REVIEW by Anji Milanovic (from plume-noire.com):
In Old, New, Borrowed and Blue director Natasha Arthy begins the film with a signed certificate of authenticity from the Dogma school. By the film’s end, however, it’s clear that she has taken the rules of Dogma and used them to make her own engaging film, instead of an exercise in philosophical experimentation.Read More »
To mark her 50th birthday, filmmaker Lynne Sachs gathers a group of her contemporaries—all New Yorkers but originally hailing from all corners of the globe—for a weekend of recollection and reflection on the most life-altering personal, local, and international events of the past half- century, creating what Sachs calls “a collective distillation of our times.” Interspersed with poetry and flashes of archival footage, this poignant reverie reveals how far beyond our control life is, and how far we can go despite this.Read More »
Crowned best film in Venice’s Horizons section, Lav Diaz’s latest madly uncommercial 7½-hour magnum opus, “Melancholia,” sets a trio of survivors wandering the country in a dirge to those lost to disaster. To reconcile themselves to the deaths of their leftist comrades and loved ones, two women and a man undertake a succession of role-changes as a radical form of grief therapy. But the alienation implied by their incarnations of a prostitute, pimp and nun, assumed at the pic’s opening, reads as anything but therapeutic.Read More »
“Very sweet, wryly funny in spots, but always haunted by war (described sparingly but never shown). It was based on a stage play and betrays its theatrical roots in some of the pacing and staging. It’s slow, perhaps too slow for action film fans, but it’s not boring. Rather, it’s delicate and precise like tea ceremony.Read More »
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Abouna is a gently heartbreaking look at the lives of two boys growing up impoverished and fatherless in Chad. Filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun mixes in telling bits of documentary realism with his story of the two boys’ lackadaisical search for their father. The filmmaker takes his time with the tale, lingering on details, like a long shot of the two boys meandering across a field, roughhousing and walking on their hands. Haroun also pointedly displays posters for Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, Idrissa Ouedraogo’s Yaaba, and Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise outside the little movie theater that the boys visit.Read More »
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Oscar winning director Sydney Pollack takes a sharp sideways turn with SKETCHES OF FRANK GEHRY, a documentary about the noted architect. Usually known for making grandiose productions such as THE FIRM and OUT OF AFRICA, Pollock adds a genuine curio to his filmmaking resume with this movie. Although the two men have been friends for years, Pollock thankfully bypasses the opportunity to pay a fawning tribute to Gehry, instead presenting a well-balanced portrait that offers both positive and negative commentators the chance to etch their thoughts into celluloid.Read More »
Set in a tight-knit, extremely conservative island community off the Southern coast of Iran where all women wear burkas, this film begins as an investigation into the suicide of a woman named Samireh. Her husband callously says that while he cares about the lives of his kids, women’s lives are cheap. However, the women the director Oskouei interviews – many of whom were married off at age 12 or 13 – stand up for themselves and discuss their difficult existences. Oskouei relies mostly on close-up or medium-shot interviews, and as usual, displays his gift for framing people dynamically in tight spaces.Read More »
Two brothers, both military, come to a kind of campus, where their third brother is kind of ill : he keeps in his room, not speaking anymore.
Why ? What can one do for him ?
One can think of Bresson with humor, or a poetic musical. The less you know about the movie before watching it, the better it is. It is too simple and too fragile to resist too much description.Read More »
Synopsis:
Serious boffin Ivan (Fedor Lavrov) arrives in unnamed town from Novosibirsk to take up a post at institute run by Sergey Sergeyevich (Pavel Lubimtsev) and is immediately put in charge of Unit 7 where the particle flux experiments are taking place. Maximum reading a subject can produce is 977, hence title, and fetching waif Rita (Klavdia Korshunova) does just that, but seems to disappear mysteriously from the sealed observation rooms every time the experiment is conducted. Overtones of Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” and “Stalker” are bolstered by hints, so subtle those just reading the subtitles won’t get them, that action takes place in the ’70s.Read More »