1990s

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Wild Reeds (Les Roseaux Sauvages) 1994- André Téchiné’s coming-of-age drama, set in a quiet provincial town in 1962, is the best French film in years. The young characters are all deeply confused about their political, intellectual, and sexual identities; the director sets up their conflicts with masterly ease, and, using smooth, complex tracking shots, carries them toward resolutions that are tentative but real. The movie flows like a river. Téchiné simply takes his characters from one point to another-from juvenile ignorance to a place where they can see themselves, and others, a little more clearly-and he makes that short journey look momentous. Few movies dealing with teen-agers have been so accurate about the moral and emotional urgency of adolescents’ attempts to understand their lives, or so forgiving of their failures. Gaël Morel, élodie Bouchez, Stéphane Rideau, and Frédéric Gorny play the main characters, and they’re all terrific.Read More »

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Szulkin based his script on the themes of a folk parable. In a gloomy castle lived alone its owner, whose gaze had a strange and terrible power – it brought death. One day an old nobleman and his daughter, having lost their way, came to the castle. Soon the maiden became the wife of the lord of the castle…Read More »

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Dalila is married to Marcolino, a jeweller in a small provincial town. She is not getting younger. The life she leads leaves her frustrated.
Dalila’s husband is violent. She’s had enough. She decides to give herself a provocative make-over.
And provocative she becomes. Quickly, she finds herself a lover. And then announces that she has to have an operation for breast cancer. In fact, she’s having cosmetic surgery. She thinks her breasts are too small.Read More »

Kinema Jumpo “Best movie”-winner of 2000.

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Veteran director Shinji Somai lensed this heart-warming family drama about a shabby looking coot claiming to be the father of an elite salaryman. Hiroshi Nirasaki (Koichi Sato) is a securities broker desperately trying to keep the fact that his company is about to go belly-up from his high-strung upper-class wife (Yuki Saito). One day, while walking home from a particularly bad day at work, he gets accosted by an old bum (Tsutomu Yamazaki) who demands to be taken in by his son. Though his mother told him that his dad died when he was born, the drunken geezer knows enough about him and his short order cook mother (Sumiko Fuji) that he is almost convinced. Read More »

The protagonist finds out that some children were left behind in a sinking school, and is slowly driven mad as he tries to save them. A parable on the theme of the Last Judgment, numerous catastrophic events reveal a certain ambiguity in their origins, accompanied by the terrible suspicion that the things going on are some kind of a performance or theatrical production.Read More »

A woman places an ad in the “Soldier of Fortune” magazine to hire a contract killer.Read More »

Despite her husband’s doubts, a woman reaches out to her dead daughter with a psychiatrist’s help.Read More »

Zero Patience is a 1993 Canadian musical film written and directed by John Greyson. The film examines and refutes the urban legend of the alleged introduction of HIV to North America by a single individual, Gaëtan Dugas. Dugas, better known as Patient Zero, was tagged in the popular imagination with the blame in large measure because of Randy Shilts’s history of the early days of the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On. The film tells its story against the backdrop of a romance between a time-displaced Sir Richard Francis Burton and the ghost of “Zero” (the character is not identified by Dugas’ name).Read More »

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This sweet-natured if somewhat bizarre examination of teenage angst, Israeli-style, proves yet again what a dearth of original ideas seems to plague American cinema; watching this freewheeling, occasionally surreal, study of a young girl with Cassandra-like prophetic powers, is an example of wholly original filmmaking, for better or worse. If it is occasionally uneven in tone, it is just as bracingly refreshing in that you’ve probably never seen anything quite like it before.Read More »