2010s

VARIETY – Warwick Thornton’s eye-opening doc about the cultural roots of the Southern Cross constellation is quintessentially Australian

At once benignly mischievous and profoundly serious, “We Don’t Need a Map,” the new documentary by “Samson & Delilah” director Warwick Thornton, explores the Southern Cross constellation, culturally integral to Australia’s indigenous peoples and inevitably massaged and reinterpreted by the white Europeans who later settled the continent. As such it is a pertinent message for the director’s countrymen and an eye-opening lesson for the world about the proud history and ongoing racial tensions that currently form the crux of the Australian experience.Read More »

IMDb wrote:
Trying to find their luck, husband and wife, Lucian and Andra start a new business by managing a guest-house hidden somewhere deep in the mountains.Read More »

TCM production exploring the invented, and inventive, techniques of early cinematographers, and their impact on filmmaking from the earliest films to those of present day.Read More »

Velicanu considers himself a fulfilled person. He’s got money, a new villa, married a younger woman and has a son from a previous marriage. Before the holidays he has to leave everything in order, but things start to get complicated. The crisis at the end of the day make him wonder whatever he is indeed a happy, fulfilled person…Read More »

‘The World Is Mine’ is about a teenager’s drama in the 2000s, focusing on the story of Larisa (Ana Maria Guran), a regular teenager from Constanta, Romania. Larisa wants a lot from life: money, power, influence, popularity and respect. Now that she is in love, she will do anything for that.Read More »

IMDb wrote:
This is the story of a young woman, Dorina, working in a sex shop in Bucharest, after being forced to interrupt her studies to care for her parents. Because of her job, everyone considers her to be something other than what she is – a fragile and unhappy woman, forced to live a life she does not deserve and for which she is not ready. And soon, things get out of control. The story of Dorina may be the story of all of us who are leading a life, inside which we feel prisoners and which we do not deserve.Read More »

Ann Hui’s My Way—starring Francis Ng and Jade Leung—is about a pre-op transsexual man nervously waiting for his operation. It is a stylishly melancholic film, and defined by the moment when he goes to the hospital for the operation, goes to sleep in the male ward (next to a newspaper reading old man) and wakes as a woman in the female ward…and finally indulging in a smile of relief and happiness.Read More »

Gu Changwei’s Longtou—shot documentary style—features a series of characters who dwell on the realities of expectation, punctuated by a series of memorable shots (a cat stalking and jumping onto an air conditioner unit; an elderly man dragging a series plastic bottles; a weight-lifter practicing his moves and a child blowing bubbles) and nice use of music.Read More »

Avigail had a baby too young and has been raising her alone. Now the teenage daughter is exploding with anger and defiance. When Avigail is remarried, the daughter doesn’t accept the new father and the house turns into a war zone. Things become even more complicated when Avigail is unable to fulfill her husband’s dream of becoming a father to his own child. Just when Avigail is about to collapse, she finds comfort in the hands of Yael, an expert in pregnancy and childcare. Yael, an abandoned child, had managed to build herself a persona of a spiritual guru of motherhood, only to run away from her grave fear of becoming a mother herself. Her troubled sister Na’ama is there to remind her the truth she has been running away from. Na’ama is a walking volcano. She is a bright and highly devoted daughter to her demented father by day and a desperate hunter of men at night. Yet, there is hope through connections. These women can help each other to change, break the cage of their self-destruction and be reborn.Read More »