In the poor, working class coal mining town of Barnsley, an adolescent boy named Billy (David Bradley) sharing a cramped bed with his older brother Jud (Freddie Fletcher) is jarred awake by the sound of his Jud’s alarm clock. Prodding his soporific brother to rise, he seizes the opportunity to comfortably stretch out on the […]
On the surface, Peruvian filmmaker Claudia Llosa’s gorgeous, provocative, and idiosyncratically rendered dark fable Madeinusa seems to have little in common with Argentinean filmmaker Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl beyond an artful eye towards creating a similarly foreboding atmosphere with which to present a dysfunctional, contemporary coming of age tale. While Martel uses loosely interwoven […]
There are people who, out of self-image, insecurity, or naive delusion that they can change another person, find themselves in doomed relationships. In Anatole Litvak’s Goodbye Again, Paula (the intoxicating Ingrid Bergman), a successful, middle-aged interior decorator, has been trapped in a dead-end relationship with Roger (Yves Montand), a philandering, transportation businessman. Commissioned to redecorate […]
Note to Pati, 1969 Something of an aesthetic convergence between the diaristic autobiographies and quotidian images of Jonas Mekas (as illustrated in his Diaries, Notes and Sketches chronicles) and the hand crafted dissonance and material violence of Stan Brakhage, Note to Pati presents a seemingly typical winter scene – the day after a snow storm […]
“I thought I would at first offer you a simple lesson – sorry, you don’t like being preached to – so let’s say a little advice, which of course you are not obliged to follow, well, let’s say a tip …which calls upon us to first explore the steps that were cleared by our predecessors, […]
The opening sequence of the film shows the titular heroine (in an exquisitely complex performance by Imelda Staunton), a cheerful and diligent middle-aged woman working as a maid for several affluent homes in postwar London, visiting an invalid man at a tenement complex in order to help with household chores, reposition his feet onto his […]