Amadi, a musician from Lagos, Nigeria, arrives in São Paulo, Brazil, with a mission: to locate his brother, Ikenna, who has recently broken all ties with their family – becoming, as the Igbo say, “lost in transition” – and bring him back to Nigeria. Amadi, who was always been more laid-back and carefree, in contrast to Ikenna’s more objective-driven personality, has to rise to the occasion so as to not frustrate his parents, as well as for self-serving reasons: he is worried that if Ikenna is not found, the older-brother mantle will be left to him, and with it, the responsibility to provide for their family.Read More »

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An unmarried actress in Munich becomes pregnant but decides against marrying the child’s father, and eventually moves in with a more agreeable man she meets on a winter sports holiday.Read More »

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The Stone Cross (Kaminnyi khrest, 1968), based on two short stories (“The Stone Cross” and “The Thief,” both published in 1900) by Galician novelist Vasyl’ Stefanyk. The Russified Osyka initially proposed an adaptation of an Andrei Platonov story, but Tsvirkunov reportedly told Osyka, “In Ukraine we have our own Platonov, one who is closer to us.” Thereafter, the director found a Russian translation of Stefanyk, coincidentally with commentary by Platonov, believing that with this he had found the “Ukrainian Platonov.” Having discussed Stefanyk’s significance for Ukrainian culture with Osyka, Drach then agreed to write the screenplay.Read More »

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Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo is a refreshingly original and complexly taut film that operates on a multifaceted level that is, all at once: compelling, macabre, funny, tragic, and even romantic. From the opening sequence of a car navigating agilely through an endless snow covered road with a car in tow, the Coen brothers deftly craft a highly engaging and comically sinister contemporary masterpiece. Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy), a Minneapolis car salesman, arranges to meet with two petty criminals in a Fargo bar, Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare).Read More »

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Like that famous saying, Tan Chui Mui speaks softly, but she carries a big stick. Her films are quiet little affairs, but boy, do they pack an emotional wallop. She has a knack for easing you into a situation, and getting you deeply involved with her characters. I liken it to Nabokov, who can say a thousand things in one sentence. Tan can create such emotional push-and-pull between her characters without them saying much. It’s all in the doing, not the uttering. Show, not tell. And she does it beautifully.Read More »

Yun Fei, a young poet, seeks the advice of an old university friend who lives in the Beijing suburbs, discovering that his friend has gone into business breeding black chickens. Discouraged about his future as a poet, Yun Fei starts a relationship with a colorblind young girl who encourages him to persevere. But even this new relationship is not enough to inspire him to write. It’s at this point that he buys a pirated record whose magical powers bring him the success he’s longed for. However, sudden fame does not seem to solve everything. The first film of Beijing theatre director Meng Jing Hui, Chicken Poets is an insightful and poetic look at materialism and the younger generation in China.Read More »

An extraordinary journey through the material that makes up our habitat: concrete and its ancestor, stone. Victor Kossakovsky raises a fundamental question: how do we inhabit the world of tomorrow ?Read More »

For his latest film, Yoshida turned once more to melodrama as a means of sensitively engaging a difficult political issue, here the devastating legacy of the Hiroshima bombing. Mariko Okada stars, in her 154th film, as the eldest of three women trying to uncover the hidden family ties that may or may not bind them together. A shared memory of the Hiroshima disaster draws the three generations together in a search back to the very site of the atomic trauma that unites them, with Hiroshima standing in as a figure for the limit point of the national imagination. Among Yoshida’s more classical films, Women in the Mirror is an assuredly stylish late work that carefully balances the three women’s stories as interlocking pieces of a complex psychological and historiographic puzzle.Read More »

A true animated film about invented islands. About an imaginary, linguistic, political territory. About a real or dreamed country, or something in between.Read More »