1990s

Mental Masturbation, a Super 8 short imbued with a blessed soundtrack of trance music (an element that would be recurrent in all his latter films), was a point of start into what would be the most appreciated (and hated) element of Manuli’s cinema: The rescue of the absurdist to paint an atmosphere of freedom, in which music (in this case, electronic music) serves as the only link of meaningful communication between its characters, or between its protagonists and the settings of his films, the relation man-man and man-nature.
(translated from desistfilm.com)Read More »

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This docudrama, filmed in the frozen northern reaches of Canada and Russia, depicts some of the technical difficulties that filmmaker Robert Flaherty encountered when he staged scenes for his 1922 silent film Nanook of the north. It shows how he initially clashes with the Inuit culture, but eventually a friendship develops with the protagonist, Nanook, and the rest of the community.Read More »

A comedic biopic focused on the life of fictional jazz guitarist Emmett Ray. Ray was an irresponsible, free-spending, arrogant, obnoxious, alcohol-abusing, miserable human being, who was also arguably the best guitarist in the world. We follow Ray’s life: bouts of getting drunk, his bizarre hobbies of shooting rats and watching passing trains, his dreams of fame and fortune, his strange obsession with the better-known guitarist Django Reinhardt, and of course, playing his beautiful music.Read More »

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How does a director whose work has long been characterized by its vibrancy deal with the subject of aging and death? With extraordinary patience and grace, it turns out. Madadayo is the last film Akira Kurosawa completed before his death in 1998, and it feels like the work of an artist aware that his time was nearing its end. (The fact that the 1993 film is only now receiving a video release in America after an extremely limited theatrical run doesn’t speak well of current attitudes toward elder greats.) The theme of aging recurs throughout Kurosawa’s later efforts, but never as explicitly as here; even the King Lear-based Ran has other concerns. Read More »

Brief Synopsis:
Story about a group of petty criminals living on the fringes of the law in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Tragedy befalls them when they get hold of, and try to sell, a collection of handguns.Read More »

Three years after the partition of India, Shibnath returns from 11 years of imprisonment. He tries to pick up his life again but his past experiences make it impossible.Read More »

Berthe, an elderly widow, is forced by her declining health to close the French farmhouse where she has spent much of her life. She moves in with her daughter Émilie and son-in-law Bruno, who share a legal practice and have two grown children: Anne, a law student, and Lucien, who was adopted. In spite of Émilie’s efforts, Berthe is not happy in her daughter’s bourgeois home in Blagnac. She sits by the swimming pool in the middle of the night talking to herself and finds the house pretentious. Worried about her mother’s physical and mental health, Émilie pays a visit to her unmarried younger brother, Antoine, a neurosurgeon. They have not seen each other for three years, since they quarreled at their father’s funeral. Émilie informs Antoine of their mother’s condition and invites him to Christmas dinner with the family.Read More »

Hackers ’95 is a 90 minute part documentary, part spoof.

Phon-E and R.F. Burns cover the hacker related goings on of 1995. SummerCon 95, Defcon 3, Operation Cyber Snare, Area 51, and more are covered.Read More »

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Third Window Films continues their collection of Takeshi Kitano Blu-rays with a revisit of his 1991 film, A Scene at the Sea. At the time Kitano was still seen largely as a comeic performer and his first two films started to change that perception and give him a small taste of international recognition. However, it is with A Scene at the Sea, his third feature as a director, that Kitano really showed the film world his skill set. Not only was it his first film as a director that didn’t feature him in an acting role, it also distanced itself from the previous two yakuza driven features and proved that Kitano is a force ot be reckoned with and a truew artist, rather than a hired gun.Read More »