2010s

Tender, erotic, and pathetic, this reconstructed narrative examines the obsession to chronicle the details of an adulterous affair. Suitcase of Love and Shame is a mesmerizing collage woven from 60 hours of reel-to-reel audiotape discovered in a suitcase purchased on eBay. Recorded in the 1960’s, a Mid-western woman and her lover become reliant on recording devises to document and memorialize their affair. The film suggestively foregrounds the tape recorder as the confidant, witness, and participant that the couple come to depend on — always omnipresent, the recorder creates a welcomed ménage-à-trois.Read More »

Driven around Paris by a loyal driver (Édith Scob), a mysterious man (Denis Lavant) dresses up in costumes and plays a number of strange, semiscripted roles.

Manohla Dargis wrote:
“Holy Motors,” from the French filmmaker Leos Carax, is a dream of the movies that looks like a movie of dreams. It is a reverie that begins, appropriately, with a seated audience waiting in the dark (like us) and then cuts to a dimly lighted room, where a man (Mr. Carax) rises from a bed that he shares with a dog. He lets the sleeping dog lie (no need for trouble just yet) and creeps over to a mysterious door hidden in a wall. With a strange metal key that’s apparently grafted to one of his fingers, he unlocks the door and — like Little Nemo tumbling into Slumberland, Dorothy crossing over the rainbow and Alice falling down the rabbit hole — leaves one world for another.Read More »

Stars: Sten Jacobs, Anna Altmann, Jaspar Fuld, Nina Splettstößer, Stephan Bürgi, Natascha Zimmermann, Felix Witzlau, Tobias Frieben, León Delor

A haunting portrait of a well-established German family living on the outskirts of Berlin in their ideal world, but are slowly shaken by external influences.

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The architect and head of the family Markus Larsen secretly lives out his bisexual tendencies while his wife Christine and their 11-year-old daughter Elisabeth drown in unbearable loneliness. When Markus gets to know the 12-year-old son of a colleague, he feels an immediate affection for the boy. Slowly, Markus begins to approach Johannes and creates an intimacy of which he increasingly loses control. While his wife and daughter are damagingly affected by their symbiotic relationship, Johannes is playing his own secret game which, in the end, leads to disaster for every family member.Read More »

To build and create in a way that is open rather than closed: this stated ideal, heard at the beginning, is good for both art and architecture, and holds also for the film itself in its mysterious, associative construction. The images, in their pictorial diversity (black-and-white and colour, sharp and blurry), centre on Churchill College, home to many innovative thinkers since 1960; also seen are a designer’s drawings, owls and snakes, trees and walls. The soundtrack, with rustles, murmurs and clicks, includes words by John Cage and John Ashbery. There’s no story, no schema: only the openness to sensation and connection.Read More »

The first feature film written and directed by Tolga Karaçelik, better known for his award-winning short films such as Rapunzel, Toll Booth tells a story of miscommunication, isolation and desperate alienation via a conflict between a father and his son. Confined to his own world of dreams, introvert, and reticent, Kenan is a toll booth attendant, who lives with his ailing father. Kenan’s drab life stuck in routines between his toll booth and home will change the day a new manager comes for supervision. (~iksv.org)Read More »

Synopsis:
Successful and handsome New Yorker Brandon (Michael Fassbender) seems to live an ordinary life, but he hides a terrible secret behind his mask of normalcy: Brandon is a sex addict. His constant need for gratification numbs him to just about everything else. But, when Sissy (Carey Mulligan), Brandon’s needy sister, unexpectedly blows into town, crashes at his apartment and invades his privacy, Brandon is finally forced to confront his addiction head-on.Read More »

What if a revolution will happen in Turkey? “After Revolution” is discussing ordinary, daily life just after socialist revolution in Turkey. (~IMDb)Read More »

9 Fingers opens like in a film noir: at night, in a train station, a man called Magloire runs from a police control. With no luggage and no future. No sooner has he found a huge amount of money than trouble begins. A gang on his heels will soon make him a hostage then an accomplice. It is Kurtz’s gang. After an aborted break-in, they all have to flee aboard a cargo ship with a dangerous volatile freight. Nothing happens as it was supposed to be – poison and madness contaminate everybody. Kurtz’s men seem to be the pawns of a conspiracy led by the mysterious “9 Fingers”…Read More »

Quote:
Well, what would you do? You’d never go along with this, right? You’re too smart. Me, too. “Compliance” encourages us to feel superior to the employees of a fast-food chicken chain in Ohio, and so we do: Audiences are said to be outraged at what the characters do, and San Francisco-based critic Omar Moore went back to more screenings to confirm that there were walk-outs.

In the case of “Compliance,” the walk-outs aren’t because it’s a bad movie, but because it’s all too effective at exposing the human tendency to cave in to authority. As the film opens, Sandra (Ann Dowd), the restaurant’s manager, is already feeling guilty. An employee left a freezer open and $15,000 in food was spoiled. Almost as bad, somebody didn’t order more pickles and bacon, and the district supervisor is scheduled to make an inspection visit. For Sandra, this is a perfect storm.Read More »