2000s

Press comment:
Not unexpectedly Troell´s contribution to the group-project facing the new millenium -“Swedish stories” – is outstanding. Here the lives of ordinary people on the countryside on Sweden´s southern tip mirror, without effort, something more general. This time we encounter some enthusiasts running a small radio station. Singing, talking, and greeting is heard, listened to and exchanged.. The image of a technology serving people and their fellowship is developed together with the one of a society not having lost its soul. —Troell is the great observer among Swedish documentarists. His brilliant cinematography and associative editing literally cuts out meaning and coherence from the visible reality.
DAGENS NYHETERRead More »

In the last feature-length collaboration between Straub and Huillet before Huillet’s death in 2006, villagers from across the length of Italy — a peasant, a postmaster, a theater director, a mayor, a rope maker — gather in the Tuscan countryside to recite the five final scenes of Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò.

Published in 1947, just two years after the Holocaust and the Second World War and two years before Pavese’s suicide, the Dialogues offer a series of meditations on human destiny, both comical and tragic, between ancient Greek mythological figures. Desperate in their hunger for immortality, mortals are blind to the gift of being human — of their ability to experience joy and suffering; to feel a passing breeze or the touch of another body; to name, remember, and act.Read More »

Hail to The King, a quietly shocking slice of Southern Gothic from British director James Marsh (Wisconsin Death Trip) and scribe Milo Addica (Monster’s Ball, Birth). Mexican heartthrob Gael García Bernal chills the blood as Elvis, a devil in disguise who infiltrates the family of long-lost dad William Hurt, a pastor with a past. Far from being as overheated as it sounds, this is a muted, menacing slow-burner. Lend it your patience, and you’ll be royally rewarded.Read More »

AMG: How does one start anew after a checkered personal history threatens to extinguish all hope and the possibility of redemption? Such is the question that lies at the heart of De Usynlige, Norwegian director Erik Poppe’s earnest psychological drama of second chances. Pal Sverre Hagen stars as Jan Thomas, a young man fresh from an eight-year prison sentence. The catalyst for his incarceration may have been an accident and may have been a premeditated murder, but regardless, the event still hangs over Jan like a dark shroud, tempering his memories and his actions. Upon release, Jan – a talented organist – lands a job in the local church as an organ player, and begins to develop feelings for Anna (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), a female priest who also happens to be a single mother. To avoid complications and protect the sanctity of the new relationship, Jan silently vows to withhold information about his troubled past from Anna, but the past catches up with him in the form of Agnes, a schoolteacher who visits the church and recognizes Jan – as the man responsible for her young son’s death.Read More »

Synopsis
In the early fifties Ingmar Bergman got himself a cine-camera, a 9.5 mm Bell & Howell, which he often used both privately and in his work. “Bilder från lekstugan” (“Images from the Playground”) embark on these films, giving a diverse representation of one of the greatest artists in cinema.Read More »

Quote:
As you may know, Michael Haneke doesn’t make comfortable films; there was Funny Games, which I thought was almost physically painful to watch, and then he made The Piano Teacher, a shocking but compulsive experience starring Isabelle Huppert as a sexually repressed piano teacher who has a dysfunctional relationship with her mother. And the rest of the world. Time of the Wolf is disconcerting, although not quite in the same class as The Piano Teacher.Read More »

In Chris Marker and Yannick Bellon’s Remembrance of Things to Come, a thoughtful and illuminating survey of Denis Bellon’s photo-reportage between the two world wars, the filmmakers provide a framework for the interpretation of Bellon’s artistically rendered, zeitgeist images as prescient, historical documents that, in hindsight, provide an insightful glimpse of the looming, profoundly transformative world events that would unfold at the first half of the twentieth century. However, in this subjective, often arbitrary process of contemporal assignment of the meaning of images, the intersection between logical deduction and extrapolation continues to be amorphous and untenable.Read More »

BBC documentary in three parts written and produced by Adam Curtis on the history and influence of the ideologies of Islamic fundamentalism and neoconservatism

Part 1 Baby It’s Cold Outside (originally broadcast on October 20, 2004)
Part 2 The Phantom Victory (originally broadcast on October 27, 2004)
Part 3 The Shadows in the Cave (originally broadcast on November 3, 2004)
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Montreal Mirror wrote:

People tend to be cynical and derisive towards romantic comedies. Personally, I’m a softie and seeing people fall in love on screen always touches me. Then again, I’m aware that most entries in the rom-com genre are derivative and idiotic. But once in a blue moon, you find one that’s surprisingly original and intelligent. Les Aimants is such a film.

After five years abroad, Julie (Isabelle Blais) comes back to Montreal and crashes with her sister Jeanne (Sylvie Moreau), a woman who lies as she breathes. Jeanne is engaged to Noël (David Savard), a workaholic who’s never home, so they communicate through messages they leave on the refrigerator. When Jeanne leaves for a week of adultery with theremin virtuoso Manu (Emmanuel Bilodeau), she asks Julie to cover up for her by responding to Noël’s fridge notes. But Julie decides to get “positive revenge” on her seemingly heartless sister by making the messages she leaves more romantic…Read More »