Synopsis from AMG:
In this episodic animated fantasy from France, an art teacher interprets a series of six fairy tales (each involving a prince or princess) with the help of two precocious students. Princes et Princesses was created using a special style of cutout animation, with black silhouetted characters performing the action against backlit backdrops in striking colors. Produced in 1989, Princes et Princesses was first released in Europe in 2000 and received its first screening in North America at the 2000 Toronto Film Festival. — Mark DemingRead More »
It’s been argued that this frightening and erotic piece of experimental montage from Belgian directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani is all form and no feeling. It’s easy to see why, since its most easy pleasures derive from a cool juxtaposition and stylisation of sound and imagery. But there’s more to it: the film also functions as a knowing, lightly feminist homage to Hitchcock and the chief exponents of the Giallo genre, Dario Argento and Mario Bava. As such, its ‘meanings’ may not be instantly traceable through a cosy linear storyline or densely wrought characterisations.
In immaculate detail and with barely any dialogue, the film depicts three symbolic events in the life of Ana: the first involves a family death and some mid-coitus voyeurism; another shows her first experience of male attraction; and the final, most impressive chapter (a wholesale updating of a key segment from Argento’s ‘Deep Red’) sees our heroine (played by Marie Bos, pictured above) sneaking around an eerie, European mansion, maybe stalked by a razor-wielding maniac.
Cattet and Forzani sculpt with pure mood. They deliver a vivid sense of Ana’s heightened sensitivity towards her surroundings via an array of bravura camera tricks and fine edits. The best way to describe it would be to imagine the shower scene in ‘Psycho’ played over feature length. A large part is shot in extreme close-up, mostly of Ana’s eyes or the silhouette of her crotch underneath a billowy cotton summer dress.
This technique imbues the film with a rich sense of texture, such as in an early scene where Ana runs her fingers over the cracking, mottled skin of (what appears to be) the corpse of an old man, or later when she’s riding in a taxi and the heat makes the leather trim too hot to touch. Some may find the film a mite academic in its glassy deconstruction of genre convention, and it’s perhaps asking a bit much to read it as anything more than a claustrophobic portrait of sexual danger, but it still fulfils that highly specific brief with blood-splashed gusto.
Amer.2009.1080p.BluRay.x264-HANDJOB.mkv
General Container: Matroska Runtime: 1 h 30 min Size: 7.92 GiB Video Codec: x264 Resolution: 1916x816 Aspect ratio: 2.35:1 Frame rate: 23.976 fps Bit rate: 11.9 Mb/s BPP: 0.317 Audio #1: French 5.1ch AC-3 @ 640 kb/s
Synopsis:
A loyal man is tempted both in real life and in cyberspace in this thriller from director Gilles Marchand. Gaspard and his girlfriend Marion head out to Marseilles for a few weeks of sunshine and relaxation, but after spending a few hours by the pool one day, he finds a lost cell phone in the locker room. Gaspard isn’t sure what he should do with the phone, and he’s all the more puzzled when the phone rings and he finds himself having to help Audrey, an attractive but disturbed woman threatening to kill herself. Gaspard and Marion help Audrey before she can take her own life, but while Gaspard is deeply in love with Marion, he’s powerfully intrigued by Audrey. Gaspard discovers Audrey is a serious fan of an on-line role playing game called Black Hole, and he begins playing too, creating a character that bears little resemblance to his own personality. The fictive Gaspard becomes all the more attracted to Audrey in the virtual environment, until he realizes she’s not as benign as he first thought. ~ AllmovieRead More »
Quote: In 1961, Noël is a French soldier in the Algerian war. His comrades, formerly opposed to the war, now oppress civilians, kill and torture. To stay faithful to his pacifist values, he will do something radical.Read More »
The young actress Galai is hired by his friend and director Hamdias to interpret a film denouncing the torture of suspected terrorists during the war of Algeria. The woman, using audio recordings made during the torture, practices the worst violence on herself to make her own interpretation as realistic as possible, to confuse reality with fiction. Galai, as the character she plays, is a part, along with her lover, a subversive movement. In an attempt to rejoin Hamdias is forced to flee an exhausting marked by humiliation and betrayal that ends in an unpredictable finish.Read More »
Quote: A man leaves his bourgeois comfort and wife for a life of adventure and for a girl involved in smuggling, leaves his name Ferdinand for a nickname, Pierrot, leaves his boredom for crazy love, society Paris for “wild” France… to eventually tune himself up with his visions and ideals.Read More »
A girl asks her father: “Daddy, why don’t you make films for children?” The filmic answer is a playful, free and personal film in the form of a letter, a film interwoven with a thousand stories, knit together with different textures, a book of images allowing a filmmaker to elaborate his view on cinema and to show the images and the stories he wants to share.Read More »
Summary
One rainy night, a stranger arrives in a nondescript seaside town and checks into a cheap hotel. All that is known about him is his name – Pierre – and everyone he meets is suspicious of him. He appears to know the area well; he looks to be in good health. But why is he here? Why is he so sad? The answers emerge when another man appears on the scene, an acquaintance of Pierre who knows the crime that he has committed and who intends to use the information to his own advantage…Read More »
Description: Three friends face mid-life crises. Paul is a writer who’s blocked. François has lost his ideals and practices medicine for the money; his wife grows distant, even hostile. The charming Vincent, everyone’s favorite, faces bankruptcy, his mistress leaves him, and his wife, from whom he’s separated, wants a divorce. The strains on the men begin to show particularly in François and Paul’s friendship and in Vincent’s health. A younger man, Jack, becomes attractive to Lucie, François’s wife. Another young friend, the boxer Jean, who’s like a son to Vincent and whose girlfriend is pregnant, has taken a bout with a merciless slugger. Has happiness eluded this circle of friends?
