Someday, everyone you know won’t exist. Tomorrow doesn’t matter until it’s today. No one makes it through life unscathed, in one way or another. These are just a few of the lessons found in “Things I Don’t Understand,” a small indie rumination with big pretensions. In his follow up to his debut feature “…Around” (2008), [...]
Maria Sødahl has made an assured feature debut with Limbo (2010) at the Cinema City film festival, Novi Sad, Serbia. The film was previously screened at Montreal and Thessaloniki. Set in the 1970s, Limbo centres on a Norwegian woman named Sonia who, with her two children, goes to Trinidad to join her husband Joe who [...]
Last night the opening ceremony took place for the 4th annual Cinema City film festival in Novi Sad, Serbia. The festival introduced the members of its three main juries, who will award prizes to films from three of the festival’s sections: ‘National Class’ (Serbian films), ‘Exit Point’ (international auteur cinema, this year showcasing films about [...]
Kim Soo-hyun’s distinctive way of looking at the world shines through in bursts of comic dialogue and unexpected visual twists in Ashamed (Chang-Pi-Hae, 2010). For the most part, the film is mildly engaging, rather like a teenage movie you might see on TV, but with some added moments of artistry. The film’s central narrative is a [...]
There are a couple of reasons why everyone should watch “Hævnen”. The first is that is a beautiful film, a beauteous film, with all the slightly otherworldly aloofness that the word suggests. The second is that by about this time next year, Mikael Persbrandt will be a household name and by golly, you don’t want [...]
”Peepli Live” has been the toast and tea of town for the better part of this past year. A Sundance selection and Berlinale screening, it has been picking up favor and five star reviews across the Prime Meridian, becoming the focus of India’s annual interest in evaluating its culture through the Western eye. Unlike the [...]
Two attractive twentysomethings meet for the first time in a Manhattan restaurant and engage in obligatory small talk. What was intended to be a meeting between indie film director and potential star soon promises to be the beginning of a long and complex relationship that won’t end how either had planned. So begins director Brian Ackley’s micro-budget [...]
Jason Rosette’s no-budget tale of desolation, desperation and loss subtly weaves together the disparate lives of a group of struggling Southwesterners in “Lost in New Mexico.” Susan (Drea Pressley), grieving and aimless after the loss of her newborn daughter, thoughtlessly seeks out a rogue animal-cloning geneticist (Dr. Alan Rice) to reverse, or subvert, the most inevitable of human events [...]
Hallelujah! Nicolas Cage has finally returned. Once a brilliant and respected actor whose eccentricities and prodigious talents combined to create truly memorable characters like H.I. McDunnough in the Coen Brothers’ zany masterpiece, “Raising Arizona,” and Charlie Kaufman’s neurotic, alter-ego twins in Spike Jonze’s “Adaptation,” Cage has since become known more for laughably bad turns in [...]
Zeppelin, Hendrix, Dylan, The Grateful Dead, The Rolling Stones. These names, among others, are synonymous with the 1960s counter-culture revolution. Anti-establishment, DIY, independence, innovation, and peace love & rock ‘n’ roll turned a burgeoning, amped-up variation on the blues into a full-fledged institution. So influential were the sounds of the 60s and 70s that their [...]
DIFF 2012 Reviews: ‘Cinema Six,’ ‘Compliance,’ ‘Faith, Love and Whiskey’Things I Don’t Understand (2011)
Jiří Trnka: Animation Retrospective
Lowlights of Cinélatino
Brevity Pays Off
‘A Secret World’ at Cinélatino
‘Future Lasts Forever’ at Sofia
Two Treatments of Italy’s Fascist Past
‘The Leopard’: novel, opera, but above all, film
We’ll always have ‘Casablanca’
