From The New york Times
Grimly austere barely begins to describe the atmosphere of dread that seeps through “Fear X” like a toxic mist. The movie’s ominous mood is deepened by Brian Eno and J. Peter Schwalm’s ambient background score, which haunts the movie with faraway groans and rattles.

If “Fear X,” the American filmmaking debut of the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, promises far more drama than it finally delivers, its glumness never abates. Whether contemplating the shabby cottages in a snow-swept Wisconsin suburb or scanning the flatlands of Montana, the camera, which stealthily follows the protagonist’s suspicious eyes wherever he looks, imagines danger crouching in every shadow.

That protagonist, Harry Cain (John Turturro), works as a security guard at a Wisconsin shopping mall. Not long before the story begins, Harry’s wife, Claire (Jacqueline Ramel), was mysteriously shot to death at the mall, along with a police officer. The double murder remains unsolved and its details cloudy. Racking his mind for reasons Claire might have been killed, Harry obsessively tries to piece together whatever clues he can scrounge from the mall’s surveillance videotapes. Blurry still photographs from those tapes along with news clippings of the killings fill up a wall of his living room.

Harry entertains fleeting hallucinations of Claire’s presence in the house and he has a recurrent memory (fantasy) of her walking up the driveway of the bungalow across the street. His intuition drives him to sneak into the deserted cottage, where he discovers some scraps of film on a bedroom floor. The house, he learns, has been rented by a local real estate agency to an unidentified corporate client.

When the photos are developed they show a snapshot of a mother and child in front of a restaurant in Montana. After making some phone calls, Harry determines its exact location and drives there to investigate. Breakfasting at a diner, he shows the photo around and learns that the woman, Kate (Deborah Kara Unger), is the wife of a local policeman, Peter Northrup (James Remar). The news of Harry’s appearance in town sets off alarms in the inner circle of its police department, which is about to cite Peter for distinguished service.

At various times, “Fear X” suggests a metaphysical mystery like “Blow-Up,” a vigilante portrait like “Taxi Driver” and a study of an obsessed loner like “One Hour Photo,” but it is really none of the above. The elliptical screenplay written by the director with Hubert Selby Jr. (the author of “Last Exit to Brooklyn” and “Requiem for a Dream”), who died last April, is an essay in minimalist gloom colored with paranoia, conspiracy and guilt.

In conversation, the unsmiling characters express themselves in the fewest words possible, their exchanges punctuated by awkward silences. The verbal sparseness contributes to the air of enveloping desolation. “Fear X” evokes an unsparing view of people as isolated, frightened, potentially violent creatures, whirling unsteadily in their solitary orbits.

The doubts and suspicions they refuse to put into words register on their faces like storm clouds, and the stony Mountain State machismo of the Montana police quickly comes to feel like a boot pressed against your throat. Peter’s agitation at Harry’s appearance in town and his refusal to tell his wife what’s happening leads Kate to assume infidelity. It all builds to an enigmatic confrontation between Harry and Peter that answers some questions but raises many others.

For Mr. Turturro, “Fear X” is an impressive exercise in restraint. The hot-wired volatility for which he is famous remains bottled up in a performance that goes out of its way to avoid grandstanding. The only moment he springs into action comes early in the film when, still at the mall, he spots an elderly shoplifter stealing a sweater and confronts the thief and his embarrassed wife. Otherwise, there are no tears, no explosions, no indications of dementia, just the sullen downcast expression and the twitch of a sunken lower lip to indicate a soul shut down in grief and despair.

Fear X - 2003 - Nicolas Winding Refn_576p.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 31 min
Size: 	2.57 GiB
Video
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Resolution: 	1024x464 
Aspect ratio:  	2.2:1
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 399 kb/s
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Audio
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https://nitro.download/view/2C38E7BD530CDDD/Fear_X_-_2003_-_Nicolas_Winding_Refn_576p.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Nicolas Winding Refn – Fear X (2003) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Signs & Wonders is a 2000 psychological thriller directed by Jonathan Nossiter and co-written with British poet James Lasdun (also co-writer of Sunday) was inspired by the Polish surrealist novel, Kosmos of Witold Gombrowicz.

It stars Stellan Skarsgård, Charlotte Rampling and Deborah Kara Unger. Produced by MK2 in Paris, with Nick Wechsler and Jed Alpert in the USA, it was one of the first larger budget films (reportedly $5,000,0000) to use digital cameras for eventual blowup to 35 MM. Nossiter worked with Tommaso Vergallo (also his chief image collaborator on Mondovino), one of the founders of blowup pioneer Swiss Effects, to create a textured, 1970s’ grainy edge look in the transformation from digital to film.

Shot entirely on location in Athens and the northern province of Epirus in Greece as well as short sequences in Vermont and New York State, the film also marked the return to the big screen of Charlotte Rampling after several years’ hiatus. The music is composed by Adrian Utley of the British group Portishead. Hailed by Cahiers du Cinema as one of the ten best films of the year, it premiered in competition at the Berlin Film Festival in 2000 and was released in France the same year by MK2 and in the United States by Strand Releasing in 2001.

Adopting the serio-comic visual associations celebrated in Gombrowicz’s novel, the film unfolds largely in Athens as an expatriate American businessman struggles to find coherence in his radical “pursuit of happiness”. Alec Fenton (Skarsgård) is a happily married man with two children who nonetheless is maintaining a torrid affair with colleague Katherine (Unger). At the start of the film, impelled by signs clearly decipherable to him, he abruptly ends the liaison after voluntarily confessing its existence to his wife Marjorie (Rampling). But after he accidentally runs into Katherine six months later while on a family skiing vacation abroad, he decides to leave his wife and children and return to America with his fated lover. But on learning from Katherine that their meeting was not an accident but a product of her design, he abandons her a second time and rushes back to Athens to try to salvage his family relations. On his return however, he discovers that Marjorie, who works at the US embassy, has taken up with a Greek political activist, Andreas (Dimitri Katalifos), survivor of the US sponsored years of Greek military dictatorship.

The urban chaos of Athens becomes the catalyst for the struggles between these American expatriates and their Greek hosts in this “strange meeting of psychological thriller and comic fable without a moral.”

Edge of the seat stuff till it falls apart right at the very end, mind blowing use of DV and stunning steadicam and hand held work by Angelopoulos’ oft used cinematographer.

1.17GB | 1h 43m | 640×480 | avi

https://nitroflare.com/view/EBFE3BA9863639B/Signs_and_Wonders.avi
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https://nitroflare.com/view/F3263D45A7EDF5F/Signs_and_Wonders.rar
https://nitroflare.com/view/AF93888195192EA/Signs_and_Wonders.sub

Language:English
Subtitles:English

The post Jonathan Nossiter – Signs & Wonders (2000) first appeared on Cinema of the World.