2000s

Kurt and Lydia are planning a relaxed vacation at the Gripsholm castle in Sweden . What Lydia does not know is that for Kurt, a well-known publicist, the journey is actually a flight from encroaching fascism and a direct threat from the Nazis.

The film takes us deep into the shady, pleasure-seeking cabaret world of Berlin at the beginning of the 1930’s, where “open season” has been declared on the last remaining bourgeois taboos, and the few remaining fig leaves of modesty are about to be swept away. Kurt, a campaigning journalist and satirist who has become a celebrity thanks to the rather saucy lyrics he has written for the songs of various shows has set off with his girlfriend Lydia, his princess, on a journey to Gripsholm castle in Sweden, in the course of a seemingly endless summer. Two friends, the fashionable variety show singer Billie and a temperamental aviator who goes by the name of Karlchen join them briefly on the holiday in Sweden. Erotic impulses inevitably lead to complications in their relationships.Read More »

PLOT: Jia Zhangke travels with painter Liu Xiaodong from China to Thailand as they as they meet everyday workers in the throes of social turmoil. Liu Xiaodong is well-known for his monumental canvases, particularly those inspired by China’s Three Gorges Dam project. Jia Zhangke visits Liu on the banks of Fengjie, a city about to be swallowed up by the Yangtze River. The area is in the process of being “de-constructed” by armies of shirtless male workers who form the subject of Liu’s paintings. Liu and Jia next travel to Bangkok, where Liu paints Thai sex workers languishing in brothels. The two sets of paintings are united in their subjects’ shared sense of malaise in the face of the dehumanizing labor afforded them.Read More »

PLOT: A young piano tuner befriends two rich old-ladies, and plots, with the help of his girlfriend, to betray their trust and steal from them.Read More »

Synopsis wrote:
An unsolved murder at Portland’s infamous Paranoid Park brings detectives to a local high school, propelling a young skater into a moral odyssey in which he must not only deal with the pain and disconnect of adolescence but also the consequences of his own actions.Read More »

An in depth look at the making of Kurosawa’s films.

The series consists of episodes of varying length, typically between 30 and 60 minutes, which chronicle the making of Kurosawa’s films. Altogether 21 of Kurosawa’s 30 films are covered by the series: basically, the ones that he shot for Toho studios.Read More »

The sublime and the mundane run hand-in-hand in Birdsong, Albert Serra’s stunningly photographed, intensely contemplative re-telling of the biblical journey of the Magi. Much of the sublimity derives from the film’s visuals, superbly tactile black-and-white images alive to the textures of the rocky landscape, which, along with the precise gradations of lighting (each scene seems shot at the one exact moment of day when its creation was possible) and the rustling of wind on the soundtrack, imbues the barren land with a richness of meaning commensurate with the Magi’s divine mission.Read More »

Quote:
A story about stolen love and stolen identities, literally shot on stolen film… Momma’s Man writer-director Azazel Jacobs’ effortlessly hip second feature is an absurdist comedy of errors, a punk-rock slice of DIY rebellion, and a warmhearted frolic that captures the “amour fou spirit of the early French New Wave” (The Village Voice).Read More »

Quote:
In “La perdición de los hombres”, Ripstein once again enters the world of misery, though his characters are not precisely outcasts as the fat nurse and her gigolo lover. This time he returns to his early free-style -it’s even in black and white-, as he tells the stories of normal people, who choose weird solutions to their predicaments and whose dreams occupy the same space and tone as their daily actions on the screen. Garciadiego rarely paints a “nice” male character. So here there are not only one but three machos, who play baseball and believe that man’s downfall is personified in women (in fact, the movie’s title is a verse from a popular ranchera that goes “Man’s downfall / Is the damned woman”). Garciadiego built her story a la “Pulp Fiction”, with the first act told after the resolution, so one has to wait quite a bit to know why two of the guys kill their pal, known as the “King of the Baseball Diamond”, while his widow fights for his corpse with his younger and prettier lover.Read More »

from slate.com:
The unabashedly teensy-budgeted Funny Ha Ha, written and directed by Andrew Bujalski, is actually more like Funny Strange—or even Funny Unsettling. You might be tempted to walk out in the first 20 minutes, which seem artless and aimless: not very fascinating people making not very fascinating small talk in drab settings. The by-default protagonist, Marnie (Kate Dollenmayer), is a listless 23-year-old between jobs and quietly smitten with an old friend, Alex (Christian Rudder), who has just broken up with his girlfriend. Does Alex like her? Other friends, among them Alex’s sister, don’t quite know. Alex, it seems, doesn’t quite know. Marnie doesn’t communicate her affections very forcefully. In fact, she does nothing very forcefully. She drinks a little at parties, she lies around, she hangs out with laid-back friends, and she floats.Read More »