Emmanuelle Seigner

Set in the 1950s Soviet Union, centers on a young artist who is commissioned to create Stalin’s monument and must go through KGB scrutiny.Read More »

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Antonio-Pedro Vasconcelos’ Os Imortais (The Immortals) ironically opens with a funeral. The last of the immortals is present among the crowd, the others having died or disappeared over the years. The man being buried, however, is the policeman who found out about the criminal secrets of the immortals. This is an intriguing start for a mediocre film, in which this tongue-in-cheek sort of cleverness is reserved for the opening scene only. The “immortals” are a group of Portuguese war veterans who earned their title in the colonial wars in Africa in the early 1970s. When Portuguese East Africa became Mozambique, they returned to their fatherland only to feel left out and misunderstood. Read More »

Synopsis:
In the middle of a harsh winter, Ursus, a colorful carnival boss, rescues two orphans lost in a storm: Gwynplaine, a young boy whose face is deformed by a scar that makes him look as though he’s constantly laughing, and Déa, a blind girl. A few years later, they travel throughout the land, performing a show of which Gwynplaine is the star.
People come everywhere to see The Man Who Laughs; he makes people laugh and enthralls the crowd. Success opens doors to the young man, he becomes famous and rich, thus distancing himself from the only two people in the world who love him for what he is.Read More »

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British couple Fiona and Nigel Dobson are sailing to Istanbul en route to India. They encounter a beautiful French woman, and that night Nigel meets her while dancing alone in the ship’s bar. Later he meets her crippled American husband Oscar, who tells him their story. While living in Paris for several years trying to be a writer, he becomes obsessed with a woman he met by chance on a bus. He tracks her down and they start a steamy love affair. Soon Oscar finds himself enslaved body and soul by her love, and continues to tell Nigel the details of this relationship in various stages over a number of visits to Oscar’s cabin.Read More »

Plot Synopsis:
Two very violent men have conspired to steal a valuable solid gold image of an African deity from the museum in Mali where it is being kept. They had it smuggled out with a number of well-made but very cheap replicas. The plan was to give each of the replicas to the members of a new squash club as a diversion, and profit from the original (worth $1 million) themselves. There is a slip-up, however, and the real statue goes to one of the players. The deliveryman now has to track down all the statues, and in this antic caper comedy, that’s easier said than done. – AllmovieRead More »

Synopsis:
Forty-three year old Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby – Jean-Do to his friends – awakens not knowing where he is. He is in a Berck-sur-Mer hospital, where he has been for the past several weeks in a coma after suffering a massive stroke. Although his cognitive facilities are in tact, he quickly learns that he has what is called locked-in syndrome which has resulted in him being almost completely paralyzed, including not being able to speak. One of his few functioning muscles is his left eye. His physical situation and hospitalization uncomfortably bring together the many people in his life, including: Céline Desmoulins, his ex-lover and mother of his children; Inès, his current lover; and his aged father who he calls Papinou.Read More »

Synopsis:
A doctor and his wife go to Paris for a medical conference. While showering, his wife disappears. His lack of language, and the odd way she disappeared makes it nearly impossible for him to find any official help in his search as he enters the punk/drug culture to find out what has happened to her.Read More »

allmovie wrote:
A pair of American security operatives (Zach Cohen and Iftach Ofir) are on patrol in Afghanistan when they stumble upon a Taliban fighter (Vincent Gallo), who kills them despite his terror and nervousness. While trying to escape, the Afghan is captured by American forces; he’s tortured during interrogation, but doesn’t tell the Americans anything, in part because an explosion has made it difficult for him to hear what they’re saying. The Americans ship the Afghan off to a detention facility with a number of other Taliban soldiers, but upon arrival he’s able to escape. However, the Afghan finds himself in a forbidding snowbound climate, and with no provisions or warm clothing he struggles to simply survive as he avoids his pursuers and struggles to find some way to get home.Read More »

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Roman Polanski’s penchant for psychosexual mind games conducted in claustrophobic spaces is deliciously revisited in Venus in Fur (La Venus a la fourrure), adapted in French and yet mostly faithful to American playwright David Ives’ Broadway hit of the same name. A teasing dialectic of subjugation and power, female objectification and emasculating rebuke, the film should titillate European audiences with its mischievous combination of think and kink, while seducing a more limited niche in the U.S.
The play premiered Off Broadway in 2010 and transferred uptown the following season, making an overnight New York stage star and eventual Tony Award winner out of Nina Arianda, the female half of Ives’ table-turning cat-and-mousecapade. Read More »