Au Revoir les enfants is a touching and nostalgic film about the loss of innocence. Julien Quentin (Gaspard Manesse) is an awkward, fanciful adolescent who is sent by his doting mother to a provincial Catholic boarding school. Set in 1940s war-torn France, there is an underlying sense of hardship and uncertainty in this idyllic countryside: […]
Alain (Maurice Ronet) silently observes his lover Lydia (Léna Skerla), struggling to decipher the elusive meaning beneath the wistful, attentive eyes, lingering beyond the point of reassuring tenderness to where the potentiality of the moment of connection has irretrievably slipped away, and all that is left is the inscrutable, opaque gaze. Confronting the awkward silence, […]
A poor, Afgan immigrant well digger named Nasim (Moharram Zaynalzadeh) distractedly watches on with his son as a friend performs his daredevil motorcycle act. Nasim’s thoughts are consumed by his gravely ill wife, and the hospital’s reluctance to continue to provide treatment without receiving payment for her incurred medical expenses. Unable to raise enough money […]
The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator is a fascinating, offbeat, and engagingly idiosyncratic examination of love, betrayal, world history, psychology, and criminology. The film opens to Dr. Aleksander Kostic’s droll lecture on sexuality, and cuts to the images of several provocative artworks. It serves as a comical prelude to the meeting of a shy, […]
A young, impoverished boy named Amiro (Majid Niroumand) observantly stands on the shoreline, his eyes transfixed on a large white ship in the distance, visibly mesmerized. Almost mechanically, he waves his arms repeatedly and calls to the silent, slow moving object. The brief episode is a fleeting, tangential distraction from his daily ritual of survival. […]
Adapted from the novel by postwar author Aya Koda (the daughter of Meiji-era novelist Koda Rohan) and filmed in the same year as the banning of prostitution in Japan, Mikio Naruse’s Flowing is something of a corollary to Kenji Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame, a complex and richly textured panorama capturing a transforming way of life […]