2010s

*The official submission of Poland to the Best Foreign Language Film of the 85th Academy Awards 2013.

A new film by Waldemar Krzystek. Poland, Lower Silesia, the beginning of a very cold winter 1981. After the series of entrapments by the Security Service a confrontation between the opposition and the communists seems to be inevitable. Just before the proclamation of martial law a group of young Solidarity activists decide to play va banque and organize a rash action to take out 80 million of the Union money from one of the Wroclaw’s banks before the account would be blocked. Security Service officers follow their steps. It’s the beginning of a gripping tournament in which also priests and curb dealers will play their parts. Each side has aces up their sleeve.Read More »

Quote:
The peaceful cohabitation of bachelors Ender and Cetin is disrupted when they allow a friend’s sister to move in with them. The 30-something longtime friends are overwhelmed by the presence of the uncommunicative Nihal. What possessed them to accept the responsibility of a university student in their home? Especially a girl struggling with the trauma of recently losing her parents in a car accident. But simple daily rituals like sharing meals eventually bring the three roommates together for more pleasant moments. Nihal soon comes out of her depressed shell and the two men discover a vibrant beautiful young woman.Read More »

Synopsis:
Lee Kang-do (Lee Jeong-jin) is a debt collector. If he shouldn’t get his money he doesn’t refrain from committing any atrocity. Therefore, he has already turned quite a few of his victims into cripples in order to get his hands on the insurance policy, and some of them even took their lives. But Kang-do’s world is completely turned upside down when one day a woman (Jo Min-soo) stands at his doorstep and claims to be his mother who left him alone after giving birth to him. The debt collector turns her away several times, but the woman is stubborn and wants to atone for her sins. Read More »

Quote:
Present-day Chad. Adam, sixty something, a former swimming champion, is pool attendant at a smart N’Djamena hotel. When the hotel gets taken over by new Chinese owners, he is forced to give up his job to his son Abdel. Terribly resentful, he feels socially humiliated. The country is in the throes of a civil war. Rebel forces are attacking the government. The authorities demand that the population contribute to the “war effort”, giving money or volunteers old enough to fight off the assailants. The District Chief constantly harasses Adam for his contribution. But Adam is penniless; he only has his son…. Read More »

From IMDB:
Ramin Lomsadze, a 75-years old Georgian wrestler who once won seven matches in 55 seconds, is getting ready for the fight with his last and most formidable opponent – Loneliness. He gets on the train and sets off for a remote Georgian village to seek out the girl he loved and lost fifty years ago.Read More »

synopsis
Two siblings who grew up in a dysfunctional household pass their damage along to those around them in this drama from Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg. Nick (Jacob Cedergren) was raised by a mother with serious drinking problems who inflicted physical and emotional cruelty on her children. Now in his early thirties, Nick is an ex-con who has his own problems with alcohol and little sense of direction in his life. Back on the streets after a stay in jail, Nick lives in a shabby hostel, has an on-again, off-again relationship with Sofie (Patricia Schumann), whose alcoholism has cost her custody of her children, lifts weights and sometimes looks in on Ivan (Morten Rose), the troubled brother of a girl he one loved. Read More »

Oscar-winning director Errol Morris presents his most provocative and sexiest film yet. In the late 1970s, Miss Wyoming Joyce McKinney became a tabloid staple when she kidnapped her former beau, a Mormon missionary named Kirk Anderson, and tied him to a bed to deprogram his religious beliefs by having nonstop sex with him. Morris (The Fog of War, The Thin Blue Line) follows the salacious adventures of this beauty queen with an IQ of 168 whose single-minded devotion to the man of her dreams led her across the globe, into jail and onto the front page. Funny, strange and disturbing, Tabloid is a vivid portrait of obsession, delusion and scandal sheet notoriety.Read More »

What you first need to understand before watching Jess Franco’s Paula-Paula is that it’s not a normal movie. There’s not script, there’s a beginning and ending, but something else in between. It’s actually what the title say it is, an audiovisual experience that could belong in an art gallery. I’ve seen stuff like this at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, but this might be a little bit more sleazy…

It begins with the arrest of a young woman, Paula, who claims she’s been working at a sex club since she was five, first with her dad, and later together with another woman named Paula – and now she killed her. The police, played by a butch Lina Romay, is skeptical about it, and seem to almost let her go. No one cares about her, another crazy woman… There’s a cut to the interaction between Paula and Paula, in something that seem to be the first Paula’s apartment. They dance, there’s long psychedelic mirror-effects, slow-motion and an amazing jazz score by Friedrich Gulda (given to Franco by the children of Gulda, the composer himself is dead) and slowly it leads to the expected ending…Read More »

Short synopsis:
After a long separation, a father and his son spend the day fishing on the river bank. On a beautiful autumn Sunday, surrounded by the majestic countryside, they seem to be alone in the world. They must start all over again.Read More »