1990s

Synopsis
The silent darkness of the bedroom is broken by a greetings message on the answering-machine. A sudden awakening for Chico on his thirtieth birthday. What a mess! Too late to meet his girlfriend, too late for the meeting at Expo ’98, and, even worse, an outsize hangover. But that’s not all. Lying next to him in bed is a young man with whom he has spent the night. He must now pick up the threads of his everyday life. Meanwhile his companion from the night before, with blue eyes and feline body, wanders around the house feeling both curious and amused, with the restless happiness of a twenty-year old with all the time in the world to spare. It is his hunger for life that, in an undeclared game, will transform what could otherwise have been a normal birthday morning for Chico…Read More »

Synopsis
[In Hick’s Last Stand] we witness yet another incarnation of a Last Bavarian Mohican, incoherently staggering across the badlands of South Dakota and Wyoming in white cowboy boots, black leather jacket, and a feather on his hat. Without dialogue, without other players besides Herbert Achternbusch, and with the most minimal narrative progression, the film consists only of an image track over which we hear Hick’s extended monologue, a declaration of love to the absent Mary, occasionally interrupted by songs by Judy Garland, Native American chants, and classical music. Read More »

In this independently produced drama, a timbermill owner is having great difficulty sustaining a livelihood due to overcutting and peculiarities of the international trade situation. Despite the damaging effect his mill has on the local environment, he appears to be someone who really enjoys the unspoiled wilderness, because he goes fly-fishing whenever he can. His troubled life edges veers into deeper waters when his daughter sends him a letter in which she accuses him of incest. Whether her story proves to be true or not, it is certain that his life is now ruined forever, as are the lives of those around him. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie GuideRead More »

“allmovie” wrote:
Running nearly three hours, Maurice Pialat’s VAN GOGH is a leisurely paced look at the famous painter’s final year. Pialat’s portrait differs from many other films in that he shows Van Gogh (Jacques Dutronc) as being reasonably sane and he focuses on the everyday events of the painter’s life and art.Read More »

Quote:
Sounding like some cheap pastiche, The German Chainsaw Massacre comes as a surprisingly independent feature, able to stand on it’s own without the crutch of it’s predecessor. However, Tobe Hooper’s movie is not so much tipped and winked as screamed in the face of in this relentless madness and more specifically in a similarly edited chainsaw chase through a forest. Choosing to loosen Hooper’s tight bolts of ‘humour’, Schlingensief loses dramatic intensity but gains an awesome sense of the egregious: unemployed customs officials form appalling folk groups at the West/East border and a woman with a knife up her butt sits down…Read More »

This highly kinetic tableaux of uprooted sights and sounds works most earnestly to expose the racial biases concealed in familiar images. Relying on valuable snippets from feature films such as “Exodus”, “Lawrence of Arabia”, “Black Sunday”, “Little Drummer Girl”, and network news shows, the filmmakers have constructed an oddly wry narrative, mimicking the history of Mid East politics.Read More »

Small film integrated in a series of 3 shortfilms about the adventures of the good old João de Deus.Read More »

Synopsis
Due to the EXPO 98 promotion campaign the Portuguese capital city appeared quite often in the French media. During their Summer holidays the following year, João Pedro Rodrigues once again films this emigrant family in France during their journey through Lisbon’s old districts, its outskirts, and their visit to Expo or Luz Stadium.Read More »

In Taxandria, a totalitarian regime has forbidden time: time watched have been confiscated, photo cameras are illegal as they freeze a point in time. A typical Servais theme: a power is oppressed by a constraint that denies what is best in the individual, and therefor has to be twisted in various ways, to establish an entirely artificial world, that has rules that may question some of the rules of our world at this side of the mirror. The digital era has begun. “Servaisgraphy” threatens to become obsolete. It was finally only to be used for the fabric of the backgrounds and no longer for the encrustation.Read More »