Eyes Without a Face opens to the sound of a jaunty and strangely carnivalesque music as an apprehensive and distracted woman named Louise (Alida Valli) hurriedly navigates through a dark and empty stretch of highway, momentarily veering off course to the side of the road by the ominous sight of a speeding vehicle quickly approaching […]
Category: Directors
The Girl from Monaco, 2008
The prevailing stereotype of Monaco as exotic, laid back resort destination and land of fairytale – perpetuated in part by the public’s enduring affection for the principality’s most famous transplant, Grace Kelly – provides the surreal atmosphere for conscientious, Parisian attorney and self-styled ladies man, Bertrand’s (Fabrice Luchini) inopportune case of tropical fever in Anne […]
Gentille, 2005
The whimsical and offbeat opening sequence of subverted expectation and role reversal provides a tongue-in-cheek glimpse into the eccentric humor and understatedly irony of screenwriter turned filmmaker Sophie Fillières latest film, Gentille, as an anxious Fontaine Leglou (Emmanuelle Devos), an anesthesiologist working the evening shift at a private psychiatric hospital, accosts an unwitting man on […]
Animated Passions: The Films of Ursula Ferrara
During the Q&A for the screening of Animated Passions: The Films of Ursula Ferrara, Ferrara commented that her body of work reflects the conventional progression of her formal art school training, graduating from monochrome to color, simple sketches to more complex forms. The theme of evolution and transformation is also integrally connected to the metaphorical […]
Go Go Tales, 2007
During the Q&A for Go Go Tales, native New Yorker Abel Ferrara indicated that although the film’s main setting, Ray Ruby’s Paradise Lounge looks like something straight out of the city’s seedier sections, the authentically gaudy look of the cabaret was actually inspired by an interchangeable array of fly-by-night strip clubs that used to operate […]
Voyage to Nowhere, 1986
“One should remember”, reflects a somber, elderly Carlos Galván (José Sacristán) at the beginning of Voyage to Nowhere as he listens to an old recording by popular folk musicians, the Trío Calaveras. Commenting on the melancholic lyrics of denial and abandonment of a shared history in the aftermath of lost love, Carlos, too, seems to […]