“It’s spring, it’s spring, and I feel I’m giving birth myself, to something monstrous, something ugly.” Gibbons enters the woods to begin his destructive campaign against spring, snapping the buds off trees while babbling maniacally. Sabotaging Spring is an impressionistic peek at Gibbons’s paranoid fancy; he explains to his dog, Woody the facts of life, evolution, and whistling.Read More »
There were a lot of movies shot after 1989, the year when communist empire fell down. I am studying film university in Prague and I am working in TV so I focus on all new Czech movies very carefully. Of course everybody remembers Jan Sverak´s recent movies like “Kolya” or “Elementary school” but forgets this hidden masterpiece. This movie tells the story of old conflict between individuality and strong group of people. Extraordinary cinematography is making very tender and natural atmosphere (shot in black and white material)by taking place in the south of Bohemia, where the landscape is full of trees and lakes. Very sensitive direction of non-actors (except main character played by Peter Forman-the son of director Milos Forman)with impressive faces and characters are representatives of collective who hates everything different from their kind of lifestyle. Peter Forman as a strong character tells what he thinks and do what he wants and he is destroyed by them step by step. Do you want to encounter the Czech beauty…look closer. (IMDB review /// Radim Kratochvil)Read More »
A newly hired maid for a rich countryside family befriends a post-office clerk who encourages her to rebel against her employers.Read More »
In this autobiographical documentary, filmmaker Naomi Kawase seeks to reach her mother and father who abandoned her at birth.Read More »
Mai Qiang is a 30-year old bachelor, withdrawn, with little in his life besides his job at an isolated signal station along the Yangtze River and his ink drawings he uses as toilet paper. Chen Qing is a hotel clerk, a widow with a young child and an undemanding relationship with her boss Lao Mo. Lao believes she has been raped, so he reports the crime to Wu Gang, the neighborhood cop. Wu investigates, but Chen is uncooperative. Lao then identifies Mai, who is detained and questioned. After Wu gets to the truth of the incident, Mai tries to break out of his loneliness and connect to Chen.Read More »
Ivan the Terrible (Russian: Ivan Grozniy) is a two-part historical epic film about Ivan IV of Russia commissioned by Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, who admired and identified himself with Ivan, to be written and directed by the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. Part I was released in 1944 but Part II was not released until 1958, as it was banned on the order of Stalin, who became incensed over the depiction of Ivan therein. Eisenstein had developed the scenario to require a third part to finish the story but, with the banning of Part II, filming of Part III was stopped and what had been completed was destroyed. – wikiRead More »
In 1995 a then well known Québec theatre director named Robert Lepage made his first feature film, Le Confessional which, to my mind, remains one of the most impressive debut Canadian films ever. An intellectual and polyglot, Lepage carried his theatrical self-assurance over to the sphere of cinema without compromising cinematic language, and in fact expresses his ideas through formal means in the manner of an assured auteur. Thematically the film is not much of a stretch for a Québec film, centering on one of the constant themes in Québec cinema: sibling-parent tension. In this case, as in many other important Québec films, the tension revolves around an estranged father-son relationship [to name just a few Québec films dealing with troubled mother/father and daughter/son relationships, Les Bons Débarras (Francis Mankiewicz, 1980), Un Zoo la Nuit (Jean-Claude Lauzon, 1987), Les Invasions Barbares (Denys Arcand, 2003), and La Vie avec mon Père (Sébastien Rose, 2005)]. What makes the film impressive is not the story but its formal treatment across two time frames, weaving the past and the present and the personal and the historical.Read More »
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Night after night a watchman hunts for a man who has been repainting the town in the color red.Read More »
Backanterna is a recording of Bergman’s production of the staged opera Bacchae, a transposition of Euripides’ classical drama written for an amphitheater into a performance designed for the most intimate of stages, the TV screen, with music by Daniel Bortz. The original Euripedes text was re-worked for Bergman’s production, and the bacchae themselves became the focus of the action. Instead of an anonymous group, Bergman turned the women into individuals who each behave and perform in an individual way. In other words, the group was an individualized collective, portrayed by carefully selected soloists. Bergman also made an addition, creating a 14th baccha, Talatta, a non-speaking dance role that functioned as the dynamic doppelganger for Dionysus. Bergman used a minimalist stage which was made to look like a black box with a simple grey platform serving as acting space, placing focus on the vocal and stylized movement of the actors.Read More »