French

“A grim portrait of disaffection and loneliness, Gaspar Noe’s I Stand Alone is a movie clearly conceived to make a stir. With an armed, frustrated, and hate-filled time bomb at its center, it unabashedly recalls Taxi Driver, offering its own nihilistic spin on Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece of urban anomie and redemption. For a feature debut, it’s unbelievably daring. Noe doesn’t shy away from sprucing up his familiar story with Godard-ian flourishes, including occasional intertitles, a torrent of offscreen narration, and even a warning to the audience to leave before the wrenching finale. A more jarring conceit is the frequent use of abrupt cuts and fast dollies, accompanied by gunshots on the soundtrack. Genuinely startling and somewhat misconceived, the distracting device nonetheless goes some way toward evoking the volatile mindset of the protagonist.Read More »

From The New York Times:

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: October 20, 2004

Thanks to movies like “36 Fillette,” “Romance” and “Fat Girl,” Catherine Breillat has acquired a reputation for both fearlessness and perversity. Her two most recent movies, “Anatomy of Hell” and “Sex Is Comedy,” arriving in New York theaters within a week of each other, will no doubt extend that reputation, though in different ways. The newer movie, “Anatomy of Hell,” which opened last Friday, takes her fascination with female sexuality to a new extreme of literal-minded explicitness. “Sex Is Comedy,” which was completed in 2002 and which opens at Film Forum in Manhattan today, is much less graphic than “Anatomy,” and it is probably Ms. Breillat’s most restrained and self-critical film. There is less nudity and less on-screen sex than in her previous movies, but a good deal more self-exposure.Read More »

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This stunning Quebecois kitchen sink drama is so raw and real, the pain evoked so acute, you’ll be devastated by its quiet power while at the same time dazzled by its cinematic genius. The film had its World Premiere in Competition at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011 and was cited as one of Canada’s Ten Best Films of the year in the Toronto International Film Festival’s (TIFF) CTT. That it has not garnered one single nomination for a Genie Award is an utter disgrace.

(Greg Klymkiw, canadianfilmcorner.blogspot.com)

Quote:
A tale of quiet resilience and human frailty that plays out against a harsh and apparently endless Quebec winter, befouled by the global economic downturn and a cruel twist of fate, Quebec filmmaker Sébastien Pilote’s debut, Le Vendeur (The Salesman) is a masterful observation of ordinary people squeezing what they need to get by out of unforgiving circumstances.Read More »

Tehran 1958 – Nasser Ali Khan, the most celebrated violin player, has his beloved instrument broken. Unable to find another to replace it, life without music seems intolerable. He stays in bed and slips further and further into his reveries from his youth to his own children’s futures. Over the course of the week that follows, and as the pieces of this captivating story fall into place, we understand his poignant secret and the profundity of his decision to give up life for music and love.Read More »

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A love story between a man and woman. And between a mother and her son. A mystical and fantastical odyssey on love.Read More »

The daily grind for the cops of the Police Department’s Juvenile Protection Unit – taking in child molesters, busting underage pickpockets and chewing over relationship issues at lunch; interrogating abusive parents, taking statements from children, confronting the excesses of teen sexuality, enjoying solidarity with colleagues and laughing uncontrollably at the most unthinkable moments. Knowing the worst exists and living with it. How do these cops balance their private lives and the reality they confront every working day? Fred, the group’s hypersensitive wild card, is going to have a hard time facing the scrutiny of Melissa, a photographer on a Ministry of the Interior assignment to document the unit. (~IMDb)
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IMDB –
“I saw this lovely documentary once, some ten years ago, and found it most rewarding. Its tone was dignified and understated, having a gently moving cumulative effect. The most salient impression I had of the film’s subjects was how expressive they were with their faces and bodies in revealing their emotions and thoughts. As a cinephile, I could not help but think of the vanished acting styles of silent cinema, of how so much had to be conveyed through purely visual means, and of how comparatively impoverished, from a visual viewpoint, so much modern cinema is. Rightly or wrongly, I perceived a more direct correspondence between feeling and expression in the people depicted in this film than is the norm among hearing people, and this suggested hidden treasures within these subjects’ lives that could be of benefit to us all. What has traditionally been seen as a handicap came to be seen as an inextricable, richly beautiful thread in the human tapestry, and this film must be conceded to be a masterpiece for showing us this truth.”Read More »

The Duchess of Langeais, as beautiful as she is brilliant, is a woman who likes to seduce but who does not give in. Until the day when she falls in love with General de Montriveau, a cabal goes up against her.Read More »

PLOT SUMMARY
Plot? Are you kidding or what ?There is no plot! This is 57 minutes of naked French weirdness.
Directed by porn king Michel Ricaud and starring a French theatrical troupe in the tradition of Grand Guignol (pronounced Grahn Geen-yol), this shocker contains three gore-drenched, sex-filled tales.
In the first, a sadist with a voodoo doll tortures an attractive woman. The catalogue of humiliation includes vomiting, menstrual trauma, pins through nipples, and finally death.
Next, a possessed woman is tortured by a crazed zombie, who slices off her nipples and gouges out her eye before disembowelling himself. Finally, a woman is attacked by a vampire and returns to life as a lascivious temptress.
– source:hiroshimavideo.comRead More »