Le Havre (2011)

| Sunday, January 1, 2012 | 0 comments |
Directed by
Aki Kaurismäki

Writing credits
Aki Kaurismäki

 
Marcel Marx, a former bohemian and struggling author, has given up his literary ambitions and relocated to the port city Le Havre. He leads a simple life based around his wife Arletty, his favourite bar and his not too profitable profession as a shoeshiner. As Arletty suddenly becomes seriously ill, Marcel's path crosses with an underage illegal immigrant from Africa. Marcel and friendly neighbors and other townspeople help to hide him from the police, and they arrange and pay for an illegal trip by boat to immigrate into England. The police officer in charge of finding the boy eventually finds him in the boat, but allows him to escape.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1508675/

The Turin Horse (2011)

| Thursday, October 20, 2011 | 0 comments |
AKA A torinói ló

Directed by
Béla Tarr
Ágnes Hranitzky

Writing credits
László Krasznahorkai
Béla Tarr



1889. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche witnessed the whipping of a horse while traveling in Turin, Italy. He tossed his arms around the horse's neck to protect it then collapsed to the ground. In less than one month, Nietzsche would be diagnosed with a serious mental illness that would make him bed-ridden and speechless for the next eleven years until his death. But whatever did happen to the horse? This film, which is Tarr's last, follows up this question in a fictionalized story of what occurred. The man who whipped the horse is a rural farmer who makes his living taking on carting jobs into the city with his horse-drawn cart. The horse is old and in very poor health, but does its best to obey its master's commands. The farmer and his daughter must come to the understanding that it will be unable to go on sustaining their livelihoods. The dying of the horse is the foundation of this tragic tale.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1316540/

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)

| Tuesday, August 30, 2011 | 0 comments |
 AKA ลุงบุญมีระลึกชาติ (Thai), Lung Bunmi Raluek Chat (RTGS)

Directed by
Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Written by
Phra Sripariyattiweti (inspired by the book of)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul


Suffering from acute kidney failure, Uncle Boonmee has chosen to spend his final days surrounded by his loved ones in the countryside. Surprisingly, the ghost of his deceased wife appears to care for him, and his long lost son returns home in a non-human form. Contemplating the reasons for his illness, Boonmee treks through the jungle with his family to a mysterious hilltop cave -- the birthplace of his first life...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1588895/

Promises Written in Water (2010)

| Wednesday, July 13, 2011 | 0 comments |
Directed by
Vincent Gallo

Writing credits
Vincent Gallo



Promises Written in Water is a stripped down abstract romantic story of a man and a woman, both in crisis. Kevin (Vincent Gallo) is a long-time, professional assassin, specializing in the termination of life. Mallory (Delfine Bafort) is a wild, poetic, beautiful young woman confronting her terminal illness and eventual suicide. She reaches out to Kevin to take responsibility for her corpse once she passes, requesting his protection of her dead body’s dignity until her cremation. Kevin’s acceptance of this request causes uncomfortable self-reflection and changes the lens through which he views death. The film features Sage Stallone as The Mafioso.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1712563/

The White Ribbon (2009)

| Thursday, March 11, 2010 | 0 comments |
AKA Das weiße Band (Kindergeschichte)

Directed by
Michael Haneke

Writing credits
Michael Haneke




The memories of an unnamed elderly tailor form a parable from the distant year he worked as a village schoolteacher and met his fiancée Eva.

The setting is the fictitious Protestant village of Eichwald, Germany between July 1913 and August 1914, where the pastor, the doctor and the baron rule the roost over women, children and peasant farmers. The puritanical pastor leads confirmation classes and gives his pubescent children a guilty conscience over trivial offenses. He has them wear white ribbons as a reminder of the innocence and purity from which they have strayed. When his son confesses to impure touching, the pastor has the boy’s hands tied to the bed frame. The doctor, a widower, treats the village children kindly but sexually humiliates his housekeeper (the local midwife) and takes advantage of his teenage daughter at night. The baron, who is the lord of the manor, underwrites harvest festivities for the villagers, many of whom are the immigrant workers in his employ. He may summarily dismiss his twins' nanny Eva for no apparent reason yet defend the integrity of the farmer whose son has taken his revenge on the baron with the destruction of a field of cabbages.

Mysterious things happen. A wire is stretched between two trees causing the doctor a terrible fall from his horse. The farmer's wife dies at the sawmill when rotten floorboards give way; her grieving husband later hangs himself. The baron’s young son goes missing on the day of the harvest festival and is found the following morning in the sawmill, bound and thrashed with a cane. A barn at the manor burns down. After the steward's daughter has a violent dream about the midwife's handicapped son, the boy is attacked and almost blinded. The pastor finds his parakeet cruelly impaled after his daughter has opened the bird's cage with a letter opener in hand. The midwife commandeers a bicycle from the schoolteacher to go into town, claiming that she has evidence for the police given to her by her son. She is not seen again, and neither is her son. On the same day, the doctor's family vacates the premises, leaving his practice closed.

The schoolteacher's growing suspicions lead to a confrontation in the rectory, where he suggests to the pastor that his children have severely bullied the weaker in the village. Offended, the pastor immediately threatens him, warning that he will face disciplinary measures if he repeats his accusations again.

The film ends at the time of the declaration of war on Serbia by Austria–Hungary, with the conclusion in church on the day of a visit from the narrator's prospective father-in-law. Disquiet remains in the village but nothing has been discovered and no one accused. The narrator left Eichwald, never to return.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1149362/

Warsaw Dark (2008)

| Tuesday, December 1, 2009 | 0 comments |
AKA Izolator

Directed by
Christopher Doyle

Writing credits
Christopher Doyle




The film concerns a young prostitute named Ojka (Anna Przybylska) who is with a Polish government official when he’s assassinated one night in Warsaw. She’s then caught by the hit-man, drugged, taken to an apartment and begins to experience a sort of personality replacement programme. Meanwhile the police try to solve the murder and track her down, following a series of number based clues that are ambiguous in origin. Ojka’s experiences locked in the rooms being tormented by this man grow ever more disturbing and masochistic as he breaks her down and she begins to lose her grip on reality.


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1142803/

Autumn Ball (2007)

| Tuesday, November 24, 2009 | 0 comments |
AKA Sügisball

Directed by
Veiko Õunpuu

Writing credits
Mati Unt (novel)
Veiko Õunpuu (screenplay)



A young writer called Mati is stalking his ex-wife, while also trying to make unsuccessful passes at other women. Augusti is a barber living a dreary bachelor life who forms a bond with little girl, but his approaches are misconstrued as pedophilia. Laura, a single mom, tears up over sappy soap operas, but refuses real-life advances from clueless men, because her ability to trust has been ruined by her violent drunk of an ex-husband. Maurer, the architect, worries about the wellbeing of humanity, but ignores his own wife Ulvi, who in turn looks for solace in the arms of a coatroom attendant named Theo. Women have always liked Theo, but due to his low social status, they don't take him seriously. All of these people might inhabit identical tower blocks, but they couldn't feel more alienated from each other if they tried.