2000s

  • Aisling Walsh – Song for a Raggy Boy (2003)

    2001-2010Aisling WalshDramaIreland

    Based on Patrick Galvin’s memoir, ‘Song for a Raggy Boy’ is set in the grey, grim surroundings of a brutal Irish reform school in 1939. While the storyline has unmistakable parallels with ‘The Magdalene Sisters’, it deserves more than to be dismissed as this year’s indictment of religious orders.Read More »

  • Noah Baumbach – Margot at the Wedding [+ Extras] (2007)

    2001-2010DramaNoah BaumbachUSA

    Online review of film:
    Eventually it may be that Noah Baumbach could turn into this country’s answer to France’s Eric Rohmer, turning out a steady diet of small, circumspect dramas about the lives and neurotic times of New York-era literary bourgeoisie. That’s one of the things that comes to mind as one takes in Margot at the Wedding, Baumbach’s fourth time out as writer/director and one that seems to set a template for the future. It’s a chill breeze of a film steeped in ugly inter-familial squabbling and the blinkered mentality of its self-absorbed characters who can generally only raise their gaze from their own navels long enough to find something lacking in the person they’re addressing.Read More »

  • Gustave de Kervern & Benoît Delépine – Aaltra (2004)

    2001-2010Benoît DelépineComedyFranceGustave de Kervern

    Quote:
    Mr Vives is not fond of the lazy farmer’s hand who keeps blocking the road with his large harvester, so he gets back at him, and the farmer’s hand gets back at Mr Vives, and round and round it goes. Until one day, when this causes Mr Vives to lose his job and come back early to discover his wife in bed with another man. Furious, he drives up to the farm hand in the middle of a field and starts a fist fight which ends in the harvester. They wake up together at the hospital, both with useless legs. It seems they’re doomed to stay together from now on.Read More »

  • Michel Ocelot – Azur et Asmar (2006)

    2001-2010AnimationFranceMichel Ocelot

    From Rotten Tomatoes
    Once upon a time, there were two children who had the same nanny: Azur, blonde and blue-eyed, son of the lord of the castle, and Asmar, dark-skinned and black-eyed, the nurse’s child. Brought up like brothers, the children are suddenly torn apart. But Azur, haunted by the legend of the Djinn the nanny used to tell him, intends to find it in lands beyond the seas. When they grow up, the two foster brothers each go separate ways in search of the fairy. Daring rivals, they find magic lands in a medieval Maghreb, full of dangers and enchantments.Read More »

  • Wen Jiang – Guizi lai le AKA Devils on the Doorstep (2000)

    1991-2000ChinaComedyFifth Generation Chinese CinemaWarWen Jiang

    Stephen Holden in the New York Times wrote:
    [The film] belongs to that rarefied breed of antiwar movie that adopts a lofty satirical distance from its characters’ plight. By turns farcical and horrifying, it scrupulously avoids plucking heartstrings to portray the soldiers and peasants alike as paranoid fools buffeted by the shifting winds of war…While acknowledging that war is hell, it goes further to suggest it is ludicrous.Read More »

  • Jin-ho Hur – Bomnaleun ganda AKA One Fine Spring Day [+commentary] (2001)

    2001-2010DramaJin-ho HurRomanceSouth Korea

    Synopsis:
    Sound engineer Sang-woo meets local DJ Eun-soo on a recording trip in the quest for nature’s voice. They succeed in capturing various sensual sounds as well as each other’s tenderness. Their love flourishes as spring comes along, but Sang-woo’s ever intensifying passion often reminds Eun-soo of her tragic past. She knows only too well how passion can vanish like a sound, and how love always surrenders to its end.Read More »

  • Zhuangzhuang Tian – Cha ma gu dao xi lie AKA Delamu (2004)

    2001-2010ArthouseChinaDocumentaryFifth Generation Chinese CinemaZhuangzhuang Tian

    Imdb:
    Delamu ¨C Tibetan for “Peace Angel”. Since ancient times, China’s two primary land routes connecting it to the outside world have been the Silk Road in the north, and Tea Horse-Road in the south. The mountain village of Bingzhongluo-Tibetan for “Village of Tibetans” is located on the high plateau of western Yunnan Province, at the foot of Gaoligong Mountain. Traveling along the Nujiang River, one can reach the southern Tibetan border town of Chawalong-Tibetan for “Valley of Dry Heat.” But with no roads connecting the two places, since ancient times the transport of all goods and supplies has relied entirely on horse caravans. The journey of more than 90 kilometers zigzags through high mountain slopes, dense forests, gorges and wastelands. Read More »

  • Sylvestre Amoussou – Africa paradis AKA Africa Paradise (2006)

    2001-2010African CinemaBeninComedyDramaSylvestre Amoussou

    When Olivier and Pauline, a French engineer and a French teacher, can not live decently in their own country any longer, they decide to emigrate to the United States of Africa.Read More »

  • Walter Salles – Diarios de motocicleta AKA Motorcycle Diaries (2004)

    2001-2010AdventureDramaUSAWalter Salles

    Synopsis:
    In 1952, twenty-three year old medical student Ernesto Guevara de la Serna – Fuser to his friends and later better known as ‘Ernesto Che Guevara’ – one semester away from graduation, decides to postpone his last semester to accompany his twenty-nine year old biochemist friend ‘Alberto Granado’ – Mial to his friends – on his four month, 8,000 km long dream motorcycle trip throughout South America starting from their home in Buenos Aires. Their quest is to see things they’ve only read about in books about the continent on which they live, and to finish that quest on Alberto’s thirtieth birthday on the other side of the continent in the Guajira Peninsula in Venezuela. Read More »

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