Letterboxd review by Wilson ★★★★½
Bernard Rose is an interesting filmmaker, with a strange obsession for adapting Leo Tolstoy. ivans xtc. is his version of the Tolstoy novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

Rose has directed another four Tolstoy adaptations, as far as I can see (pretty sure Leo didn’t have a short story about Candyman…), he has also made Anna Karenina (1997), The Kreutzer Sonata, Two Jacks and Boxing Day.

Rose takes the Tolstoy stories and updates them to the modern day, often setting them in sleazy Hollywood. He casts Danny Huston and lets rip.

ivans xtc. is a really full throttle Hollywood satire. It is a sleazy, sordid 90 minutes. The kind of film where Peter Weller snorts cocaine off Danny Huston’s wife, “2 milimetres from her pussy” as the film would have it. Rose pulls no punches with Hollywood, while keeping his literary precision.

He scores the film with a cold, classical soundscape; while swerving into the satire by casting Tiffani Thiessen and Victoria Silvstedt, as strange versions of their own public personas.

The film is probably most notable for its incredibly low-grade digital photography, that adds to its grimey appearance. It deliberately looks terrible, which just adds to the film.

However, in the end, this film belongs to Danny Huston. Huston manically stumbles around the film, delivering a masterclass in charisma. Huston plays a Hollywood agent, with snake-oil charm, a huge grin and dead eyes and an unending love of consumption. Yet the film works because it opens with his death, the reactions to his death, then spins backwards into his last weekend, of parties, and drugs and sex.

It is like the louche Ikiru.

Yet, despite the level of unlikeable debauchery, Rose and Huston makes the film an emotionally resonant work. Where you feel deeply by the end of the 90 minutes for main character.

ivans xtc. is one of the most neglected great films of the last 15 years. A brutal satire, a great literary adaptation, a stunning performance; a debauched, sexy, drama, that ends up as a really melancholic character study.

Ivansxtc.AKA.Ivans.xtc.2000.576p.BluRay.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 32 min
Size: 	2.46 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1020x576 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	3 355 kb/s
BPP: 	0.238
Audio
#1:  	English 5.1ch AC-3 @ 448 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/B128AFCB844F134/Ivansxtc.AKA.Ivans.xtc.2000.576p.BluRay.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

https://rapidgator.net/file/92392dedb3574b90c7e885479d2fd5ee/Ivansxtc.AKA.Ivans.xtc.2000.576p.BluRay.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Bernard Rose – Ivansxtc AKA Ivans xtc. (To Live and Die in Hollywood) (2000) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Anna is a young widow who is finally getting on with her life after the death of her husband, Sean. Now engaged to be married, Anna meets a ten-year-old boy who tells her he is Sean reincarnated. Though his story is both unsettling and absurd, Anna can’t get the boy out of her mind. And much to the concern of her fiancé, her increased contact with him leads her to question the choices she has made in her life.

Birth 2004 720p WEB-DL AAC2.0 H.264-alfaHD.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 40 min
Size: 	2.85 GiB
Video
Codec: 	h264
Resolution: 	1280x692 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	3 954 kb/s
BPP: 	0.186
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AAC @ 122 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/EFB435D0D2B2707/Birth_2004_720p_WEB-DL_AAC2.0_H.264-alfaHD.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Jonathan Glazer – Birth (2004) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Playoff tells the story of legendary Israeli basketball coach Ralph Klein. He became a national hero, when he made Maccabi Tel Aviv into European Champions in the late Seventies, one of Israel’s first great international sporting successes. But Max became a national traitor equally fast, when he then accepted the against-all-odds job of turning the totally hopeless West-German basketball team – of all people! – into European winners. Max always maintains that Germany – where he was born before the war – means nothing to him, and that training their national team is just another job on his path to NBA glory. But things aren’t as simple as he refuses to speak German to the young players. The only person he seems to be able to relate to is a Turkish immigrant woman Deniz, and her cheeky teenage daughter Sema. Max just about falls in love with Deniz – and does succeed in reinventing the Germans as European champions. When he discovers what happened to his own family in the 1940s – it is …

1.98GB | 1h 46m | 720×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/62C8835983958E5/Playoff.2011.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language:English,German,Turkish,Hebrew
Subtitles:English,Hebrew

The post Eran Riklis – Playoff (2011) first appeared on Cinema of the World.