phone call and explains his predicament to someone on the other line.

Nicky meets with a bearded man sitting at a desk outside in a snow-covered junkyard about his situation. Nicky looks around at the desolate snowy landscape.

At Nicky’s house, Nicky sits at his kitchen table when a large man, accompanied by a woman who treats him deferentially, and another man. After an inaudible conversation, apparently about Nicky’s situation, the two men and woman leave. But the second man in the background says something to Nicky before leaving. Nicky looks out his window and again sees the two men waiting by a car. Nicky grabs a kitchen knife and places it under his belt. Nicky runs outside where he is apparently shot by the waiting men, and falls to the ground… dead. The final image shows Nicky’s girlfriend, still lying in bed asleep.Read More »

Quote:
Brass-balled, Bronx-born auteur Abel Ferrara is one of those two-fisted screen bards that always follows through on each sucker punch, his heart beating with Sam Fuller’s blood. His scorching morality plays and tainted-psyche humanizations are raw nerves exposed and chewed through, like a naked tornado called Hyde to Scorsese’s more calculated risk-taker Jekyll. However, what makes an Abel Ferrara film for me isn’t plot or casts of meaty, dilemma-torn characters. It’s in the gritty city itself, a filmmaking toybox for tones, textures, sounds, music and aesthetic. When Ferrara looks at New York City, he knows its tourist-trap beauty is bullshit and the lurid truth is in the blackened gum on the bottom of the postcard rack. He’s the director who would probably kick my pasty ass all the way to Chinatown if he heard this flowery praise.Read More »

Winner of the Golden Lion for first feature, Poetical Refugee is the story of Jallel, a North African immigrant in Paris. Claiming to be a refugee from war-torn Algeria in order to get residency, his life in the country of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ is one of homeless shelters, illegal jobs, assumed identities and emotionally complex sexual relationships. Director Abdel Kechiche, who was born in Tunisia and has worked for many years as an actor in France, refuses to portray Jallel as either hapless victim or angry rebel. Instead, he focuses on Jallel’s interpersonal relationships with his new community-not ghettoized North Africans, but an eclectic group of unemployed French and second-generation immigrants struggling to survive. Here, it is the wounded who heal the wounded, and Jallel, in spite of his own traumas, becomes a healing force for the emotionally troubled women whose lives intermingle with his. With superb performances by Sami Bouajila (Bye Bye), Aure Atika and Elodie Bouchez (The Dream Life of Angels), Poetical Refugee offers a moving and tender portrayal of life on the margins.Read More »

Filmed in a reformed train Wagon, sueur follows the performance as a belly
dancer of The secret of the Grain lead actress, Hafsia Herzi, who dances on
hot and popular musics.Read More »

Eustache’s debut film follows two young men near the place de Clichy, looking for fun and whatever trouble comes with it. Unsurprisingly, their attention ultimately falls on a girl. They go to a dancing called “Robinson”. Spurned when she decides to go dancing with someone else, their thoughts quickly turn to revenge. Slowly, we discover the layer of despair that sits just under their carefree appearance.Read More »

Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus
(Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes)
Jean Eustache, 1966. B&W. 47 min.
With Jean-Pierre Léaud, Gérard Zimmermann, Henri Martinez, René Gilson.

Daniel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is desperate to buy a new duffle coat but has no money to do so. Taking a job as a street-corner Santa Claus, he begins to earn income and, more surprisingly, the attention of many young women taken with his costume. Eustache infuses Daniel (and his hometown of Narbonne, where the film takes place) with a keen sense of compassion. As always, daily reality is at the forefront: how Daniel spends his time, his efforts to meet girls, his attempts to make money. A wonderfully earthy film, and Eustache’s first major work.Read More »

Photographer Alix Cléo-Roubaud shows her photos to a young man (Boris Eustache), talking about them as they look at them together. Each of the photos appears as a countershot. Yet after awhile, doubts emerge: we are not really seeing what is being described.

The penultimate film by Jean Eustache, the French director famed for The Mother and the Whore (1973), is Les Photos d’Alix (1980). It’s an 18-minute, 35-mm color film in which we see a photographer—Alix Cléo-Roubaud—showing her photographs to a young man (Eustache’s 20-year-old son Boris). As they work their way through a stack of black-and-white prints, the young man asks brief questions and Roubaud tells him where and how each photograph was made and what her intentions were, what interested her about the images. The photos often feature double exposures and other darkroom techniques (solarizing, masking, dodging, burning). In one of a man lying on a bed, the photographer has used a supplemental exposure to stretch the curving, old-fashioned headboard into a strange sinuous shadow. Another dreamlike images shows a bare-chested man floating in an expanse of milky white light. Later we see a landscape divided by nested rectangular zones of light and darkness created during the printing process.Read More »