1990s

A small crew films Leipzig 89-90. They interview factory workers, young people, a former journalist, a Redskin and others. These individuals share their thoughts about the reunification, its consequences and their plans for the future.Read More »

Jacob Gronlykke directed this $3 million Danish drama, the first production filmed completely in Greenland, with Inuit dialogue. The story begins with the 1947 ceremonies in which Greenland becomes part of Denmark; Danish king Christian X gives a ceremonial rifle to Greenland’s Niisi Lynge. A half-century later, Niisi’s son Rasmus (Rasmus Lyberth) still has the rifle, but past dreams have gone sour. The alcoholic Rasmus, married to aggressive Marie (Vivi Nielsen), has many problems because of his drinking, and so does his son Niisi (Knud Peterson), who drunkenly kills his brother’s girlfriend and then commits suicide. The grief-stricken Rasmus sets out across the frozen land on a risky hunting trip, and the film’s tone shifts from realism to satire as Danish female environmentalists make fun of his crude clothing and gear. A helicopter pilot lands and tries to talk Rasmus into turning back. In a folkloric vein, Rasmus encounters a hermit, the Qivittoq (Anda Kristiansen), who takes him into a mystical world for a reunion with his father. Shown at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.Read More »

Myope (‘myopic’) and Lunettes (‘glasses’), both played by the maker, Franssou Prenant, live in Paris and experience the same feeling of isolation and fear of the outside world. Their reaction to these feelings are however contradictory: Myope is a rebel, always out to defend herself against ‘external’ reality, while Lunettes observes the world and eventually accepts it for what it is. From the window of their apartment they look at Agathe and Pierrot, two inseparable kids who love each other, but do not express these feelings. Are they real, or do they only exist in the imagination of both women? The film dissects the relationships between the various characters and reveals the many barriers around them, something that is beautifully expressed in the film material used: Myope and Lunettes are filmed on Super-8, Agathe and Pierrot on 16mm. The coarse grain and the fuller colours of Super-8 evoke an unpolished, authentic mood, while the sharper and cooler 16mm material is more stylised and emphasises the element of fiction. A contrary cut stresses the two confusing personalities of Myope and Lunette in the same body of the director.Read More »

The unexpected death of Fujishima Motoharu, president of a medium-sized firm, triggers a fierce battle over his estate inheritance among family members.Read More »

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
In its most unsettling scenes, set at a castle being used as a military training school for Hitler youth, Volker Schlondorff’s film “The Ogre” suggests the stirring cinematic equivalent of a Wagner opera.

As you watch hundreds of adolescent boys being hyped with a messianic blend of heroic German mythology and Nazi ideology and participating in torch-lit rituals and athletic contests, you sense of the thrill of being a boy swept up in the demented pageantry and passion of the Nazi cause.Read More »

A young girl, Annie Nolan comes to the police to confess to a murder, but runs away before saying anything. Later, she visits the police psychologist Gayle Bennett, and in flashback, her story of how she fell in love with the older policeman Craig Mitchell and was used by him in his plot to murder his wife unfolds.Read More »

Quote:
Pedro Almodovar’s films are a struggle between real and fake heartbreak–between tragedy and soap opera. They’re usually funny, too, which increases the tension. You don’t know where to position yourself while you’re watching a film like “All About My Mother,” and that’s part of the appeal: Do you take it seriously, like the characters do, or do you notice the bright colors and flashy art decoration, the cheerful homages to Tennessee Williams and “All About Eve” (1950) and see it as a parody? Even Almodovar’s camera sometimes doesn’t know where to stand: When the heroine’s son writes in his journal, the camera looks at his pen from the point of view of the paper.Read More »

Annette Kennerley’s ‘Sex, Lies, Religion’ explores lesbian cruising in Abney Park cemetery, and features the filmmaker and a woman she’d met the night before at the capital’s short-lived Clit Club.Read More »

Is life all downhill after college? A group of recent grads, all friends from school, face the ups and downs of the real world, bonded together by the memories of their youth, in this drama.Read More »