1990s

The lives of many individuals connected by the desire for happiness, often from sources usually considered dark or evil.

Quote:
Todd Solondz’s “Happiness” is a film that perplexes its viewers, even those who admire it, because it challenges the ways we attempt to respond to it. Is it a portrait of desperate human sadness? Then why are we laughing? Is it an ironic comedy? Then why its tenderness with these lonely people? Is it about depravity? Yes, but why does it make us suspect, uneasily, that the depraved are only seeking what we all seek, but with a lack of ordinary moral vision? In a film that looks into the abyss of human despair, there is the horrifying suggestion that these characters may not be grotesque exceptions, but may in fact be part of the mainstream of humanity.Read More »

Quote:
F. A. Brabec’s Král Ubu is a film for wide audiences made for the centennial of the first performance of French playwright Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896). It is a cruel picture of the ways in which human beings acquire power and then cling to it. The story of Father Ubu, an idiot who climbs over the bodies of the dead to his royal post, is presented with a touch of the grotesque where naive comic elements meet black humor. Using a human touch, the film- makers were able to transform the original into a film aimed at a contemporary audience while remaining faithful to the vision of Father Ubu and Mother Ubu venturing everything in their efforts to seize power and mammon. Read More »

Undersecretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt resigns to form a volunteer militia unit called “The Rough Riders” to fight in the Spanish-American War.Read More »

Quote:
Lawrence Lau provides another snapshot of social realism akin to his amateur acted affair Gangs. However with Sylvia Chang and debuting Rain Lau, Queen Of Temple Street is put into another division, providing up close but not overbearing views of the prostitution surroundings,.Read More »

“Schtonk!” is a satirical German movie, retelling the hoax of the Hitler Diaries.

Subtitled “Der Film zum Buch vom Führer” (“The film accompanying the Führer’s book”), the movie is a grotesque farce about the events when, in 1983, German Stern magazine began to publish, with great fanfare, the 60 volumes of the alleged diaries of Adolf Hitler – which two weeks later turned out to be entirely fake. That story is commonly described one of the greatest failures of modern journalism overall.Read More »

Paris –1943. Paris is going through one of the hardest winters of its history -occupied and tortured by the Germans, freezing and starving, the City of Light hardly deserves its name. But Sophie Vasseur only just witnesses that misery. She has been recruited as the accompanist of Irene Brice, an opera singer, one of the few ‘lights’ still shining in Paris. Her husband Charles, a brilliant and rich businessman who loves her passionately, efficiently supports her agents and sponsors in protecting her from the unbearable reality, and Sophie, the shadow, cuddles in the shelter.Read More »

An unusual and wonderful friendship develops between a busy but unhappy salesman and a resident of a mental asylum.Read More »

Still recuperating from his wife’s untimely death, a lawyer must defend his probably dirty brother-in-law, a stockbroker under investigation. He discovers that everyone has dark secrets, including himself.Read More »

In an intriguing long take static shot of the oppressively barren Siberian frontier, a converted tank (turned off-road passenger utility vehicle) traverses a rugged terrain that seemingly bisects a rural, indigenous village, disappears in a spray of displaced mud as it sinks partially out of frame into a trench, then momentarily re-emerges to continue on its plodding journey, only to become imperceptible from the horizon once again as it descends into a series of depressions on the gravel road. Watching this sequence (and film) again within the added context of having also seen Twentynine Palms, I couldn’t help but think that Bruno Dumont must somehow have been influenced by this unstructured and glacially paced, yet lucidly pure, challenging, and entrancingly reductive film by Lithuanian filmmaker Sharunas Bartas, a feature that he developed from his earlier diploma film, Tolofaria on the nomadic, indigenous tribe.Read More »