2011-2020

  • Vladimir Durán – Adiós entusiasmo AKA So Long Enthusiasm (2017)

    2011-2020ColombiaDramaVladimir Durán

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Ten-year-old Axel lives with his mother and three sisters in a flat in Buenos Aires. The mother, Margarita, lives locked up in a room beyond the bathroom, while the children are her prison guards. The children communicate with her mother through a small window, giving her blankets, DVDs and reading material and celebrating her birthday in the corridor. When she’s eventually had enough, it’s Axel that must decide what to do.Read More »

  • Joachim Trier – Thelma (2017)

    2011-2020DramaJoachim TrierMysteryNorway

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    Synopsis wrote:
    A college student starts to experience extreme seizures while studying at a university in Oslo, Norway. She soon learns that the violent episodes are a symptom of inexplicable, and often dangerous, supernatural abilities.
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  • Momoko Andô – 0.5 miri AKA 0.5 mm (2014)

    2011-2020AsianDramaJapanJapanese Female DirectorsMomoko Andô

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    From japansociety.org
    Sawa, a home helper for a middle class family with an elderly infirm grandfather, is forced to stretch her morals to keep her job. As a result, she finds herself broke and out on the street. She survives her first night by striking up an ambiguous friendship with a kindly old man, gaining access to a portion of the immense wealth held by Japan’s aging population. She continues with similar encounters, and while these begin as scams or revenge on rampant sexism, they ultimately become vulnerable intergenerational exchanges. Director Momoko Ando (Kakera: A Piece of Our Life, 2009) masterfully crafts this journey through Japan’s embattled sexual landscape, confronting aging, class and patriarchy. Adapted from the director’s first novel, 0.5mm features Sakura Ando (the director’s sister), who charges each scene with as much humanity as its impeccably photographed frames can handle. This is a dark and profound comedy of the best sort.Read More »

  • Midi Z – The Road to Mandalay (2016)

    2011-2020DramaMidi ZThailand

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Quote:
    Taiwan-based Burmese filmmaker Midi Z produces his best work yet with “The Road to Mandalay.” Returning to narrative features after the documentaries “Jade Miners” and “City of Jade,” Z maintains his focus on Burmese exiles with a low-key, high-impact love story about two illegal immigrants with very different ideas about making money and starting a new life in Bangkok. Very well performed by Z’s regular actress Wu Ke-xi and established Taiwanese star Kai Ko (“You Are the Apple of My Eye”), “The Road to Mandalay” is bound to travel far and wide on the fest circuit following a prestigious hat-trick of selections in Venice, Toronto, and Busan. Taiwan and Hong Kong theatrical release is set for Dec. 9.Read More »

  • Apichatpong Weerasethakul – Rak ti Khon Kaen aka Cemetery of Splendor (2015)

    Drama2011-2020Apichatpong WeerasethakulArthouseThailand

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    Quote:
    The unconscious dream state that connects each of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films begins in his latest when frequent collaborator, Jenjira Pongpas (Her characters’ names devolving film to film from ‘Pa Jane’, ‘Jen’ and now simply ‘Je’), stumbles into the frame with her ft. high platform sandal keeping her stumpy left leg in proportion with her right. This familiar image is the proverbial blanket Weerasethakul pulls over his audience, tucking the viewers into his familiar world, allowing for a communal drift into his drowsy landscapes. It’s only a testament to Weesrasethakul’sself awareness as a filmmaker that he has a narcoleptic soldier drop into a lethargic mess as we see him glance upon a movie screen, reflecting how he makes his films onto the characters who inhabit them. This scene, among others, provides a self reflexive exploration of Weerasethakul’s oeuvre, adding to a film that exudes more passion, thoughtfulness and complexity than any of his other major works.Read More »

  • Terry Gilliam – The Zero Theorem (2013)

    2011-2020DramaFantasyTerry GilliamUSA

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    Quote:
    The Zero Theorem casts Christoph Waltz as Qohen Leth, an egghead data processor who is given a mission to make order out of chaos. This being a production by Terry Gilliam – the rambling mad uncle of British cinema – Qohen Leth is clearly screwed from the outset. The Zero Theorem is a sagging bag of half-cooked ideas, a dystopian thriller with runaway dysentery, a film that wears its metaphorical trousers around its metaphorical ankles. In fits and starts, I quite enjoyed it.Read More »

  • Melika Bass – Creature Companion (2018)

    2011-2020ArthouseMelika BassShort FilmUSA

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Synopsis
    In the American suburbs, over the course of languorous summer days and nights, two women mysteriously and sensuously enter into a twitchy, sensuous symbiosis. A hypnotic performance piece, it is a slow-burning, saucy, abstracted fable on the longing and laboring female body.Read More »

  • Dario Bischofberger & Mirko Bischofberger – Old is the New (2012)

    2011-2020ComedyDario Bischofberger and Mirko BischofbergerDramaSwitzerland

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Jessye is a young and modern Chinese woman who works for the national tourism office in China. She is sent to a small village in southern Italy to investigate the touristic potential of the region for the booming Chinese tourism industry. Her only contact initially is Franco, a solitary farmer who lives with his animals in the countryside and rents his rooms. In the village she also meets Salvatore, who owns the village pub and dreams of a modern lifestyle. Through these and other people of the region Jessye starts to learn more about the local traditions and their endangered Greek language that now have to face the invasion of the present-day expansionist tourism industry.
    Read More »

  • Lena Dunham – Creative Nonfiction (2009)

    2011-2020ComedyDramaLena DunhamMumblecoreUSA

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    David Lowery wrote:
    What is it about the sexualization of English professors that irks me so? I think of the cliche of the sturdy, masculine educator bewitching his female pupils with silver-tongued erudition on the works of Percy and D.H Lawrence and I wonder: what of their poor colleagues, the mathematics professors? Can’t fractal equations be as erotically stimulating as the breakdown of Pyrrhic verse? The answer, as any English major knows, is not likely-there’s little that can so easily compound the psychological dynamics between teacher and student like the aphrodisiacal qualities of language-but it was nonetheless a gust of fresh air to see Lena Dunham so precisely pierce this stereotype in her debut feature, Creative Nonfiction. Dunham stars in the film as Ella, a freshman student at an unnamed Midwestern college, who is working on a screenplay for a creative writing class that, in its early stages, could be synopsized by at least three sentences of this very paragraph.Read More »

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