2000s

The Yellow Scarf is a film by Janusz Morgenstern from 2000. Janusz Gajos plays its protaganist, a man fighting with alcoholism, and is proof that television productions do not have to be worse than feature films.

The protagonist – a middle-aged man at the top of his career – does not have a name, nor a surname; he is a universal character, an everyman that everyone can identify with. On the Christmas Eve he consecutively meets with his employees, his ex-wife, his son and his present partner. His persistently prolonged rambling is meant to postpone the inevitable Christmas visit to his mother.Read More »

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Life in the Argentine pampas is nasty, brutish and short, judging by the intense, compelling drama “La Rabia.” Impressive if challenging-to-watch work by helmer Albertina Carri (“Los rubios,” “Geminis”) observes adultery, violence and animal slaughter largely through the eyes of two disturbed children, while use of jagged animation and luminous landscape shots transmutes the base material into something more sublime. “La Rabia” is certain to sweep through fests, but could have trouble finding distribution in some territories due to unfaked deaths of various animals which, per opening credits, “lived and died as they naturally would.”Read More »

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Reiko is a sex robot programmed to accumulate sexual experience. She goes through seven body types to experiences a variety of couplings. She returns to the company to download her accumulated info and escape from their control.Read More »

Foreldrar was the big winner at the Eddas ceremony (the yearly Icelandic film prize) winning a total of six Eddas.

In modern day Reykjavik, dark secrets come to light when an unhappy dentist, a lovelorn businessman and a young mother fleeing her troubled past meet by chance.

Inspired by the largely improvisational, collaborative methods of Jean-Luc Godard, John Cassavetes and Mike Leigh. In conjunction with actors from the Icelandic theatrical troupe Vesturport, who based their characters on real people, director Ragnar Bragason has produced an unsentimental dramatic study of parenthood in all its potential for fulfillment, suffering and self-discovery.Read More »

Royce and Dexter are two slackers who live in the strange little town of Weedsville. When Royce’s girlfriend Matilda overdose’s on their stash and dies, they decide to bury her in an abandoned Drive-In theater. Things get out of control when they discover Satanists performing a ritual sacrifice right where they were going to bury the body…Read More »

This is the sequel to the Straubs’ Operai, contain.

Excerpts from the novel Donna di Messina (1949 and 1964, 1967) by Elio Vittorini (1908-1966).Read More »

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A French drug dealer living in Tokyo is betrayed by his best friend and killed in a drug deal. His soul, observing the repercussions of his death, seeks resurrection.Read More »

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Woman is the Future of Man may not mark any major departures of style for celebrated auteur Hong Sang-soo, but the filmmaker is still in top form in this tightly-constructed, mesmerizing work. Although it features much of the awkward dialogue and cutting irony that has made Hong’s previous films so distinctive, Woman feels in some ways both more shallow and more elusive than the works that preceded it. As such, it is a difficult film to make sense of, unless you have had previous exposure to the negative energy that fills Hong’s cinematic world.Read More »

Quote:Winner of the Best Documentary award at the Cannes Film Festival, master filmmaker Patricio Guzmán’s The Cordillera of Dreams completes his trilogy (with Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button) investigating the relationship between historical memory, political trauma, and geography in his native country of Chile. It centers on the imposing landscape of the Andes that run the length of the country’s Eastern border. At once protective and isolating, magisterial and indifferent, the Cordillera serves as an enigmatic focal point around which Guzmán contemplates the enduring legacy of the 1973 military coup d’état.Read More »