2000s

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It is often said that comedy is the most untranslatable element from culture to culture. This is perhaps even more the case with surreal mixed genre films like this. In Shindo Kaneto’s film (his 101st!) the old sensei has given us a strange meditation on male lusts and women’s struggle for independence. It is like a play in that the action takes place almost exclusively in a small cabin in a deserted region of Western Japan. A mother and daughter are stranded in a ghost town and are starving to death. They hit on a plan to get them out of their plight which involves exploiting the few men who stray into their cabin. They offer sexual services and then bump off the happy customers. All goes well until a local cop shows up and, then, a relation of theirs from way back.Read More »

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About a month after the Holy Week, a major national election will take place. What future does it hold for a motley group of TIRADORS–local slang for petty thieves—whose daily survival depends on fast fingers and yearly atonement on divine grace? The tiradors all live in an old dilapidated tenement building in the slums of QUIAPO, a busy business district of Manila where they ply their trade.Read More »

Synopsis
Austrian experimental documentary maker Peter Schreiner undertakes a psychoanalytic quest for human existence. It’s a cross between Freud and Sartre, magical and minimalist, as long as you dare.
Two wrinkled lovers, marked by life, expose their deepest inner emotions. Giuliana compares the vaults of her spirit with closed doors that you ‘have to open cautiously’. ‘But,’ Christian wonders, ‘does that make you happier?’ They talk slowly and calmly, looking for the right words for their inner demons. It all comes down to reason and feeling and where the two meet. About reality that looks both familiar and alienating. Read More »

95% of men admit to masturbating. But some men masturbate more than others. Much more… ‘I Can’t Stop Masturbating’ will follow two men as they try to break an addiction that is destroying their lives.

Russell masturbates up to 15 times a day, a habit that is destroying his relationships with the opposite sex. We’ll follow Russell as he embarks on a road trip across America, sampling weird and wonderful treatments to see if he can finally kick his addiction. Paul’s habit means he cannot hold down a job or a relationship. The programme will follow Paul as he undergoes therapy in the UK, in a desperate attempt to get his life back on track. Will Russell and Paul be able to pull it off?Read More »

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Like an eager frequent flyer, Western paternalism changes destinations but not its baggage. The Children of Huang Shi takes the good intentions and terrible methods of The Constant Gardener and Blood Diamond and takes them to China, where another traumatizing upheaval is whittled down to window-dressing for the personal romance and redemption of a couple of chalky-white stars. Business as usual for Roger Spottiswoode, who in the 1983 thriller Under Fire envisioned the Nicaraguan revolution as mere scrim on which a hotshot American reporter could get his shit together. The adventure-seeking outsider this time around is real-life British journalist George Hogg (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who arrives in late-1930s China as invading Japanese forces plow the land, slaughtering everyone in their way.Read More »

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The moral conundrum at the heart of Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky’s “The Counterfeiters” is worthy of Kafka or Dostoevsky: What is the value of a single human life in the face of unspeakable evil? During World War II, one of Europe’s greatest counterfeiters decides, for a while, that his own survival is more important, until inevitably he learns that surrendering one’s soul and humanity may be worse than losing your life altogether.Read More »

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El secreto de sus ojos (English: The Secret In Their Eyes) is a 2009 Argentine dramatic crime film, directed by Juan José Campanella, co-produced by Argentina and Spain, and based on Eduardo Sacheri’s novel La pregunta de sus ojos (The Question In Their Eyes). The film stars Ricardo Darín, Soledad Villamil, Javier Godino, Guillermo Francella and Pablo Rago. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at the 82nd Academy Awards, just two weeks after being awarded the Goya Award for Best Spanish Language Foreign Film of 2009 (the Goya Awards are the Spanish equivalent to the American Academy Awards). As of 2010 it has become the second most succesful film in Argentina’s history, only surpassed by Leonardo Favio’s 1975 classic Nazareno Cruz y el lobo (Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf). (Wikipedia)Read More »

Ai Weiwei studio production “LAO MA TI HUA” is a documentary of an incident during Tan Zuoren’s trial on August 12, 2009. Tan Zuoren was charged with “inciting subversion of state power”. Chengdu police detained witnessed during the trial of the civil rights advocate, which is an obstruction of justice and violence.Read More »

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Everyone is, alas, familiar with the Mafia. Tony Montana, Al Capone, the Sopranos, the Italian gang of Scorcese, Pacino, and de Niro have made Godfathers as real as our own. The Japanese Yakuza we have also vaguely heard about. Same with the Chinese triads or the Russian mafia. Far more secretive as organized crime goes is the murderous Napolitan Camorra.Read More »