1980s

Two killers revenge a wirepuller of the underworld in Yokohama.

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An adults-only entry to Hong Kong’s new-wave film movement, House of the Lute is elegant and engaging. The classy production is accompanied at all times by sounds of a lute – a dynamic instrument adding audio punctuation marks and exclamation points throughout the course of the story. A television set features prominently in the second half and adds interest. Aside from providing the advertising spiel for the famed Darkie toothpaste brand, the TV also brings additional issues to the screen. It appears no coincidence that a forced sex scene between Shek and a less-than-willing Mrs Lui plays against a news report of Hong Kong’s rising social ills, notably rape and murder. Later, a local farmer brushes aside books and smashes away antique pottery to better view the TV – akin to how Hong Kong has bulldozed heritage in its hurtling drive for urban modernity. House of the Lute lends itself well to retrospective viewing.Read More »

A small group of well-to-do vacationers go on a hiking trip into the woods. Foolishly unprepared to deal with Mother Nature and their situation, they wander around lost for days and weeks, becoming more and more fatigued, hungry, and desperate. A brief encounter with a pair of epicureans on a bridge fails to garner them any of the gluttons’ feast due to a language barrier. Eventually their party begins to die, and the survivors ration their meat among them, attaching a religious-type ritual to its dispensation.Read More »

A global peace film produced in 1983-86 by the Swedish Peace & Arbitration Society and local support groups in Sweden, Canada, USA, Australia, New Zealand, USSR, Mexico, Japan, Scotland, Polynesia, Mozambique, Denmark, France, Norway, West Germany, with post-production support from the National Film Board in Montreal, Canada.Read More »

Synopsis:
This film’s based on Yuri Pakhomov’s short story “Test priyekhal” (Father-in-law Arrived). An elderly man arrives on a visit to his daughter in Moscow. She is away on a business trip, so he is looked after by his son-in-law, who has a very different character from his…Read More »

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A sardonic and irreverent contemporary adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet Goes Business is an idiosyncratically whimsical, yet incisive satire on corporate greed, materialism, corruption, and vengeance. Shot in black and white and employing high contrast lighting, the film achieves an atmospheric noir that reflects Aki Kaurismäki’s irrepressibly droll sense of humor and penchant for understated irony. Kaurismäki incorporates traditional, often manipulative and hackneyed stylistic devices of lush, overarching music, directed stage lighting, expressionistic gestures, skewed camera angles, and meticulously composed slow motion shots in order to playfully subvert dramatic convention: Lauri’s angered departure from Hamlet’s office; Hamlet’s self-consciously tormented delivery of a poem to Ophelia; the overdramatic, but anticlimactic plot device of the Murder of Gonzago play-within-a-play episode to expose Klaus’s treachery; the exquisite choreography of Ophelia’s final moments of despair. By integrating muted emotion with exaggerated theatricality, Kaurismäki creates a delirious and incongruent fusion of highbrow art film and pop culture kitsch – a patently iconoclastic comedic tragedy on indecision, inertia, and alienation.
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Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, only became a metropolis when it got its first serial killer. The said killer is a big, fat, shy and mother-fixated man, played to deadpan perfection by one of Serbia’s greatest comedians, Tasko Nacic. He lives with his cruel mother in a gothic apartment resembling those from Mario Bava’s films. He sells flowers and lives by the motto, ‘Those who don’t like carnations don’t deserve to live!’ His victims are the young women who refuse to buy his flowers and humiliate him in public. The film follows the exploits of three main characters: the strangler, the incompetent and highly neurotic inspector on his trail and the nerdy rock singer attracted to the killer’s exploits. The latter’s oedipal desires and sexual angst turn him into a promoter of the strangler’s crimes (through a song devoted to him) and a potential strangler in his own right. –IMDbRead More »

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This film is one of Ruiz’s greatest. Once, I read, with his film Ruiz pay tribute to Jean Luc Godard’s Le Mepris. So then, I asked Ruiz (Santiago, 2005)… You were influenced by this Godard’s film… ? – which film ? – … This film Le Mepris with Jack Palance and… your film features same kind of music (Georges Delerue’s music is an actor in Le Mepris, and as far as I can feel Jorge Arriagada composed great music for Ruiz’s film, but does not top Delerue’s), (…) close atmosphere, and two languages… – more than two languages ! – (answered Ruiz). Yes, you are right (…), and then Ruiz goes : “Probably I took it from there”. So, as far as art form and influence is concerned we are aware where inspiration is coming from. Read More »

Focusing on the culture and beliefs of the people in the state of Minas Geraes in Brazil, this highly innovative drama by director Carlos Alberto Prates-Correia continuously blurs the line between fantasy and reality. At center stage is a man and his life, viewed from the perspective of his dreams, visions of the past, interpretations of the present, and a “real” world somewhere in-between. Cultural and social vignettes from life in Minas Geraes are interspersed throughout the film; the avant-garde approach of Prates-Correia contorts some of these vignettes into enigmas.Read More »