1990s

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Director John Dahl’s The Last Seduction is an updated film noir centering around a seductive, cheerfully lethal femme fatale. Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino) talks her gullible, easily manipulated, doctor-husband Clay (Bill Pullman) into pulling off a $700,000 drug deal to pay off his gambling debts. But while Clay is in the shower, Bridget quietly leaves with the money. She ends up in a bar in a small town where she meets Mike (Peter Berg) and uses him to further her scheme to keep the money and get rid of her inconvenient husband. Linda Fiorentino was championed by many critics for a Best Actress Academy Award nomination, but neither she nor the movie could be nominated since the film had made its debut on cable television.Read More »

Mehrollah is a 14-year-old boy who is forced to find a job to support his family after his father dies. He travels to the southern parts of Iran, looking for work. Upon his return to his hometown, he notices certain changes in his family.Read More »

Synopsis:
Surprising film about an ordinary subject: a description in Moullet’s inimitably comic style of the French town of Foix. Moullet manages to put over several humorous facts about the town that you won’t find in the usual travel guides. (IFFR)Read More »

Set in 1977, back when sex was safe, pleasure was a business and business was booming, idealistic porn producer Jack Horner aspires to elevate his craft to an art form. Horner discovers Eddie Adams, a hot young talent working as a busboy in a nightclub, and welcomes him into the extended family of movie-makers, misfits and hangers-on that are always around. Adams’ rise from nobody to a celebrity adult entertainer is meteoric, and soon the whole world seems to know his porn alter ego, “Dirk Diggler”. Now, when disco and drugs are in vogue, fashion is in flux and the party never seems to stop, Adams’ dreams of turning sex into stardom are about to collide with cold, hard reality.Read More »

“Mina Tannenbaum” follows the ups and downs of a long-term friendship between two Jewish French women.
Young Mina and Ethel meet at ballet class, and instantly take to each other. Through the years, they maintain their closeness, even when their paths diverge. Mina, thin and lovely, goes through a period of intense shyness and then tries to become a successful artist; the plumper Ethel, insecure and often ashamed of her body, struggles to get her career as a journalist off the ground.
Then a misunderstanding threatens the relationship… with potentially tragic results.Read More »

Quote:
For a 13-year-old boy like Filipe, (played by José Afonso Pimentel) the prospect of a summer vacation in the Azores with his father (played by João Lagarto) is like a dream come true. It’s a time for them to become re-acquainted and it’s also a time for his first girlfriend and annoying questions to his father about love and sex.Read More »

An elderly woman living in Nagasaki, Japan takes care of her four grandchildren for their summer vacation. They learn about the atomic bomb that fell in 1945, and how it killed their grandfather.Read More »

Synopsis:
Legendary animators Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata team up to create this nostalgic animated work aimed at adult women, based on a manga by Yuko Tone and Kei Okamoto. The film centers on Taeko, a 27-year-old office worker who is sick of her job and ready for a change. She suddenly recalls the year 1966, when she was young and full of hope. She ventures to rural Yamagata prefecture to visit her sister and her brother-in-law. There she helps with the family farm where they turn saffron flowers into pigment for lipstick. While there she meets a hunky young farmer who’s the cousin of her brother-in-law. She is immediately taken with his hard-working, salt-of-the-earth ways.Read More »

Reflecting on Mao’s famous saying “Let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend,” Trinh T. Minh-ha’s SHOOT FOR THE CONTENTS—a title that alludes to a Chinese guessing game—is a unique excursion into the maze of allegorical naming and storytelling in China. The film ponders questions of power and change, politics and culture, as refracted by the Tiananmen Square massacre. It offers at the same time an inquiry into the creative process of filmmaking, intricately layering Chinese popular songs and classical music, the sayings of Mao and Confucius, women’s voices, and the words of artists, philosophers, and other cultural workers. The result is a meditative documentary that captures major shifts of interpretation in modern Chinese culture and politics.Read More »