2000s

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 »

Freedom’s Fury is a documentary about the Hungarian water polo team of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics and the the effects of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution on the lives of the team members, with their infamous match with the Soviet team in the main focus.
The film is made up of a series of archive and recreated footage and short snippets of interviews with people directly or indirectly involved with the revolution or water polo. The material discussed is perhaps a little too extensive to fit into a ninety-minute-long documentary, but the interviews with the surviving members of both Hungarian and Soviet teams make Freedom’s Fury a memorable viewing experience.Read More »

Five men share a secret that has deadly consequences in this thriller from Belgium. When Filip (Matthias Schoenaerts), a playboy with a wild streak, finally settles down and gets married, his good friend Vincent (Filip Peeters) presents him and three of his friends with a special gift. Vincent is an architect, and after supervising the renovation of a apartment block, he installed a luxurious penthouse flat for the use of himself and his married pals, where they can enjoy liaisons with other women without their spouses becoming any the wiser. Filip, Vincent and three of their buddies — hard-drinking ladies’ man Marnix (Koen de Graeve), Filip’s psychoanalyst brother Chris (Koen De Bauw) and taciturn Luc (Bruno Vanden Broecke) — are the only ones with keys to the flat, and the only ones who are supposed to know it exists. But one day one of the five checks into the apartment and discovers a woman’s bloody corpse shackled to the bed; one of their group is a murderer, but who is the killer and how can the others keep this a secret from the police and their families? Loft was directed by Erik Van Looy and written by Bart de Pauw, both of whom got their start in the film business as actors.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 »

French helmer Christian Vincent’s quirky labyrinthine comedy Quatre étoiles (AKA 4 Stars, 2005) opens with a comely young girl named Franssou (nicknamed France) stumbling into a highly promising set of circumstances. Though France’s great-great aunt feels less than completely enchanted with her, she wills the young girl an inheritance of 52,000 Euros ($62,000.00) on her deathbed. Upon receiving the money, France promptly ditches her dishwater-dull beau and high-tails it to a posh hotel in Cannes, where she falls into the lap of Stephane – a pushy flim-flam artist eager to pass himself off as Elton John’s front man, then to hit France up for 30,000 of the Euros. Though France sees right through his ploy, she (surprisingly) agrees to the request – but nothing can compare Stephane for the conditions that France will impose – or for the genuine feelings that France begins to harbor for him. Or does she? Screen vet François Cluzet co-stars; Vincent co-authored the script with Olivier Dazat.Read More »

Quote:
Nicklas lives a pretty normal teenage life, until one day, not far from graduation, when a gangster from his school beats him up. Nicklas passes out, and the next day when he returns to school he notices that nobody seems to notice him. As he tries to get attention he notices that his actions disappear the moment he has done them. He throws a book and as soon as it lands it’s back where he picked it up. He has returned as a ghost, but he can do nothing but passively observe as the police stand clueless to the murder.Read More »

Quote:
Back in the summer of 2004, a friend from a website I used to review for encouraged me to review Stephen Chow’s movie Shoalin Soccer. Biting the bate, I decided to purchase the disc and give it a shot. I was not disappointed one bit. It was one of the most entertaining movies I reviewed that year. When it was announced that another of Stephen Chow’s movies would be released in the form of Kung Fu Hustle, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. After viewing this on DVD, I came to the conclusion this man is absolutely brilliant, in that he was excellent at using special effects and wire work in such a unique and interesting way. Instead of using special effects as an integral part of the story, he uses it to enhance the comedy, to create these outrageous scenarios that are silly and humorous, but at the same time interesting and ingenious.Read More »

A violent, guitar-playing, electrically charged boxer faces off against an electronic wizard half-merged with a metallic Buddha.Read More »

Quote:
A young woman disguises herself as a knight to expose a gold-digging man divided between her and a Countess.

Jacquot began his career as assistant director of Marguerite Duras (Nathalie Granger, India Song) and as an actor in films directed by Jean-Claude Biette. Then turned to writing and directing with the 1975 film L’Assassin musicien (The Musician Killer) which starred Anna Karina.Read More »