2011-2020

Late in this documentary about film critic Roger Ebert, the subject himself e-mails director Steve James from the hospital to insist that a difficult conversation with his wife Chaz be captured for the movie. After all, he writes, “This is not only your film.”

The correspondence underscores how this filmic profile is also a kind of a self-portrait by Ebert. It shares a title with the critic’s 2011 memoir, passages of which are lifted to narrate his rise from precocious tabloid reviewer to unlikely celebrity to national treasure. And while it’s too candid about Ebert’s ego, petulance, and late-career critical softening to be called hagiography, that very frankness does harmonize with the critic’s own eleventh-hour turn toward full and fearless disclosure. He came out as alcoholic in 2009, used his blog to inform readers of his health issues (which rendered him unable to speak in 2006), and here thrills to James’s documenting of his most painful medical ordeals.
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Two minutes in which Carax attempts to reach the essence of Art : sculpture, Cinema, actress, music, gallery, myth…
a delicious mixture;
Godard influence is still here and will always be with Carax;
The short seems like the continuity of the movie Holy Motors, with always the small frontier between reality and Art.Read More »

Synopsis:

Balibar, well-known as an actress and singer, left none of her talents unused in her directing debut. In this eclectic homage to Greek tragedy, Balibar and Léon are free of any convention. With a cameo by Barbet Schroeder.

Jeanne Balibar and Pierre Léon roam in tourist outfits through Paris and prepare a play with a producer who keeps changing her clothes. In a parallel world, another layer if you wish, actors rehearse their texts for a Greek tragedy on the beach at Deauville and at prominent Parisian locations. It is the story of Electra, probably a rather inefficient character, one who perseveres and refuses to give up the battle against injustice.
This absurd, slightly surrealist and occasionally humorous film looks like a theatre performance with its solemn dialogues and mise-en-scène issues. The makers, the actress Balibar and filmmaker Léon, however also use the medium by inserting screenshots of business e-mails – reflections on their plans. In addition, Balibar is a singer and she sings the texts as if the e-mails were edifying lieder. Electra, for Instance is, as one of the characters puts it, a true ‘culture souq’.
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Fernando Trueba, one of the most prestigious filmmakers in Spain, has set his latest film somewhere in occupied France in the summer of 1943, not far from the Spanish border. An old renowned sculptor, tired of life and mankind?s folly, rediscovers the desire to work and sculpt his last piece thanks to the arrival of a young Spanish woman who has escaped from a refugee camp. “The lovely and poignant drama ‘The Artist and the Model’ stirringly presents art, life and death as one irrevocably tangled trio” (Los Angeles Times). “[Trueba and Carriere] imbue the material with genuine feeling-exploring the melancholy of waning days and a defiantly naive belief in artistic transcendence.Read More »

Juraj Lehotský’s riveting feature debut is about a troubled 15-year-old named Ela (electrifiying newcomer Michaela Bendulová) sent to live in a correctional facility. Forced there by her mother and cut off from the outside world, she keeps to herself, preferring to spend her time in solitude writing letters to her boyfriend. After escaping during New Year’s celebrations, she moves in with him, in the garage below the train tracks he calls home. Her life soon moves in unexpected directions, and, after a series of unpredictable events, Ela faces a life-changing decision. An official selection at the Toronto International Film Festival, Miracle is intense, daring filmmaking.Read More »

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Premiered at Toronto Film Festival, UFO In Her Eyes is a cinematic adaptation of her most recent novel of the same title. The film stars Shi Ke and Udo Kier and is a political metaphor recounted through the phantasmagoric transformation that befalls a small Chinese village after an alleged UFO sighting. Inspired by Soviet cinema, Xiaolu Guo dedicated this film to Soy Cuba, a 1964 Soviet-Cuban film directed by Mikhail Kalatozov. The movie’s score is composed by the Somali-Canadian musician Mocky and produced by Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin. It received the Public Award at Milan 3-Continental Film Festival 2013.Read More »

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A kindergarten principal finds a series of morbid cartoons drawn by a docile pupil. A porn actor struggles to rise to the occasion while filming his first porno. A middle-aged nightclub bouncer faces off with a rebellious teenage stripper. Director Ken Kwek tells three iconoclastic stories in a short film that pitches political correctness out the window of Singapore mainstream cinema.Read More »

Hilton Lacerda’s film debut is a lively take on the conflict between the straight establishment and the gay avant garde in late ’70s Brazil, and won a clutch of awards at the recent Rio festival.

The spirit of Fassbinder lives on in Hilton Lacerda’s Tattoo, at once an homage to the anarchist theater scene in late 1970s Brazil, a portrait of a society on the edge of change, and a punchy critique of Latin American homophobia. As drama, Tattoo tells an often-told story, but it does achieve a distinctive air of controlled chaos, managing to be both bouncy and thought-provoking in an unsubtle kind of way. Having picked up several awards in Rio, Tattoo should go on to leave its mark at festivals where the gay and the political meet. Its five Rio awards included best actor and best supporting actor.Read More »

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Some movies are watched. “The Strange Color Of Your Body’s Tears” is a movie you live inside. This new film from directors Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani touches you repeatedly, inappropriately, from the front and, delightfully, from the rear. To synopsize the film is folly, though it will be fun to see viewers try. This is the magic that Cattet and Forzani have weaved from their debut effort “Amer,” a hypnotic trip down the giallo rabbit hole. Very few filmmakers today are working with a radical new vocabulary, but Cattet and Forzani are using genre of the past to toss us, shouting, into the future.Read More »