Dreyer’s “Gertrud,” like the various installments of “The Bachelor” franchise, found much of its drama basically from characters sitting on elegant sofas and talking about their relationships. “Flowers of Shanghai” achieves a similar outcome: it’s a film about sex work that features no sexual intercourse.
“Ratcatcher” centers around a twelve-year-old boy living during the harsh slums of Glasgow, a placing frighteningly rendered by Ramsay’s stunning images that pressure your eyes to stare long and hard within the realities of poverty. The boy escapes his frustrated world by creating his own down because of the canal, and his encounters with two pivotal figures (a love interest along with a friend) teach him just how beauty can exist within the harshest surroundings.
More than anything, what defined the decade was not just the invariable emergence of unique individual filmmakers, but also the arrival of artists who opened new doors on the endless possibilities of cinematic storytelling. Administrators like Claire Denis, Spike Lee, Wong Kar-wai, Jane Campion, Pedro Almodóvar, and Quentin Tarantino became superstars for reinventing cinema on their possess conditions, while previously established giants like Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch dared to reinvent themselves while the entire world was watching. Many of these greats are still working today, as well as the movies are many of the better for that.
Queen Latifah plays legendary blues singer Bessie Smith in this Dee Rees-directed film about how she went from a struggling young singer for the Empress of Blues. Latifah delivers a great performance, as well as the film is full of amazing music. When it aired, it had been the most watched HBO film of all time.
It’s now The style for straight actors to “go gay” onscreen, but rarely are they as naked (figuratively and otherwise) than Phoenix and Reeves were here. —RL
Montenegro became the first — and still only — Brazilian actor to be nominated for an Academy Award, and Salles’ two-hander reaches the sublime because de Oliveira, at his young age, summoned a powerful concoction of mixed emotions. Profoundly touching nonetheless never saccharine, Salles’ breakthrough ends with a fitting testament to the idea that some memories never fade, even as our indifferent world continues to spin forward. —CA
William Munny was a thief and murderer of “notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition.” But he reformed and settled into a life of peace. He takes one particular last task: to avenge a woman who’d been assaulted and mutilated. Her attacker has been given cover via the tyrannical sheriff of the small town (Gene Hackman), who’s so decided to “civilize” the english sexy film untamed landscape in his very own way (“I’m building a house,” he consistently declares) he lets all kinds of injustices materialize on his watch, so long as his personal 3 movs power is safe. What is to be done about someone like that?
Still, watching Carol’s life get torn apart by an invisible, malevolent power is discordantly soothing, as “Safe” maintains a cool and continual temperature each of the way through its nightmare of a third act. An unsettling tone thrums beneath the more in-camera sounds, an off-kilter hum similar to an air conditioner or white-noise machine, that invites you to definitely sink trancelike into the slow-boiling horror of sexy video sexy video it all.
A single night, the good Dr. Bill Harford will be the same toothy and self-confident Tom Cruise who’d become the face of Hollywood itself while in the ’90s. The next, he’s fighting back flop sweat as he gets lost while in the liminal spaces that he used to stride right through; the liminal spaces between yesterday and tomorrow, public decorum and private decadence, affluent social-climbers as well as sinister ultra-rich they serve (masters of your universe who’ve fetishized their role inside our plutocracy for the point where they can’t even throw an easy orgy without turning it into a semi-ridiculous “Snooze No More,” or get themselves off without putting the anxiety of God into an uninvited guest).
A poor, overlooked movie obsessive who only feels seen from the neo-realism of his country’s national cinema pretends for being his favorite director, a farce that allows Hossain Sabzian to savor the dignity and importance that Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s films experienced allowed him to taste. When a Tehran journalist uncovers the ruse — the police arresting the harmless impostor while he’s inside the home amazing bdms with the affluent Iranian family where he “wanted to shoot his next film” — Sabzian arouses the interest of the (very) different nearby jav sub auteur who’s fascinated by his story, by its inherently cinematic deception, and with the counter-intuitive probability that it presents: If Abbas Kiarostami staged a documentary around this gentleman’s fraud, he could efficiently cast Sabzian given that the lead character of your movie that Sabzian experienced always wanted someone to make about his suffering.
Tailored from the László Krasznahorkai novel from the same name and maintaining the book’s dance-motivated chronology, Béla Tarr’s seven-hour “Sátántangó” tells a Möbius strip-like story about the collapse of a farming collective in post-communist Hungary, news of which inspires a mystical charismatic vulture of a person named Irimiás — played by composer Mihály Vig — to “return from the lifeless” and prey within the desolation he finds One of the desperate and easily manipulated townsfolk.
experienced the confidence or perhaps the cocaine or whatever the hell it took to attempt something like this, because the bigger the movie gets, the more it seems like it couldn’t afford to be any smaller.
His first feature straddles both worlds, exploring the conflict that he himself felt to be a young man in this lightly fictionalized version of his possess story. Haroun plays himself, an up-and-coming Chadian film director situated in France, who returns to his birth country to attend his mother’s funeral.
Annette Bening and Julianne Moore play the moms of two teenagers whose happy home life is thrown off-balance when their long-back anonymous sperm donor crashes the party.