1990s

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Along with his penchant for complex, often fragmented narratives and innovative montage editing techniques, one of the things that makes Nicolas Roeg such a fascinating filmmaker is his approach to the supernatural. Roeg’s interest in strange phenomena can be traced all the way back to Performance (1970), which saw Roeg and co-director Donald Cammell present a sort of symbolic form of reincarnation or “rebirth” via the fusing of the characters played by James Fox and Mick Jagger. Read More »

Alice is a successful barrister who lives with her stay-at-home boyfriend Nicholas. When their mutual friend Juliette splits up with her partner Michel, Nicholas takes solace in the fact that his relationship with Alice is a stable one. He does not realise that Alice has been seeing another man, a handsome sports photographer, Gaspard, for the past few months. When he discovers the truth, Nicholas goes to extreme lengths to gain Gaspard’s confidence, with the intention of sabotaging the affair…Read More »

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Seven episodes, each taking place on a different day of the week, on the theme of suicide and violent death.Read More »

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This movie is about traditional swiss folkmusic has a lot more to offer than only folklore. “UR-Musig” is about the work and life of mountain peasants in the midst of archaic mountain landscapes. It is about traditional swiss architecture and interior decorations, about peoples and their garbs. There are not many dialogs and no narrator. The pictures speak for themselves. The Swiss Prealps are shown in all four seasons and in all thinkable weathers which make every landscape shot more breathtaking than the other.Read More »

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A New York girl sets her father up with a beautiful woman in a troubled marriage while her stepsister gets engaged.Read More »

People from all walks of life (a high-school student, a middle-aged businessman, a yakuza chief, etc.) all receive mysterious messages from loved ones who were killed 3 months earlier in a shipwreck. They are instructed to go to a small island in the Inland Sea that evening. At the stroke of midnight, the lost ship emerges from the sea and they are given a brief time to say their final words to their lost loved ones, before the deceased must once again board the ship and it sinks back into the depths. (Summary from IMDB)Read More »

From the director of The White Rose and The Nasty Girl, comes this stunning adaptation of Hungarian author George Tabori’s autobiographical, somewhat surreal novel. Shifting between Nazi-occupied Budapest and present-day Berlin, the film artfully depicts the true story of how Tabori’s mother Elsa escaped deportation to Auschwitz.Read More »

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Elle is an alienating mixture of South American surrealism and the classic Hollywood melodrama of e.g. Douglas Sirk (of whom Sarmiento is a great fan). The husband is in love, the wife is not averse to being loved and yet they are not happy. At least, not in the usual sense of the word. The man is after all rather too much in love to be not a little paranoid and the wife, slightly Hitchcock and fairly nervous, is too carried away by his love to be not a little shocked. He regards her as a match for the Venus of Milo, cherishes her as a work of art and tries to perfect her, with all the obsessiveness that entails. Read More »

Mark Rappaport’s creative bio-pic about actress Jean Seberg is presented in a first-person, autobiographical format (with Seberg played by Mary Beth Hurt). He seamlessly interweaves cinema, politics, American society and culture, and film theory to inform, entertain, and move the viewer. Seberg’s many marriages, as well as her film roles, are discussed extensively. Her involvement with the Black Panther Movement and subsequent investigation by the FBI is covered. Notably, details of French New Wave cinema, Russian Expressionist (silent) films, and the careers of Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, and Clint Eastwood are also intensively examined. Much of the film is based on conjecture, but Rappaport encourages viewers to re-examine their ideas about women in film with this thought-provoking picture.Read More »