2000s

Quote:
Itinerant Kurdish teachers, carrying blackboards on their backs, look for students in the hills and villages of Iran, near the Iraqi border during the Iran-Iraq war. Said falls in with a group of old men looking for their bombed-out village; he offers to guide them, and takes as his wife Halaleh, the clan’s lone woman, a widow with a young son. Reeboir attaches himself to a dozen pre-teen boys weighed down by contraband they carry across the border; they’re mules, always on the move. Said and Reeboir try to teach as their potential students keep walking. Danger is close; armed soldiers patrol the skies, the roads, and the border. Is there a role for a teacher? Is there hope?Read More »

Brutal gangster Don Logan recruits “retired” safecracker Gal for one last job, but it goes badly for both of them.Read More »

Ari, a paramedic, is a chronic womanizer; he makes it a point of pride to never sleep with the same woman twice, and his nights are a long series of brazen one-night stands. But when Ari meets Tiina, something unexpected happens – he falls in love.Read More »

Spread over three time periods (Summer 10 Years Ago/Summer 5 Years Ago/This Summer), Lost Virgin tells the tale of good-time girl Chisato (Sasaki), hungry for new experiences yet ultimately in search of emotional fulfillment.Read More »

Plot / Synopsis
Wesley, is responsible for handling all the incidents that relate to extraterrestrial life on Earth. One day, Wesley meets Fong (Rosamund Kwan) when he is looking at a blue human bone in an antique shop. Fong is an alien from the Blue Blood Planet, she left her home 600 years ago to look for the Blue Blood Bible. Wesley tries to stop Fong going away, the Double X Unit lead by Wai and So is ordered to handle the case. At the same time, Kill and Rape arrive Earth from Blue Blood Planet. They come here to take Fong back to the Blue Blood Planet.Read More »

A restaurant opens for the night. The diners include: A man dining alone, who orders a plate of spaghetti that becomes his dining companion. A couple; the woman talks endlessly (and unintelligibly), as her head mutates into a variety of shapes. Her ravenous companion refuses to pay, and the restaurant reclaims its food. A family with two children; they play, rather elaborately, with their food.Read More »

Quote:
‘We can’t easily tell night from day during the summers here,” observes one character early on in Hong Sang-soo’s Paris-set Night and Day—a nearly throwaway line that circumscribes the sense of physical and spiritual dislocation felt by the film’s protagonist. Like most of the director’s leading men, Kim Sung-nam (Kim Yeong-ho) is a hangdog, self-absorbed, soju-guzzling Hong alter ego—a fortyish Korean artist who flees to the City of Lights after an episode of recreational drug use leads him to believe he is under police investigation. There, he rents a room in a crowded boarding house and resolves to lay low until he can safely return home to his wife, Sung-in (Hwang Su-jeong), or else find a way to bring her to France. But resolutions aside, it isn’t long before Sung-nam finds himself navigating Hong’s trademark gauntlet of awkward seductions, casual betrayals, and ghosts of girlfriends past.Read More »

Quote:
Following up on his acclaimed debut feature, Kichiku Dai Enkai — an intense portrait of a band of 1970s radicals who descend into morass of fratricidal blood lust — Kazuyoshi Kumakiri shifts gears completely by offering this understated romantic drama. Ichio (Takeshi Kitano regular Susumu Terajima) runs a rundown eatery on a Hokkaido highway. One day, a couple gets into a spat resulting in the guy — an overly tanned self-satisfied clod — hopping in his red sports car and driving off without her. The woman, Taeko (Rinko Kikuchi), returns to order a meal. When she tries to dash without paying, Ichio nabs her but lets her off with a warning. Ichio soon finds himself similarly stranded when his horseracing-mad father — and owner of the restaurant — swipes Ichio’s car for a crazed gambling road trip with his buddies. Later that night while camping out, Taeko inadvertently burns down one of the restaurant’s sheds. This time around, Ichio puts Taeko to work. Soon, in spite of themselves, a relationship is born.
~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie GuideRead More »

Observations of three varied corners of China’s garment industry: workers in a large-scale production line factory; a designer who rallies against the mass-machine-production of clothes and has created the eponymous hand-made collection called ‘Useless’ (Wuyong) for Paris Fashion Week; and finally the simple life of increasingly out-of-work tailors in small town Fengdang.Read More »