Quote:
Olivier Assayas is about as protean as today’s great filmmakers come, but the last thing I expected from the mad genius behind the globe-trotting, gorgeously kinetic Boarding Gate is a Chekhovian chamber drama whose mantra could be essentially reduced to: posterity cares. If Boarding Gate convincingly documented a 21st century where human beings can be bought, sold, and shipped from New York to Paris to Hong Kong like shares on the NASDAQ, Summer Hours is the sobering requiem for the safety of objects, for the shape and weight of everything we leave behind when we give in to perpetual flux. Together the two films offer a deeply affecting inquiry into the meaning (and market necessity) of attachment in an age of unfettered globalization.

In Summer Hours, a group of adult siblings inherit a French country estate and their great uncle’s collection of 19th-century art when their mother dies, and weigh their pragmatic interests against a family legacy. Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) lives in New York, can rarely visit, and would rather sell the heirloom. Jeremie (Jérémie Renier) is preparing a move to China to help manufacture Puma shoes with cheap labor, and could definitely use another financial boost. It’s left to Frederic (Charles Berling) to be the standard bearer. He’s a university professor pushing an awkward dictum that “the economy is the opposite of a science”; perhaps as a result, he sees the peculiar aesthetic value in the pieces of a broken Degas plaster his mother kept in a plastic bag.

In stark contrast to the hyperbolic monsters of Arnaud Desplechin’s chaotic reunion epic A Christmas Tale, the family members here treat each other with a credible civility. When the skeletons are eventually unearthed, the siblings are inquisitive but hardly get worked up. It’s a testament to Assayas’s empathy that he is able to build the entirety of his drama in the distance between his principals’ forgivable self-interest and their quiet kindness. Yes, on one level Jeremie is getting ready to turn a profit from sweatshop labor, but he’s also seeking a safety net for his children, so that they too can one day puzzle over their inheritance. Adrienne seems egocentric and frazzled, but Binoche’s gestures suggest that she’d rather serve as her art’s purveyor than as its guardian.

In his thrilling Irma Vep, Assayas depicted an artist maddeningly fraying all human bonds in the hot pursuit of an epiphany. The world of Summer Hours is a couple generations removed from the madness of creation; it offers the idea that any “finished product”—artistic or otherwise—is subject to decay, or at least a perpetual adaptation. The broken Degas plaster may have lost its market value, but it might also serve as a vivid reminder of the time the siblings ran a bit too quickly down the hallway. As such, the drunken teenage house party that closes Summer Hours, seemingly pitched as a didactic lament for the future, eventually about-faces into something rare and beautiful and surprising. The past may be decomposing, but the kids are all right.

Olivier Assayas - (2008) Summer Hours.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 43mn
Size: 	2.16 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x560 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 746 Kbps
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#1:  	French 5.1ch AC-3 @ 256 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/BCC01AD60767F39/Olivier_Assayas_-_(2008)_Summer_Hours.mkv

Language(s):French, English
Subtitles:English

The post Olivier Assayas – L’heure d’été AKA Summer Hours (2008) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
…even after a number of viewings, I’m still not sure if what I have seen is a kind of high Euro-modernist masterpiece about race, culture, urban rage and alienated identity – or a perversely opaque and frustrating essay in enigma, a labyrinth of blind alleys, in which putative solutions are forbiddingly walled off. It is a film which gestures at the literal incomprehensibility of experience, how it resists encirclement and extends beyond the perimeters of perception and interpretation. The mood of Code Unknown is moreover often fractious, crackling with unease and ill-humour, and yet this is a movie whose images and personae linger in the mind, and which can deliver dazzlingly generous, compassionate insights…
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

…Whilst the film is a worthy effort, making some valid statements of how we now live, its message is perhaps weakened by its fragmented structure, some rambling sequences and an over-abundance of characters… Also, the lack of anything approaching a tidy resolution of the film’s multiple strands is unsatisfying and suggests a dearth of inspiration on the part of the film-maker. What the film certainly appears to lack is a punch-line, a clear concluding statement to either reinforce or challenge the audience’s understanding of the film. Instead, it all ends in enigmatic silence, leaving the spectator to ponder: so what?
James Travers, French Film Guide.com

…Michael Haneke creates an intelligently constructed, compelling, provocative, and relevant observation on social inequity, the untenability of cultural assimilation, and the failure of communication in Code Inconnu. Presented as a series of dissociated (and intrinsically ethnographic) episodes on the lives of the principal characters following the fateful (though seemingly trivial) transection, Haneke examines the ingrained social divisiveness, moral complacency, and created bounds of human interaction. Chronologically indeterminate events, interrupted dialogues (often truncated in mid sentence), prolonged transitional fadeouts, and recurrent episodes of missed (and mis) communication… pervade the film’s fragmented narrative structure, exposing the flawed perception of cultural integration and social equality in the constantly evolving racial and socio-economic demography of a traditionally monoethnic society.
Acquarello, Strictly Film School

Michael Haneke - (2000) Code Unknown.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 57mn
Size:	2.46 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
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Aspect ratio:	1.85:1
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Audio
English 5.1ch AC-3 @ 256 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/E4D21553137E6AC/Michael_Haneke_-_(2000)_Code_Unknown.mkv

Language(s):Malinka, Romanian, French, German, English, Arabic, French Sign Language
Subtitles:English

The post Michael Haneke – Code inconnu AKA Code Unknown (2000) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A love story between two emotionally damaged outsiders, played by Alexis Loret and Juliette Binoche, which marked Techine’s return to the haunting and intense territory of Les Roseaux Savages. Highly praised for its effective use of an unorthodox narrative structure, it tells the story of Martin, who runs away from his rural French home under mysterious circumstances and ends up at his half-brother’s flat in Paris, where he meets and falls in love with the his roommate Alice. When Alice informs him that she is pregnant, he has a sudden flashback of what happened to make him flee his father’s house…

Alice et Martin.1998.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 4 min
Size: 	2.81 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x554 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 000 kb/s
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#1:  	French 2.0ch AC-3 @ 224 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/5D1FA14272F6CED/Alice_et_Martin.1998.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English, French

The post André Téchiné – Alice et Martin AKA Alice and Martin (1998) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A mother unexpectedly meets her son’s fiancée at a villa in Sicily and gets to know her as she waits for her son to arrive.

The.Wait.2015.1080p.HMAX.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.x264-SPWEB.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 35 min
Size: 	5.67 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	8 250 kb/s
BPP: 	0.159
Audio
#1:  	Italian 5.1ch E-AC-3 @ 256 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/CA58E90C4659638/The.Wait.2015.1080p.HMAX.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.x264-SPWEB.mkv

Language(s):Italian, French
Subtitles:Romanian, English

The post Piero Messina – L’attesa AKA The Wait (2015) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy doesn’t defy you to understand it, and yet it feels almost inappropriate, tasteless even, to do so—as if you were eavesdropping on a private conversation. This resplendently heady yet nimble essay film is effervescently structured around a man and woman’s thoughts about art, life, landscape, and love. The man, James Miller (William Shimell), is an author, in Tuscany to tout his new book, Certified Copy; his female companion and guide, “She” (Juliette Bionche), a fan, maybe even his wife, sells art both real and forged from an underground storefront that suggests a portal into Italy’s ancient past. Their flair for self-reflection matches the film’s own: From coyness to resentment, the voluptuously see-sawing tenor of their conversations becomes a commentary on the entwined relationship between art and life—how a painting or movie, like a kiss or a touch, can either woo us or repulse us depending on the perspective.

When James and She ride around town, their faces stunningly fused with the buildings reflected in their car window, they speak of art and forgery and ways of seeing. How James is jealous of one of She’s “simple” friends, the way she emotionally responds to art and doesn’t try to convince anyone of her opinion, the film recalls Pauline Kael’s sympathetic—though often contradicted—respect for how the hardworking masses go to the movies in order to escape the harshness of their everyday lives. Certified Copy, at least here, becomes a statement on critical discourse: how critics argue with other critics, sometimes even with themselves in their pieces, and possibly at the expense of their own sense of fun—which is to say nothing of the fun they sometimes begrudge others for having.

Certified Copy is enough to guilt any critic, even ones who aren’t starved for pleasure or thrive on reprogramming their readers, but that would suggest that Kiarostami, one of our great humanist filmmakers, is a man of judgment—or that he’s talking only to the people who critique his work. This is a film whose slyness derives from its flabbergasting sense of framing, overlapping visual textures, and ever-peeling layers of thought, so that from moment to moment—no, shot to shot—there’s this dizzying sense that the characters are at once talking to themselves, their maker, and the audience that beholds them. And as in a scene where She, sitting inside a restaurant, looks out toward the street at a couple celebrating their nuptials, or perhaps at her reflection in the mirror, or perhaps us in the audience, one gets the sense of Kiarostami’s own image as a sort of mirror, one that reflects, exposes even, our deepest anxieties and wants.

Kiarostami tempts one to invoke the kindred-spirited themes of Voyage to Italy, L’Avventura, even Before Sunset as we chew on his Certified Copy, but to do so would suggest that Kiarostami thinks of them as ideals. Those films are reference points, sure, but nothing more. Certified Copy is very much its own entity, as it understands idealism, at least the intellectual form of it, as the denial of individuality. That point is itself an intellectual one, but it’s one that’s understood quite spontaneously and emotionally in the film’s greatest scene when She, tired from bickering, enters a church, James behind her, and emerges from within in awe of the old couple that hobbles slowly across the way toward the steps that lead to what may or may not be their home.

Even beyond this seemingly holy moment, it’s never fully known whether James and She are strangers to each other or if they’re a wretchedly estranged married couple, play-acting the role of husband and wife after a visit to a coffee shop as a means of indirectly challenging each other’s views of art and representation, but it’s exactly by this point that one realizes that it doesn’t matter what they are to each other. How She looks at the old couple is, for me, Binoche’s finest triumph to date—a great actor’s profoundly emotional and philosophical consideration of how we struggle with the idea of our mortality and loneliness. She would, no doubt, love for herself and James, whoever he is, to create a copy of what the older couple seems to share, but if he were to stay, like she begs him to, would it be a lie?

Certified Copy appeals to me as a lover of Buñuel—even before Jean-Claude Carrière, Buñuel’s greatest collaborator, pops up in a illusory scene wherein it looks as if he is verbally abusing his female companion (Agathe Nathanson), I was already smitten by its surreal consideration of identity and romance—and as a lover, period. I can’t say that I understand everything Kiarostami has to tell me about life, art, romance, and tradition, from Michelangelo’s “David” to the silly ritual of tasting the wine from a freshly corked bottle in restaurants, at least not consciously, but I know I feel haunted, elated, enriched by his wily and impassioned view of relationships as bodies in constant flux, of disagreement and individuality, and of the transformative power of a simple, sincerely felt timeout in a moment of bitter crisis, such as a tender hand on a shoulder, to remind a lover, however scorned, that they are still loved. From its gorgeously prismatic visual style, Kiarostami’s latest is very much a work of art, but its enlightening emotional feeling proves that it’s also a certified copy of real life.

Abbas Kiarostami - (2010) Certified Copy.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 46mn
Size: 	2.25 GiB
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#1:  	5.1ch AC-3 @ 256 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/9547BD22DDB16FE/Abbas_Kiarostami_-_(2010)_Certified_Copy.mkv

Language(s):French, English, Italian
Subtitles:English

The post Abbas Kiarostami – Copie conforme AKA Certified Copy (2010) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Paris, je t’aime is about the plurality of cinema in one mythic location: Paris, the City of Love. The filmmakers have five minutes each; the audience must weave a single narrative out of eighteen moments. The moments are fused by transitional interstitial sequences and also via the introduction and epilogue. Each transition begins with the last shot of the previous film and ends with the first shot of the following film, extending the enchantment and the emotion of the previous segment, preparing the audience for a surprise, and providing a cohesive atmosphere. There’s a reappearing mysterious character who is a witness to the Parisian life. A common theme of Paris and love fuses all.

Paris.je.t.aime.AKA.Paris.I.Love.You.2006.480p.BDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	2h 0mn
Size:	3.36 GiB
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https://nitro.download/view/F85F51876D3873E/Paris.je.t.aime.AKA.Paris.I.Love.You.2006.480p.BDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English,Spanish,Russian

The post Various – Paris, je t’aime (2006) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Set over the course of one winter, it revolves around a 17-year-old high school student struggling to get to grips with new challenges posed by death, life, the city and “the temptation of renouncement”. In a bid to regain his momentum, he decides to ditch the lies he has been feeding himself.

Winter.Boy.2022.720p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP2.0.H.264-WDYM.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	2h 3mn
Size:	3.57 GiB
Video
Codec:	h264
Resolution:	1248x520
Aspect ratio:	2.40:1
Frame rate:	24.000 fps
Bit rate:	3 928 kb/s
Audio
French 2.0ch E-AC-3 @ 224 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/9078EFAC619AC70/Winter.Boy.2022.720p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP2.0.H.264-WDYM.mkv

https://rapidgator.net/file/9e2796839ed7ed67fe1389ed5db0d920/Winter.Boy.2022.720p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP2.0.H.264-WDYM.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English,Spanish,Italian,Turkish

The post Christophe Honoré – Le lycéen AKA Winter Boy (2022) first appeared on Cinema of the World.