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Nine convicts escape from prison; most are convicted murders. They commandeer a van from a strip club. Their plan is to find a stash of counterfeit money that a deranged cell mate told them about, divide it, then part ways. They make it to the site where the money is supposed to be hidden, and then one by one, each seeks out the place he wants to be, a version of home, somewhere to connect. Will it end well for any of them?Read More »
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The film’s main character Rei (Terashima Shinobu)is a freelance writer bombarded by the voices in her own head – her mother’s scolding, the gossip of friends at school, and the voice of her own unrequired desires. Losing sleep and developing eating disorders, and dependent on alcohol, Rei is on the brink of losing her mind.
Then one night, when she stops by a convenience store to purchase alcohol, she meets a long distance trucker (Omori Nao), and everything changes. Mysteriously attracted to this stranger, and prodded by the voices in her head, she joins him in a journey she hopes will eventually be the key to her salvation.Read More »
Originally, Documentarist was intended as a traditional documentary about a country that has to face challenging problems such as war, unemployment, extreme poverty, mass emigration, alcoholism and crime. Unfortunately, Harutyun Khachatryan did not raise enough state money in order to make the film he wanted to and therefore had to settle for a different project. Thus, he decided on a very unorthodox narrative strategy. By weaving together different styles, such as documentarist observation and docu-drama approach, he shed a new light on the complexities and challenges a director has to face in order to present a multifaceted picture of reality. Read More »
A young couple announces their wedding at a party with friends. The reactions of the latter reveal hitherto unexpressed sentimental flaws within the group. The following days, the tension rises to the surface.Read More »
In the 1990s David Perlov returned to the format of the filmed diaries he produced between 1973 and 1983, organized in a different way, closer to the cinematographic essay, and divided into three thematic chapters, “Sheltered Childhood”, “Routine and Rituals” and “Back to Brazil”. In the first, we follow the childhood of his grandchildren; in the second, the political routine of Israel, the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the rise of Benjamin Netanyahu and various rituals that make up the country’s daily life; in the third, Perlov returns to Brazil, remaking, for the last time, his trips to Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Belo Horizonte.Read More »
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Armenia’s leading living filmmaker, Harutyun Khachatryan, chose his nation’s 19th century poet, Ashugh Jivani, as his new film’s central spirit. This is hardly accidental, for nothing here is prosaic. Here is a dazzling, alternative vision of a cinema that is essentially poetic, metaphorical and allusive. A work of tactile sensuality, it nominally depicts the step-by-step creation of a monumental statue of the poet that ends up traveling on the back of a truck through the Armenian countryside. From this Khachatryan conjures a transcendental cinematic experience, employing a sublime fusion of sound, image and music to evoke the soul of the director’s beloved country and its people.Read More »
Dreams in Copenhagen is director Max Kestner’s documentary film portrait of Denmark’s capital. COPENHAGEN DREAMS is a film about the physical surroundings that are part of shaping our lives. About the buildings we wake up in, the front doors we walk out of, the streets we traverse. It is also a film about how the way we live our lives affects our physical surroundings. About the places we dream of and the walls onto which we scratch the names of our loved ones, before it’s too late.Read More »
Naqoyqatsi, also known as Naqoyqatsi: Life as War, is a 2002 documentary film directed by Godfrey Reggio and edited by Jon Kane, with music composed by Philip Glass. It is the third and final film in the Qatsi trilogy.
Naqoyqatsi is a Hopi word meaning “life as war”. In the film’s closing credits, Naqoyqatsi is also translated as “civilized violence” and “a life of killing each other”. While Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi examine modern life in industrial countries and the conflict between encroaching industrialization and traditional ways of life, using slow motion and time-lapse footage of cities and natural landscapes, about eighty percent of Naqoyqatsi uses archive footage and stock images manipulated and processed digitally on non-linear editing (non-sequential) workstations and intercut with specially-produced computer generated imagery to demonstrate society’s transition from a natural environment to a technology-based one. Reggio described the process as “virtual cinema”.Read More »
Synopsis:
A young woman is taken hostage by a police officer and subsequently abused by the lawman gone mad.
Review:
The term Cargo 200 refers to the bodies of USSR soldiers brought home from Afghanistan in the 1980s, but in Aleksei Balabanov’s film of the same name every character seems destined to become Cargo 200, either actually ending up dead or at least ending up in a dead-end quagmire of pointless violence and immoral behaviour. Unflinching would be a gentle word to describe this portrayal of a doomed humanity, but the exact point of the film beyond its doomsday message is never really clear. Unlike other recent excursions into nihilism as expressed through heartless sex and pointless violence (Mortier’s Ex Drummer comes to mind as a recent example), Balabanov’s film never goes beyond stating the obvious.Read More »