2000s

This film has been called the “Uruguayan ‘Slacker’”, a reference to Linklater’s movie. It has also been called a landmark film in a (low-key, small-scale) renaissance in Uruguayan cinema – a national cinema with a terrible memory problem (“El Dirigible”, from 1994, was routinely cited as “the first Uruguayan film”, which is very false, but understandable when one sees how little movies that country has managed to preserve).

Whatever its place in film history, it’s worth a watch, and rings very much true.Read More »

As adapted from the roman by Antonia Arslan and co-directed by legendary Italian brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, The Lark Farm marks one of the few international features to tackle the Armenian genocide head-on. The story (with its thematic parallels, in the early scenes, to De Sica’s 1970 Garden of the Finzi-Continis) concerns the Avakian clan. An Armenian family living an affluent lifestyle and periodically shuttling back and forth between their two comfortable homes, the Avakians feel convinced that the rising tide of Turkish hostility on the horizon means little to them and will scarcely affect their day to day. Read More »

Ummuye, Behiye, Ummu, Fatma K., Cennet, Saniye, Fatma F., Zeynep and Nesime are nine peasant women living in Arslankoy, a mountain village in southern Turkey. They spend their days working hard in the fields, on the construction site and at home. To lighten the burden of life, these women come together for a wholly different reason. They intend to write and perform a play based on their own life stories. They gather at the local high school, which they were shy of even stepping into until that day and they work with the principal, Mr. Huseyin. They reveal their life stories that they were even afraid to tell themselves and confront. For days on end, under the curious gazes of the village men, they work tirelessly, discuss and create with much fun a play, “The Outcry of Women!” This documentary is about the development process of this play and the change the women went through during this period.Read More »

“Jas sum od Titov Veles” is a story of three sisters who try to survive, though they seem ill equipped for the cruel society… (IMDb)Read More »

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Set in the Midlands of Britain in the summer of 1983 and scored to the exhilarating reggae bounce of Toots and the Maytals, This Is England is a classic coming-of-age story.
Shane Meadows’ semiautobiographical film, The 400 Blows, is as timely today in any inner city as it was a quarter of a century ago in Yorkshire, where unemployment and restlessness were high.Read More »

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A Colombian writer returns to his native Medellín to mourn his lost youth and, while he’s at it, pick up a new one. That, more or less, is the tale that Barbet Schroeder’s new movie has to tell. Schroeder has made some spicy pictures in his time, but this one feels lacklustre by comparison, and the two main performers-Anderson Ballesteros as the hustler and German Jaramillo as his aging mentor-tend to drift through their scenes, trying not to notice the hellfire around them. Whether they are genuinely ground down by the woes of the world or simply exhausted by years of casual sex is hard to work out; to be fair, few directors could make a film about moral anesthesia without sinking into glumness, and Schroeder does a pretty good job of insuring that no one in the audience will book a Colombian vacation in the near future.Read More »

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In “A Gentle Breeze in the Village,” Soyo Migata (Kaho) is a quirky 8th grade student who resides in a tiny rural village somewhere in Japan. The village is small enough where there’s only 6 students that attends their school (from 1st grade through 8th grade). Soyo’s been friends with her classmates since early childhood and they all hang out together like an extended family. One day, a new student named Hiromi Osawa (Masaki Okada) arrives. He’s a good looking boy from Tokyo and all the other students view as something of a celebrity.Read More »

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The story takes place in occupied Korea at the start of the 20th century, where a young student in medicine discovers the murdered body of the son of a government official. Being scared of being accused, he decides to hire Hong Jin-ho (a detective) to help him find the murderer before the police accuse him of the murder.Read More »

A movie set in a love hotel, but without a single sex scene? A 59-year-old woman as the heroine? It’s hard to imagine that particular pitch loosening purse strings at major Japanese media companies. A fatally ill teenager? That’s more like it.

Mark Schilling’s review from the Japan Times: No sex at a love hotel
A movie set in a love hotel, but without a single sex scene? A 59-year-old woman as the heroine? It’s hard to imagine that particular pitch loosening purse strings at major Japanese media companies. A fatally ill teenager? That’s more like it.
Director Izuru Kumasaka has incorporated these and other decidedly uncommercial elements into debut feature “Park and Love Hotel” (titled “Asyl” — short for “Asylum” — internationally), which won the Best First Feature Award at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. Read More »