Two Days, One Night
By now the Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, have established themselves as a major force within the Belgian movie industry. They write, produce and direct their pictures together. They’ve been nominated for the Palme d’Or, the top prize at Cannes, SIX times and have actually won twice. Their latest is the French language Two Days, […]
The Great Beauty
The Great Beauty is director Paolo Sorrentino’s ode to finding the beauty in one’s own existence. The production reunites the filmmaker with his frequent lead star (and muse) Toni Servillo in a character study. We’re presented a contemporary version of Rome through the eyes of Jep Gambardella. The aging bon vivant once wrote a masterpiece […]
The Past
The incredible promise that Director Asghar Farhadi demonstrated with 2011’s A Separation has proven to be no fluke with his subsequent follow-up, The Past. He recounts human behavior with the precision of an absolute master. The plot is artfully straightforward. Four years after separating from his ex-wife Marie (Bérénice Bejo), an Iranian man from Tehran […]
Blue Is the Warmest Color
Adèle is a girl in secondary school. She yearns for romance, but her desires are complicated by conflicting feelings. Egged on by the inane chatter of her high school friends, Adèle goes out with a good looking schoolboy who is attracted to her. On the way to their date, she spies a young mysterious blue haired […]
The Wind Rises
Young Jiro fantasizes about being a pilot. But the boy’s nearsightedness makes that impossible. Instead he joins a major Japanese engineering company in 1927 and starts designing airplanes to satiate his desires. The Wind Rises is a fictionalized biography of Jiro Horikoshi, the creator of the Mitsubishi A5M and its famous successor, the Mitsubishi A6M […]
Wadjda
Saudi Arabia has no movie theaters. Clerics oppose public screenings because they encourage mingling of the sexes. Small wonder that it has taken until 2013 to get Wadjda, the first feature shot entirely in Saudi Arabia. In a country where a film industry is virtually absent, this fact alone would make its existence commendable. However […]
The Hunt
The avant-garde filmmaking movement known as Dogme 95 was started in 1995 by Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. Their goal was to focus filmmaking techniques on actual story and performances and eschew expensive special effects. Perhaps The Hunt doesn’t adhere to the strict guidelines of a Dogme film, nevertheless, the emphasis on […]
Kon-Tiki
Kon-Tiki, the Inca god of Sun and storm, was the name of the balsa-wood raft used by Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl. The primitive vessel was instrumental in his 1947 expedition across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian islands. The purpose was to show that the South American people could have […]
No
Chile’s very first nominee for Best Foreign Language Film is a political drama about the country’s national referendum held in 1988. The plebiscite concerned whether Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet should extend his rule for another eight-years in office. The vote is simply ‘Yes’ in favor of the idea and ‘No’ for anything else. René Saavedra, […]
Fist of Legend
Fist of Legend is a Hong Kong action film set in Shanghai in 1937 when the city was occupied by Japanese forces. Chen Zhen (Jet Li) learns that his Chinese martial arts teacher Huo Yuanjia has died in a battle with a Japanese fighter. Distraught he leaves for China immediately to avenge his death. Upon […]