2010s

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“Tuesday, After Christmas” (Marti, dupa craciun, 2010) is the latest film from Romania to hit the film festival circuit and cause a stir. I saw it at this year’s Chicago International Film Festival.

A great many of the films coming from Romania have all been fiercely political. There was “12:08 East of Bucharest” (A Fost sau n-a fost, 2007), “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” (4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile, 2007), “How I Spent The End of the World” (Cum mi-am petrecut sfarsitul lumii, 2006) and the movie which started this recent “new wave” in Romanian cinema “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” (Moartea domnului Lazarescu, 2006). But “Tuesday, After Christmas” is much different. There is absolutely no mention of politics or even social injustice.Read More »

“Gittoes’s work often asks two questions: what are the experiences of other artists working and surviving in war zones? Or, what is his moral responsibility as an artist-correspondent? When Gittoes allows his subjects to explain the former, or, when he talks about his own experience of the latter, his work is clear and insightful.Read More »

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We follow 24 hours in the life of a being (DL) moving from life to life like a cold and solitary assassin moving from hit to hit. In each of these interwoven lives, the being possesses an entirely distinct identity: sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, sometimes youthful, sometimes old to the point of dying; sometimes destitute, sometimes wealthy. By turns murderer, beggar, company chairman, monstrous creature, worker, family man…Read More »

Synopsis “Jeanette” is a musical drama based on Charles Peguy’s play “Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc” (1910). It focuses on the part of Peguy’s play that deals with Joan of Arc as a child, from age 8-12, when she started to embrace her sacred mission.

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Alba is eleven years old and terribly shy. She has great difficulty standing up for herself among the precocious girls in her class, who talk like little adults about relationships but keep making fun of Alba with the cruelty of children. The fact that she gets nosebleeds at inconvenient moments doesn’t help. To make matters worse, when her ailing mother is hospitalised she is dumped with her eccentric father Igor, who she never knew and of whom she is very ashamed. Very slowly and cautiously, the father and daughter get to know each other. Alba is a coming-of-age film that is both heart-rending and unsentimental. It’s striking that such a mature and powerful debut comes from Ecuador, the country that until the beginning of this century had only made one film a year. Young leading actress Macarena Arias is one to keep an eye on. She manages to use a minimum of dialogue to devastating effect.

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In an alternate present-day version of Oakland, telemarketer Cassius Green discovers a magical key to professional success, propelling him into a universe of greed.Read More »

In this short named for the cocktail ordered at the hotel bar of Fassbinder’s BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE, a singer serenades a small crowd in a moody nightclub who all look the part of Fassbinder characters—if not of Fassbinder himself. Serra pays homage not by mimicking Fassbinder’s style but rather by alchemically conjuring the people, places, and modes of performance most identified with him.Read More »

Louis XIV is no newcomer to Albert Serra’s filmography, the hero of his latest opus to date, THE DEATH OF LOUIS XIV (2016). ROI SOLEIL features a twin, even though, in the game of differences, it turns out that there are quite a few. Instead of Jean-Pierre Léaud, a non-professionnal actor whom Serra already worked with in his first films.Read More »

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After returning to his childhood home, a disgraced children’s puppeteer is forced to confront his wicked stepfather and the secrets that have tortured his entire life.Read More »