2000s

CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character – host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect (played by Richard Serra), and the Entered Apprentice (played by Barney), who are both working on the building. They are reenacting the Masonic myth of Hiram Abiff, purported architect of Solomon’s Temple, who possessed knowledge of the mysteries of the universe. The murder and resurrection of Abiff are reenacted during Masonic initiation rites as the culmination of a three-part process through which a candidate progresses from the first degree of Entered Apprenticeship to the third of Master Mason.Read More »

Barsam, Anna’s father, is seriously ill. Before he dies, he would like to bequeath something to his daughter: a sense of doubt. As he flees to Armenia, he leaves several clues in his wake so that Anna can come after him. For Anna, this journey she is obliged to make in an unknown country, becomes what her father wanted it to be: an initiation, a sentimental journey, a second adolescence. She finds him in a little village, lost in the Caucasian mountains, seated dreaming under a blossoming apricot tree. She will come to doubt her identity, her relationships and her commitments.Read More »

Synopsis:
Unable to accept the the loss of their son in the 2005 Tsunami, Jeanne and Paul Bellmer have remained in Phuket. Desperately clinging to the fact that his body was never recovered, Jeanne has convinced herself that the boy was kidnapped by traffickers in the chaos that followed the catastrophe… Paul is sceptical, but cannot bring himself to shatter his wife’s last hope. The traumatized couple embark on a quest that will plunge them through paranoia and betrayal, ever deeper into an alien universe, a supernatural realm where the dead are never truly dead, and where nightmares, obsession and horrifying reality converge.Read More »

Synopsis:
A documentary analyzing the role of the modern American media and its effects on democracy.

Review:
The middle child to Joel Bakan and Harold Crooks’s The Corporation and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, Robert Kane Pappas’s Orwell Rolls in His Grave is an expert piece of investigative journalism that likens our media system to a subsidiary of our country’s corporate process. Polemically, Pappas’s incendiary media watchdog is closer in tone to Moore’s anti-Bush rant, but aesthetically it shares more in common with Bakan and Crooks’s Power-Point-ish exposé of corporate greed.Read More »

Fortress Europe is the latest semi-documentary film by Zilnik and was shot on the borders between Slovenia and Italy, Croatia and Slovenia and Hungary and Austria—i.e. the southern area covered by the Schengen Treaty governing the transit of migrants in Europe. As Zilnik notes in the accompanying interview, this new “wall” against the movement of people is more impenetrable than the Berlin wall.Read More »

An Artist violently grinds stones and uses the sand to create animated drawings. His first picture is the Garden of Eden. Once Eve becomes pregnant, all the tribulations of the real world are unleashed upon her. She follows through dream-like sequences populated with crying birds, brick-wall-faced bureaucrats and pensive philosophers in seemingly petrified poses. Irritated, repressed and allured by each other, the creatures on the screen start living a life of their own. Gradually, a dark climax builds up. Will the Artist himself be able to handle so much emotional intensity? Written by helge79Read More »

Erotic Suspense After Mistaken Identity

In Patrice Leconte’s sardonic psychological thriller, ”Intimate Strangers,” Sandrine Bonnaire portrays a Gallic answer to one of Alfred Hitchcock’s sleek blond women of mystery. Imagine the Grace Kelly of ”Rear Window” or the Kim Novak of ”Vertigo” sprawled seductively on an analyst’s couch, smoking cigarettes and confiding her sexual frustration to a repressed, wide-eyed shrink who is obsessed with her.Read More »

Kick the Cock is an old Dutch saying, meaning Peek in the Kitchen. Maid Angelita is baking a cake for her boss.Read More »

Quote:
O (Takashi Sorimachi) is the number 1 assassin in all of Asia. Tok (Andy Lau) wants to dethrone him and become the premier hitman in the world. What these two have in common is that they are in love with the same woman, Chin (Kelly Lin). And Chief Inspector Lee (Simon Yam) wants to catch them both. Thrown into a gauntlet of razor blade shoot-outs and a feeding frenzy of warfare, this film is a story about two men of the most excessive lifestyles competing in a world where men die young and the victor not only walks away with the most money, but with the most valuable reputation. Bursting of style and pimp slapped with full on octane entrenched cinema, Johnny To presents his action masterpiece, “Fulltime Killer.”Read More »