2000s

Quote:
Set in a South Korean orphanage circa 1975 and featuring a concentrated, thoroughly convincing perf by preteen Kim Sae-ron, “A Brand New Life” is an admirably un-manipulative drama about the impermanence of relationships and the resilience of kids in the face of it. Drawing on her own childhood experience as an orphan living with Catholic nuns in Seoul, first-time writer-director Ounie Lecomte has made a film that’s emotionally and aesthetically involving in almost every shot. Only an imperfect DV-to-35mm transfer minimizes the impact of a picture that remains intimately and movingly focused on a bereft 9-year-old girl’s p.o.v.Read More »

Synopsis:
Zeki Demirkubuz plays the lead character Ahmet who wants to make a film about Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’. He falls into a deep depression, loses interest in the film and life, pushes those who love him away and cannot complete the film.Read More »

Review from The New York Times, published October 2, 2009
Mike Hale wrote:
“Intimate Enemies” is a movie you’ve seen before, when it was set on the Apache reservation or in the Vietnamese jungle. This time the naïve lieutenant, the jaded sergeant, the suicidal mission with no purpose — all the components of the restless-natives combat movie — are applied to the war in Algeria in the late 1950s.Read More »

Roger Ebert
August 18, 2000

My best guess is that John Waters produced the talent shows in his high school. There’s always been something cheerfully amateurish about his more personal films–a feeling that he and his friends have dreamed up a series of “skits” while hanging out together.

“Cecil B. Demented” takes this tendency to an almost unwatchable extreme, in a home movie that’s like a bunch of kids goofing off.Read More »

After almost the whole family decimated by soldiers of the Roman Empire, the noble Germanus is captured as a slave. Humiliated and tortured by the mighty of Rome, he is obliged to endure the most terrible trials. In the bloody combat that wages as a gladiator in the Roman arenas, Germanus ends up losing his only brother, who dies in the hands of the cruel lakes. But Germanus will not give up and now will have to use all his spirit of struggle and leadership to command the masses against oppression towards freedom.Read More »

On his fifth attempt at boarding school, young Benni has one last
chance to prove to his parents he can function in the academic world, and, most importantly, pass math. But Benni has other concerns; he is partially paralyzed and struggling with typical teenage issues – making friends, falling in love and having sex. When his mother decides to move him to yet another school, Benni must decide whether to make a stand for what truly matters to him. Based on an autobiographical novel by Benjamin Lebert, Crazy has earned Schmid great praise for its honest portrait of teenage life.
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About the performing body and how it affects viscerally the people who confronts it, looks at it and participates in the transcendental experience that is its primary affect. The ceremonial and meditative are the common responses to the weeklong series of performances that took place in November 2005 in the Guggenheim Museum in New York. From an art event to a social phenomenon, the seven performances became the talk of the town because it created among the visitors a sense of sublimation like prayer. The film attempts to reveal the mechanisms of this transcendental experience by just showing the performer’s body living the events inscribed in each pieces with details that outline the body fragility, versatility, tenacity and unlimited endurance.
—Babette MangolteRead More »

Quote:
“Rewizyta” is a film about the further fate of the protagonists of Krzysztof Zanussi’s films from the 1970s: “Family Life” (1970), “Camouflage” (1976) and “The Constant Factor” (1980). What happened to them? Where are they? How did they survive the decades that separate us from those times? The film takes the form of an interview conducted in the present day by a would-be suicide, the protagonist of “And A Warm Heart,” who, on the recommendation of a therapist, investigates whether human life can be successful. The interview scenes are juxtaposed with film excerpts. Years later, the same actors appear before the camera and answer the man’s questions.Read More »

During a five year period an Italian filmmaker documents the world of down-on-their-luck individuals who live in a Californian desert trying to get by one day at a time. None of them has more than a vehicle, a dog and some clothes.Read More »