Synopsis:
Two parallel stories about two identical women; one living in Poland, the other in France. They don’t know each other, but their lives are nevertheless profoundly connected.
Review:
It is important to resist the temptation to figure out every last detail of “The Double Life of Veronique,” the mysterious and poetic new film by Krzysztof Kieslowski. That way lies frustration.Read More »
Synopsis:
After college graduation, Grover’s girlfriend Jane tells him she’s moving to Prague to study writing. Grover declines to accompany her, deciding instead to move in with several friends, all of whom can’t quite work up the inertia to escape their university’s pull. Nobody wants to make any big decisions that would radically alter his life, yet none of them wants to end up like Chet, the professional student who tends bar and is in his tenth year of university studies.Read More »
Journal of Film and Video
Response to Phil Solomon’s WALKING DISTANCE
By Albright, Deron
“Imagining one of those rusted medieval film cans having survived centuries, a long lost Biograph/Star, a Griffith Melies co-production, a two-reeler left to us from, say, the Bronze Age, a time when images were smelted and boiled rather than merely taken, and they poured down like silver, not to be fixed and washed, mind you, but free to reform and coagulate into unstable, temporary molds, mere holding patterns of faces, places, and things, shape-shifting according to whim, need, the uncanny or the inevitable. . . WALKING DISTANCE is a simple Golden Book tale of horizontals and verticals, a cinema of ether and ore. . . “Read More »
Quote:
James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave star as mutually insane neighbors in a California apartment house who become romantically involved (she thinks she’s sexually intimate with Puccini, and he periodically wrestles with a demon of his own named Hank). Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep, The Glass Shield) directed this whimsical, bittersweet 1999 feature, handling the actors with sensitivity, but the preciousness of Anthony C. Winkler’s screenplay, adapted from his own novel, only underlines how much better off Burnett is writing his own scripts (Nightjohn being an exception). With Margot Kidder.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago ReaderRead More »
In the last days of 1999, after a few shots of a French supermarket, abundant in food and color, we hear Dramane compose a letter home to his father in Mali whom he then visits in the village of Sokolo. He meets the lovely Nana, and there are possibilities. People place long-distance calls from the post office. “Reaching people,” says the postmaster, “is a matter of luck.” Contrasts between Paris and Sokolo – between Mali and France and between Africa and Europe – are underscored by voice-over poems and comments by Aimé Césaire. A man dictates a letter to a brother in France: what is the nature of their hardships? People look for their place on this earth.Read More »
Synopsis:
“A documentary of insect life in meadows and ponds, using incredible close-ups, slow motion, and time-lapse photography…”
Review:
Children, being built nearer to the ground and having more time on their hands, are close observers of ants and spiders, caterpillars and butterflies. Adults tune them out; bugs are things you slap, swat, step on or spray. “Microcosmos” is an amazing film that allows us to peer deeply into the insect world and marvel at creatures we casually condemn to squishing. The makers of this film took three years to design their closeup cameras and magnifying lenses, and to photograph insects in such brilliant detail that if they were cars, we could read their city stickers.Read More »
During the summer of 1956, Egypt under President Gamal Abdul Nasser became embroiled in a conflict with Great Britain, France and Israel over the decision by the Egyptian leader to nationalize the Suez Canal in the wake of the refusal of the United States, and consequently the World Bank, to fund the construction of the Aswan High Dam. This pivotal period in the modern history of Egypt has been intelligently recreated in docu-drama style in a critically acclaimed film, “Nasser 56,” by Egyptian director Mohamed Fadel and starring Egyptian actor Ahmad Zaki as Nasser.Read More »
In the future, humanity has been genetically engineered into four classes, ranging from the decision-making Alphas to the worker class Drones. The notion of individual relationships is outdated and people are encouraged to seek pleasure with anybody else. The use of the drug Soma, which provides instant happiness, is widespread. Bernard Marx is a rising publicity man with the Department of Hatcheries and Conditioning. He and his companion Lenina Crowne fly over the Savage Reservations where people who were born by natural means live outside of civilisation, but their helicopter crashes. One of the Savages, John Cooper, saves them from an attacking mob. Fascinated by John, they bring him back to the city where he becomes an object of curiosity by the sensation-starved populace. However, John also comes to challenge their beliefs about the society they live in.Read More »
When a psychopath (François Montagut, DANGEROUS LIAISONS) butchers the proprietor of a candy shop, Detective Mike Livet (Tomas Arana, THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST) assumes that the killer made off with the victim’s as a souvenir. When the ear winds up in the refrigerator of newly widowed Tracy Grant (Joanna Pacula, THE KISS), Livet suspects that the grisly gift may have something to do with the death of her husband Abe (whose corpse was disinterred from its grave the same night). When a woman is butchered in a shopping mall bathroom and a severed hand winds up on Tracy’s doorstep, Livet looks into Abe’s shady past and discovers sex, drugs, and a stalker who did not take Abe’s nuptials all too well.Read More »