1990s

Director Wu Nien-Jen’s autobiographical portrait of his father and the family conflict that develops around him, set against the background of dramatic political change in Taiwan.

Sega, a coal-miner who grew up in the years of Japanese colonial rule over Taiwan, is more strongly attracted to Japanese identity and culture than to the Mainland Chinese model imposed after the Kuomintang takeover in 1945. His son Wen-Jian on the other hand, typically for his generation, has a natural allegiance to Chinese culture. He is baffled by and impatient with his father’s fondness for the Japanese, a bafflement intensified by the harshly negative portrayal of Japanese imperialist ambitions and wartime atrocities he is exposed to at school.Read More »

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An insistent cataloguer of the innumerable manifestations of everyday insanity and the absurdity of “normal,” mundane existence, Ulrich Seidl blends the techniques of documentary and narrative… An insistent cataloguer of the innumerable manifestations of everyday insanity and the absurdity of “normal,” mundane existence, Ulrich Seidl blends the techniques of documentary and narrative filmmaking to create unique exposes of the illusions, self-deception, and cultural complacency of the Austrian middle class. In MODELS, Seidl examines that most glamorized segment of the population through a voyeuristic lens, interested more in the banalities of his three subjects’ lives than in perpetuating the images of their perfection.Read More »

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A beautiful and deeply moving work,it deals with a taboo subject which is rarely treated on the screen.The approach is much different from that of Alain Resnais in “Hiroshima mon amour”,and the main reason is that the director is Japanese.Far from Marguerite Duras’ verbal logorrhea,Kurosawa lets us in the tragedy through children’s eyes,and their simple and naive words.These children,who visit the memorial, only know what the history books tell:almost nothing.Read More »

Virginal 19-year-old Shokichi goes to the small island Maja-jimais, to collect the bones of his father Shoji, a man he never knew, which have been left to bleach in the sun at the foot of the cliff where the sea washed them up. But Shokichi is accompanied by three hookers who take the trip as a vacation – at least, until they all go down with food poisoning, probably from eating bad pig’s liver.Read More »

The Guardian wrote:

Rewatching director Rowan Woods’ chilling suburban drama The Boys (1998) feels like spending time with creepy acquaintances you hoped to never meet again. The story is based on a horrific crime, but there is something disturbingly mundane and commonplace about the way the film unfolds – the sense similar events may be taking place as we watch, in suburbs we frequent and neighbourhoods in which we live.Read More »

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A film that relies heavily on dialogue, but is ultimately fulfilling.

The director has taken the realm of film to display a table top

discussion, or more accurately a philosophical conversation between someone’s most interesting and intelligent friends.

It’s a movie you can imagine yourself as an eavesdropper in on one of the most engaging and interesting discussions on life.

Worth the two hours and a subject matter still topical to world problems today.Read More »

A modest family is destined for tragedy due to the rivalry between two teenage stepsisters. It begins when Tao Lan accidentally kills her stepsister. Seventeen years later, a female guard escorts the solitary Tao Lan, now a stranger to life outside prison, to her first painful family reunion…Read More »

Based on the true life experiences of poet Jimmy Santiago Baca, the film focuses on half-brothers Paco and Cruz, and their bi-racial cousin Miklo. It opens in 1972, as the three are members of an East L.A. gang known as the “Vatos Locos”, and the story focuses on how a violent crime and the influence of narcotics alter their lives. Miklo is incarcerated and sent to San Quentin, where he makes a “home” for himself. Cruz becomes an exceptional artist, but a heroin addiction overcomes him with tragic results. Paco becomes a cop and an enemy to his “carnal”, Miklo.Read More »

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One of Manoel de Oliveira’s masterpieces, A Caixa (The Box) / Blind Man’s Bluff is an adaptation, in parable form, of a play of the same name by Prista Monteiro.
The action takes place around a flight of steps in a poor neighbourhood and is about the final misadventure of an old Blind Man who has yet again been robbed of the official alms box with which he earns is living. His daughter, besides doing the house work, wears herself out taking in washing. Her companion, an unemployed lay-about like many of his friends, lives off the Blind Man’s box which has just been stolen for the second time.Read More »