2010s

Nearly two decades after scripting the Infernal Affairs trilogy which has been liberally remade and borrowed from, Felix Chong’s new crime thriller does some pilfering and copying of its own. Spotting Project Gutenberg’s high-profile, largely Hollywood influences isn’t difficult, but derivation is rarely as entertaining as this slick Hong Kong effort about a high-stakes counterfeiting operation — and rarely comes with such compelling and engaging performances from the starry likes of Chow Yun-Fat and Aaron Kwok.Read More »

Quote:
Lars, a male nurse from Saarbrucken, moves with his lover Roland, a sweet-spirited musician with a lilting voice, to the bustling Berlin. They renovate an apartment with the intention of finally living together. For Roland, their happiness seems almost complete. What he doesn’t know, however, is that while secretly checking out Berlin’s nightlife, Lars is experimenting with a deadly poison – an obsession that will lead to a horrific outcome for the couple.Read More »

Synopsis
A Yangtze Landscape utilizes a non-narrative style, setting off from the Yangtze’s marine port Shanghai, filming all the way to the Yangtze River’s source, Qinghai/Tibet – filming a total distance of thousands of kilometers. Experimental music and noise recorded live on scene are used in post-production, painstakingly paired with relatively independent visuals, creating a magically realistic atmosphere contrasted with people seeming to be ‘decorative figures’ right out of traditional Chinese landscape scrolls.Read More »

Quote:
Sixty Six began as a three minute, 16mm film I created in 2002– a pop poetic filled with the lush palette of Daylight Noir and primary color abstraction. For some undefined reason, I never took this little conjuring to the printing stage but would instead occasionally screen it publicly as tape-spliced workprint. In June of 2012, I felt compelled to finally complete this short. I decided to re-create it, shot for shot, in digital video, which in the intervening decade had replaced 16mm as my format of choice. But a surprising thing happened as I transposed some of the original shots into video, the piece kept expanding as new images and materials spontaneously folded in.Read More »

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A group of students decides to camp on a desolate Caspian region which runs a competition of kite flying during the winter solstice. Not far from the camp, live Babak and Saeed, two grim cooks. Armed with sharp knives, they roam the forest in search of meat to serve the decrepit restaurant they run nearby…Read More »

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At some point beating and ravaging others becomes a routine pastime when two kids go on a rampage. Taira picks his target of men and goes for broke, while Kitahara puts down his camera long enough to instead go after women. There is enough blood shed during the course of one night to paint a mural of red for the whole city to see.Read More »

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Helmer is 55 and a bachelor. He tends a remote farm and looks after his ailing father. Theirs is a brittle, tight-lipped relationship. When his father moves ever closer towards the grave, Helmer shifts him upstairs. He then clears out all the junk from the ground floor, throws the house plants on the dung heap, orders a new bed, and begins to live a life of his own. From time to time, Ada from the neighbouring farm drops in with her sons, and the milk truck driver regularly seeks Helmer’s company – but Helmer withdraws into his own world.Read More »

IMDB:
Features four distinct, bizarre, existential tales about people whose lives are in transition, who are each asking questions about themselves, their environments, and about God(s).Read More »

Observational documentarian Barbara Kopple has a long history of making herself seem invisible, but the vérité intimacy and anti-establishment zeal of Oscar-winning classics like “Harlan County, USA,” and “American Dream” suggest that her signature work couldn’t have been made by anyone else; Kopple isn’t absent from these films so much as she’s sublimated into the air they breathe. “Desert One” is different — you couldn’t find Kopple’s fingerprints on this comprehensive but incurious account of the Iran hostage crisis if you watched the movie through a magnifying glass. Read More »