Quote:
You could potentially create some sort of slogan from Garde à vue meeting Buffet froid, if it was at all possible to classify the unclassifiable director Quentin Dupieux, as illustrated by Keep an Eye Out, the new film by the very offbeat director of Steak, Rubber (Cannes Critics’ Week in 2010), Wrong (in competition at Sundance in 2012), Wrong Cops (Piazza Grande at Locarno in 2013) and Reality (Horizons section at Venice in 2014). In a feature film as zany as ever that marks the director’s return to the French language, the filmmaker has nevertheless embarked on an interesting and subtle variation of his exploration of absurd realism.Read More »

German actress Maria Schrader subsequently became well-known as the director of the prize-winning 2020 Netflix miniseries Unorthodox. But in this 2016 feature film her considerable directing talents are already on clear display as she portrays Austrian author Stefan Zweig’s years of exile after 1936, moving between Buenos Aires, New York, and Brazil in search of a new home.

Zweig, whose writings inspired the film The Grand Budapest Hotel, was one of the most prominent Jewish intellectuals in Europe between the wars. Schrader shows him struggling with life as a nomad and with his separation from the homeland whose language had always nourished him. Though in despair at the collapse of European civilisation, Zweig hesitates to publicly denounce the Nazi regime…Read More »

Acclaimed Spanish filmmaker Rodrigo Sorogoyen (MOTHER, THE REALM) made his Cannes debut with this riveting rural thriller in which issues of class, modernity and masculinity erupt into violence. Well-to-do French couple Antoine (Denis Ménochet, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS) and Olga (Marina Foïs, POLISSE) are happily settled into their new life in a quaint Galician village, farming the land and rehabbing old houses. But their bucolic existence is threatened when new wind turbines are proposed, promising a huge payout for the struggling locals but a disaster for the traditional life Antoine and Olga have been cultivating. Voting against the project, they make enemies of brothers Xan (Luis Zahera, THE REALM) and Lorenzo (newcomer Diego Anido) as long-simmering tensions reach a boiling point.Read More »

From DVD booklet:
After Perséphone, his first film which he describes as “an experimental, mythological poem” and shoots under the pseudonym Luc Zangrie, he makes a portrait of playwright Michel de Ghelderode together with his friend Jean Raine. It introduces us to the world of a creator obsessed with and fascinated by death. If biographic references are present, they are only there in order to place the writer in the right setting: nostalgia for Bruges and Flanders, solitary wanders through a backward-looking, legendary Brussels. Ghelderode’s gravelly voice is the leitmotiv of the film, which focuses on rehearsals of his plays at the Théâtre de Poche and with the puppets of the Théâtre Royal de Toone. We accompany him into his study, a place of dreams and fantasy, full of baroque objects that define his world.Read More »

The Family, Paul Watson, 1974

12 x 30’ – First “fly on the wall” documentary serial.
Press Critics Prize – National Archive.

A ‘fly on the wall’ look at the working-class Wilkins family from Reading.

Modelled on the 13-part observational series, An American Family (US, d. Craig Gilbert, 1972), producer Paul Watson’s 12-part The Family (BBC, 1974) is credited with creating the concept of the ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentary in Britain. Regardless, Watson’s cinema verité-style, warts-and-all portrait of the working-class Wilkins family certainly popularised an ‘observational’ style still seen as the defining characteristic of British documentary some twenty-five years later.Read More »

Papà is a more comedic film where Giorgetta (Menichelli) is caught between a father and son, and more broadly, two ways of life: the Count di Larzac, Parisian man of leisure, and his rustic son Giovanni, who has been living in the same rural village as Giorgetta. This film is an adaptation of a 1911 three-act stage comedy by Robert de Flers and Gaston Arman de Caillavet, also called Papa.Read More »

In The Fruit Tree a young woman, Sharleece, wanders through a house that is available to rent in the sleepy desert town where she lives, California City. Looking out of the window evokes unexpected memories of her childhood home in Los Angeles.Read More »

Synopsis
A very personal interpretation, to say the least, of the passion of the Christ According to St. John. (imdb)Read More »

Bibi comes to her aunt Toni’s boarding house where she is seduced by lesbian women. Soon, no one is safe from her insatiable hunger.Read More »