As the film opens, a gregarious loafer named Watanabe (Ichiro Yuki) turns away a young man who has inquired about a sign on the window for a room for rent, explaining that he had just rented the room earlier that day. Moments later, an attractive young woman inquires about the same room and, attempting to […]
In its tongue-in-cheek illustration of misguided revolutionaries, Antoni Padrós’s Lock-Out suggests a rough hewn and metaphoric – if more impenetrable and decidedly uneven – precursor to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation, interweaving episodes of straightforward narrative, dream-like interludes, and political manifesto into an abstract portrait of resistance and marginalization. For former finance worker Walter […]
In March, 2006, after the Iranian team’s victory in a World Cup qualifier match over Japan, seven people were trampled to death and dozens of others injured after soldiers forcibly attempted to divert the large exiting crowd from a military helicopter that had landed near the main gate and blocked it. Only six of the […]
An aristocratic widow and her daughter living abroad in Europe for the past five years are summoned home by family in order to resolve the late husband’s outstanding debt that would result in the bank’s seizure of the family estate. Broaching complex and indigenous themes that invariably invite comparisons to Far East Asian realist filmmakers […]
Crafted as a cine-reportage restaging of the circumstances surrounding the 1965 abduction – and presumed assassination – of mathematics professor and exiled Moroccan opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka (Simon Abkarian) on a Paris street, I Saw Ben Barka Get Killed is told from the point-of-view of petty criminal turned informant Georges Figon (Charles Berling) who, […]
Something of a prelude to David Lynch’s explorations into the dark side of tinsel town (and in particular, the intersecting alternate realities of his sprawling metafilm Inland Empire), Frank Perry’s Play It As It Lays is a stark, fragmented, and disjointed, but instinctually cohesive, occasionally luminous (and humorous), and inevitably heartbreaking adaptation of Joan Didion’s […]