2010s

A man who wants to pass the border hunts a ram and decides to escape disguised as the animal.Read More »

Forced to return to his naturist roots, Willy bungles his way into noble savagery.Read More »

The search for the body of Andres Bonifacio.

Clavis Films wrote:
A cinematographic fresco on the Philippine revolution against the Spanish colonial regime at the end of the 19th century. The film tells the story of several women, one of whom is in search of her husband kidnapped by the settlers. These damned souls roam a jungle of astonishing beauty. Like Bela Tarr, Lav Diaz is reinventing cinema here.Read More »

Storyline
On an isolated hilltop, an elderly couple lives in solitude. She is dying and he accompanies her through the passing. Her death transforms the days that follow.Read More »

A headstrong young girl in Afghanistan disguises herself as a boy in order to provide for her family.

Chicago Reader wrote:
The Breadwinner is a moving, visually impressive lesson in modern Afghan history
Posted By Ben Sachs on 01.26.18 at 12:26 PM

When I went to see The Breadwinner at the AMC River East a couple months ago, I was the only one in the theater; when I planned to write about it a few days later, the film had already left town. I’m glad to see that the Gene Siskel Film Center has brought it back for a weeklong engagement, so that more Chicagoans can catch up with this inventive and informative film. (That it was recently nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Feature should help drum up attendance.) Read More »

A group of Yokohama teens look to save their school’s clubhouse from the wrecking ball in preparations for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.Read More »

In a fateful bumper car collision, Jake and Ella meet and become the most loving couple in the long history of romance. But when a scheming “other” woman drives a wedge of jealousy into their perfect courtship, insecurity and hatred spell out an untimely fate. With only the help of a disgraced magician and his forbidden “soul machine”, Ella takes the form of Jake’s numerous lovers, desperately fighting through the malfunction and deceit as they try to reclaim their destiny.Read More »

Cat in the Wall tells the true story of how a cat, stuck in a wall, changes the lives of aspirational migrants, benefit fraudsters and gentrified Brexiteers.

As documentarians, Mina Mileva and Vesela Kazakova have always been fearless. The duo’s rage permeates their first foray into fiction, Cat in the Wall. An examination of society’s absurdities and unfairness through the eyes of Irina, a single Bulgarian mother whose place in London is challenged in every way, turning her into a metaphoric “cat in the wall”, just like the real one.Read More »

Don’t we all feel the same longing for German films that break ranks, that are wild and sensual, that possess a true physicality? Dominik Graf’s thrillers, the articles he’s written on cinema and his new documentary all tell of this longing. What happened to this section of our film tradition, which in the 1970s and 80s brought forth a genre cinema that showed a very different Germany, one looking into the abyss?
Even before Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, there were reflections of neon signs in nocturnal streets and a dark angel who wanted to rescue a prostitute in Roland Klick’s Supermarkt (1973). Klaus Lemke and Roland Klick sit before Graf’s camera as nonchalantly as their heroes and rave about how actors who make full use of their bodies. At first, post-war Germany did not want maimed bodies sweaty with exertion, until Mario Adorf and Klaus Kinski brought back the need for the physical. Suddenly, there was space for violent, bloody and dirty stories, with the RAF’s first department store bomb reverberating through films such as Blutiger Freitag (1972). This is another way of telling German history. [Berlinale.de]Read More »