2000s

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A handful of lackadaisical crooks are on a wild goose chase across Europe in this comedy. Carlos (Jeremy Strong) is an underworld kingpin who has lost a leather shoulder bag while traveling through Poland and wants it back, the sooner the better. Carlos orders one of his underlings, Harry (Detlev Buck), to find it, but Harry is too busy with his sexual fantasies about the good looking blonde that works at his car repair shop, so he calls up Schorsch (Georg Friedrich), a second-rate thief who resembles a down-market version of Edgar Winter, and hands the assignment over to him. Schorsch is ambivalent about the request, and tries to pass it along to Mao (Pia Hierzegger), who is the first person down this chain of criminal slackers who has a good reason for not looking for the bag — she’s busy looking after her daughter. The search for the bag finally falls to Max (Michael Ostrowski) and Hans (Raimund Wallisch), two guys who run a hot dog stand; Max also sells drugs on the side, while lightweight Hans gets high of the fumes from Max’s marijuana and eats a large percentage of their wares.Read More »

Trainee designer Kasumi has married her employer in Tokyo, the manager of a design workshop, and has had a two-year affair with one of his clients. She and her unsuspecting husband are vacationing in Hokkaido with her ex-lover and his wife when their five-year old daughter Yuka disappears without a trace. Distraught, Kasumi clings to the idea that Yuka is somewhere alive and safe. She returns to the spot every year, hoping to find a clue. Meanwhile her marriage nearly collapses, and her ex-lover’s marriage does collapse. On her fifth visit to Hokkaido, she is shadowed by Utsumi, a detective who has his own ominous reasons for wanting to be involved…Read More »

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Daniel Eisenberg’s quiet, voyeuristic portrait of Chicago shrouded in darkness draws us back to the beginning of cinema: to the Lumieres and Albert Kahn’s “Archives of the Planet” to long takes by a fixed-camera with a fixed-lens to images that unfold in durational time. Confronting one-hundred years worth of cinematic conditioning, accomplished through montage and editing that has accelerated the way we experience time, Eisenberg meticulously edited his footage to avoid the chronological thrust of a narrative while evoking the rhythms of a city at night, long a fascination of filmmakers. Eschewing the conventions of fiction and non-fiction, SOMETHING MORE THAN NIGHT embodies the heightened sensual experience of place, time and memory.Read More »

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After claiming to be visited by his dead father’s ghost, a young man with sleepwalking problems (Hugo Arana) enters into a sexual relationship with the neighborhood hottie (Anotella Costa), a spiritual-mystical type who’s all too willing to be his guide through the Kama Sutra, as well as to teach him how to hold in his wad past 81 thrusts. Eventually, Arana discovers he can materialize in far-off lands when he bones — as though sex were the spice from Dune. (Sample post-coital line: “Venice is incredible!”) This, mind you, is basically played for giggles, with writer-director Eliseo Subiela maintaining a gentle dreamy-absurdist tone that feels like Buñuel minus the anticlericalism (if that makes any sense). Cheerfully inscrutable, with a deftly sustained, calmly deranged performance from Costa, it unfortunately can’t figure out an ending and so just stops. There’s a sexual metaphor for that condition, right?Read More »

A drama set in the days leading up to the 2008 Presidential election, and centered on a high-end Manhattan call girl meeting the challenges of her boyfriend, her clients, and her work.Read More »

An ill man’s dying wish reunites four old friends. (IMDb)
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Friends brought together by tragic circumstances discover how sad their own lives have become in this bittersweet comedy-drama from German filmmaker Michael Klier. Harry (Henry Hübchen), Justus (Burghart Klaussner) and Bernhard (Armin Rohde) were close when they were young but haven’t seen each other in many years. However, they meet for the first time in decades when they learn another member of their circle, Manni (Peter Lohmeyer), has fallen ill and has only a short time to live. Manni has done well for himself and has a fine house with a pool as well as a vintage Ferrari, but as his life draws to a close he wants to spend time with his pals and asks them to help him with his one nagging regret. Manni used to date a beautiful girl named Rosi (Sibylle Canonica), but he treated her badly and she left him; all these years later, Manni asks his pals to find her so he can apologize and beg her forgiveness.Read More »

Biographer/ documentarian David Stenn, while working on a book about Jean Harlow, discovers a forgotten crime in which a 17-year-old extra was raped at an MGM party by a studio sales executive, and the studio proceeded to cover up the crime, protect the criminal, and destroy the victim. In addition to the first interview with the victim ever, 65 years after the crime, we also get a crash course in studio era history, including an interview with the illegitimate daughter of Loretta Young and Clark Gable.Read More »

Prisoners of Beckett is the meeting of two worlds that never usually converge.

One is comprised of poetry and freedom, the other silence and obscurity.

It’s a true story, which begins in a high security prison in Sweden, where a young actor, Jan Jonson, decides to stage “Waiting for Godot” with a cast of five prisoners.

Their performances turn out to be so unique and genuine that Beckett grants them the right to perform his play and follows the enterprise from his Parisian retreat.Read More »

Plainly but nonetheless effectively handled, “The Twilight” relates a case of prison recidivism with the real-life subjects playing themselves. Chance to glimpse incarceration and ex-con life in Iran will hold attention for foreign viewers, though this very modest, earnest exercise in old-school social problem cinema ultimately proves that the related issues are pretty much the same the world over. Fest and educational play are signaled.Read More »