2010s

Erwin, a middle-aged married man, finds that his only outlet is online gaming. After trying to make a drastic shift in his life, he finds himself in the same rut as before.

Angelo Muredda @CinemaScope wrote:
…Radwanski looks to another late bloomer with his just as well-observed How Heavy This Hammer, closely following listless middle-aged father Erwin (Erwin Van Cotthem), who periodically escapes his humdrum domestic life through online strategy games that allow him to reimagine himself as some sort of Viking.Read More »

Sacred Mount Shasta channels energy into the earth. The native Wintu made pilgrimages to take care of it, and only medicine men or women were allowed to climb up. We then receive an astral message, as we listen to the rain pouring down during a summer storm in Cape Romain, South Carolina, and travel over the marsh.Read More »

Are you afraid of death? According to statistics, two people on earth die each second. Die Tomorrow zeroes in on the last day of its protagonists, each of whom have no idea of their fate. The film picks up on six everyday situations and turns them into moving stories. With true lightness of touch, director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit forges shots that play out over considerable time and then combines them with documentary-like interview footage, news reports, sound recordings, statistics and archive material, thus creating an elaborate essay. In view of what is about to happen, small snatches of conversation take on dramatic dimensions for the viewer.Read More »

Unannounced, Aziza is once again standing in her room – internship, Portugal, everything canceled. But her room is occupied. Her mother, Trixi, has rented it out. Zach lives there now, a twenty-something from New Zealand, who came to Germany on a one-way ticket. Starting from this situation, the film develops an almost documentary-style portrait of a Kreuzberg ‘situation’: everything is readily available, time, people, summer, streets. And in the end a crash, the film itself: ‘for nothing’?Read More »

A beauteous depiction of a woman’s life and gradual liberation. Lucia has long been married to Andrea and is fully occupied by raising their son and her work in a flower shop. But everything is turned on its head when she discovers that Andrea has betrayed her. Lucia is forced to ransack her conscience and everything that her existence has been. Slowly she builds up her life again, and then she meets Ahmed, a newly arrived refugee selling odds and ends on the street.Read More »

A cinematic essay in defense of remembering, The Royal Road offers up a primer on Junipero Serra’s Spanish colonization of California and the Mexican American War alongside intimate reflections on nostalgia, the pursuit of unavailable women, butch identity and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo — all against a contemplative backdrop of 16mm urban California landscapes, and featuring a voiceover cameo by Tony Kushner.
This bold, innovative film from acclaimed San Francisco filmmaker Jenni Olson combines rigorous historical research with lyrically written personal monologue and relates these seemingly disparate stories from an intimate, colloquial perspective to tell a one-of-a-kind California tale.Read More »

MARK SCHILLING wrote:
Junji Sakamoto’s “Zatoichi: The Last,” the latest revival, doesn’t feature Katsu, who died in 1997 after a wild, riotous life. Instead it stars the hyper SMAP singer Shingo Katori, who has mostly appeared on the big screen in comedies (“The Uchoten Hotel”) or kiddie actioners (“Saiyuki”).

Also, instead of portraying Ichi as an outcast and loner, the film gives him a wife, friends, a community — and strong feelings for all of them.Read More »

In 2052, a man wanders through a semi-constructed high rise in pursuit of hidden targets, in a minimalist rethinking of Blade Runner.Read More »

Alice, a buoyant and impertinent redhead teenager, is far from the charming little girl her mother adopted when she was unable to have a child of her own. Being an endless source of problems and affected by her mother’s disappointments, Alice forges lies and blurs the lines between the fiction she creates for herself and the reality of her existence. Until her mother discovers she is pregnant.Read More »