Nobuhiko Obayashi’s sci-fi fantasy (from a manga by Kazuo Umezu) about a middle school that gets transported by an earthquake to a strange and otherworldly landscape. Read More »
Nobuhiko Ôbayashi – Hyôryu kyôshitsu AKA The Drifting Classroom (1987)
Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky – A londoni férfi AKA The Man From London (2007)
Quote:
After witnessing a crime during his night shift as railway switchman near the docks, a man finds a briefcase full of money. While he and his family step up their living standards, others start looking for the disappeared case.
Sight and Sound wrote:
Béla Tarr’s latest film may initially appear to be his most conventional work to date, but the Hungarian director hasn’t softened his uncompromising worldview in ‘The Man from London’.By Michael Brooke
The extinction of the aesthetically and intellectually rigorous European art film has been predicted for so long (in the early 1980s, a Sight & Sound columnist called for the creation of a Society for the Protection of the Art Movie) that the mere fact of Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr continuing to direct films without making the smallest concession to popular fashion is a cause for celebration. Read More »
John Ford – The Fugitive (1947)
Museum of Modern Art writes:
In 1946, John Ford effectively took over the crew of his friend and fellow spirit Fernández—including stars Dolores del Río, Pedro Armendáriz, and Miguel Inclán, and cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa—and, with Fernández acting as his “first lieutenant,” filmed this abstract, ambitious work on locations in Mexico and at the Churubusco Studios. Ostensibly an adaptation of Graham Greene’s unfilmably scandalous The Power and the Glory, it derives many of its plot points from Ford’s 1935 The Informer, though the film’s ultimate subject is the Mexican landscape, as explored in all of its compositional possibilities by the incomparable duo of Ford and Figueroa. Read More »
Fabián Bielinsky – El aura AKA The Aura (2005)
A quiet, epileptic taxidermist plans the perfect crime. All he needs is the right opportunity. An accident, perhaps… Read More »
Pierre Zucca – Vincent mit l’âne dans un pré (et s’en vint dans l’autre) (1975)
Synopsis(from All Movie Guide):
Living a dismal life taking care of his uncommunicative and nearly blind father, Vincent (Fabrice Luchini), a sculptor, tries to make life better for himself but fails for a variety of reasons. Read More »
Ulrike Ottinger – Unter Schnee AKA Under Snow (2011)
Quote:
In Echigo in Japan the snow often lies several feet deep well into May covering landscape and villages. Over the centuries the inhabitants have organized their lives accordingly. In order to record their very distinctive forms of everyday life, their festivals and religious rituals Ulrike Ottinger journeyed to the mythical snow country – accompanied by two Kabuki performers. Taking the parts of the students Takeo and Mako they follow in the footsteps of Bokushi Suzuki who in the mid-19th century wrote his remarkable book “Snow Country Tales”. Read More »
Bille August – Smilla’s Sense of Snow (1997)
REVIEW by Angus Wolfe Murray (from eyeforfilm.co.uk):
When Smilla Jasperson came home that winter’s day in Copenhagen, the boy lay dead on the pavement. He had been playing on the roof, the police said, and probably slipped on ice.
She was friends with the boy, a six-year-old Greenlandic Inuit, who lived with his alcoholic mother one floor down in her apartment block. She knew he had a fear of heights and would never have been up there unless something, or someone, had forced him. Read More »