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"Take an Agatha
Christie-esque Ten Little Indians premise, turn it on its
head, and then shake it very hard, up, down, and sideways. Facing
financial difficulties, industrialist and family patriarch Michel
Piccoli conspires to bump off his guileless, harmlessly mad daughter
(Elsa Zylberstein), heir to his wife's vast fortune, by arranging for
the escape of a psychotic killer (Bernard Giraudeau) confined in a
nearby asylum. The predominant tone is pure farce, with the bodies
piling up while the heroine remains blissfully oblivious, and the film
turns on Zylberstein and Giraudeau's truly hyperbolic performances as
two insane innocents. The narrative may take place 'in the near future'
but its premise revisits Ruiz's political primal scene, replaying the
Chilean coup d'etat as slapstick." - Gavin Smith, Film Comment
Jul/Aug 03
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Wed
Feb 15: 1:45
Fri
Feb 17: 2:50
Fri
Feb 17: 7:15
Mon
Feb 20: 8
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Ruiz's follow-up rumination
on time, mortality and longing for wholeness. Chilean Max (played,
beautifully, at 18, 20 and 71 by Grégoire Colin, and at 51 by
his father, Christian Colin) retains a lifelong vision of his hero, a
French aviator named Antoine (François Cluzet, who gives Ruiz
exactly the right tone of dazed wonderment), who keeps finding himself
behind the controls of an airplane without remembering how to operate
it - and who is also, in some way, the hero of the classic French novel
Les Grandes Meaulnes. This sad, mysterious and somewhat noble film,
which shifts between 1930s and 1970s Chile and England during WWII, is
a triumph of makeshift invention, and it sustains its delicately sad
tone from beginning to end. And it was all shot in Romania. - Kent Jones
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Thurs
Feb 16: 1:30
Sat
Feb 18: 7:15
Tue
Feb 21: 2:15
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Ruiz's first Chilean feature
in 30 years offers a kind of crystallization of his preoccupation with
time "as a dimension... of the cinematic medium itself" (Maxime
Renaudin). Time not as a succession but an accumulation of sensations,
events, memories, feelings. Don Federico (Marcial Edwards) is trying to
write his novel and finally seeing it written for him in his country
estate, where he hears news reports from the radio of his own death,
crosses paths with his younger and older self, and re-experiences the
death and resurrection of his mother. Everything in this amber-toned
environment is aged, worn by time, and eternally present. Diás
de campo is a fugue composition, offering a melancholy interaction with
time itself. - Kent Jones
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Sat
Feb 18: 1
Thurs
Feb 23: 2:30
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"A discreet saga unfolding
over some 30 years, Everlasting Regret is another of Kwan's
takes on the 'women's picture,' following the romantic fortunes of a
Shanghai beauty queen (Sammi Cheng) from the postwar era to the advent
of communism to the Cultural Revolution and drawing to a close at the
dawn of China's economic modernization in the early Eighties. Kwan
avoids melodrama and sentimentality as he focuses in, ever more
tightly, on the unfolding predicament of his heroine. As ever, he's
aided by the exquisite stylization of William Chang's production
design, which reinforces the sense of claustrophobia and entrapment." -
Gavin Smith, Film Comment Nov/Dec 05
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Wed
Feb 15: 4
Sun
Feb 19: 8:15
Mon
Feb 20: 3:30
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More than 30 years ago,
America's greatest living photographer, William Eggleston, shot 30
hours of video in and around Memphis, using a modified Sony Porta-pak,
a cumbersome black-and-white camera that recorded on reel-to-reel
half-inch videotape. Eggleston and Robert Gordon recently distilled
this footage into a 77-minute time capsule. It is an extraordinary and
deeply personal vision of the Memphis demimonde, filmed in the city's
bars and streets. "Stranded in Canton makes us aware of the
chaos outside the frame of every Eggleston photograph. One might
venture, on the evidence of this swerving, lurching, ghostly video
diary that, for Eggleston, time is chaos, against which still images
and the rhythms of music are two forms of defense... As the
ethnographer of that mysterious region called the South, he homes in on
art and artifacts, on family gatherings where familiarity and hostility
are inseparable, on geeks biting the heads off chickens, on juke-joint
philosophers and drag queens, on musicians amateur and professional,
black and white - all of them grooving on their own sounds." - Amy
Taubin, Film Comment online exclusive, Sept 05
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Wed
Feb 15: 6:30*
*Q&A with the
director
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"Or more to the point:
battle in Cannes. Opening with a scene not suitable for recapitulation
in this calendar, Carlos Reygadas's follow-up to Japon was
the designated scandal of last year's all-important French film
festival. Marcos, a general's chauffeur, has a très-bizarre
relationship with his employer's daughter, who gets her kicks working
as high-class prostitute. Marcos and his wife are also up to their
necks in trouble after their child-abduction scheme goes horribly
wrong. This grotesque and increasingly surreal vision of contemporary
Mexico, with its extremes of poverty and wealth, is like a Bosch
painting come to life. Voyeuristic provocation or compassionate
portrait of fallen humanity? You decide. "Reygadas exercises a
consciously popular lyricism, ultimately closer to Sergio Leone than
Andrei Tarkovsky. The resulting beauty approaches bad taste... but is
real beauty ever pure?" - Frédéric Bonnaud, Film
Comment Jan/Feb 06
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Wed
Feb 15: 9:30
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"This quietly devastating
coming-of-age story set in a steel town in 80s rural China deservedly
won the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize and marks a return to form for
Wang, whose 1993 The Days helped kick off the Sixth
Generation movement. The protagonist of Dreams is high-school
student Qinghong (newcomer Gao Yuanyuan in an amazing performance). Her
embittered Shanghai-born parents relocated to the countryside during
the Cultural Revolution, to aid China's march of industrial progress.
Now disillusioned, they yearn to return to the city. Qinghong's
authoritarian father therefore forbids her budding romance with a shy
young factory-worker, wanting a better life for his daughter via
university entrance. But times are changing, youthful rebellion is in
the air, and the stage is set for tragedy. Wang gives us fascinating
glimpses of Chinese youth culture back in the day and tacit class
divisions between the proletarian locals and the town's discontented
urban exiles. His delicate handling and visual intelligence neatly
sidestep both melodrama and the clichés of Sixth Generation
dingy realism, while retaining a vivid sense of milieu and landscape."
- Gavin Smith, Film Comment Jul/Aug 05
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Thurs
Feb 16: 3:45
Fri
Feb 17: 9
Mon
Feb 20: 1
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"A young Tehran office
worker arrives home one evening only to have her mother insist that she
sleep elsewhere that night. She leaves. Iranian bus service being at
best infrequent, she starts to walk, but eventually accepts a ride from
a passing motorist. A woman alone on the streets after dark in this
country is by definition suspicious, so the driver subjects her to an
interrogation. The rest of the film is made up of a series of rides
with different men. The "car film" is a staple of Iranian cinema, yet
in actress-turned-director Karimi's film it takes on new life. One
Night begins as a story with a well-defined goal and trajectory,
but gradually the plot gets overwhelmed by the experience of the
journey. After all we've seen and heard, the city will never be the
same." - Richard Peña, Film Comment Jul/Aug 05
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Thurs
Feb 16: 9
Fri
Feb 17: 1
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"For those who have never
read the New Testament in Aramaic, the title of the film allegedly
reiterates Jesus' final words as he hung upon the cross. The latest
film from the director of 2000's Eureka is an offbeat,
playful riff on viral-apocalypse sci-fi. It's 2015, and Japan is in the
grip of a 'the lemming syndrome,' a disease that induces suicidal
impulses in its victims. Two experimental musicians (Tadanobu Asano and
Masaya Nakahara) may be have found the key to a cure. They believe that
the ambient location sounds they record and process into ear-filling
feedback loops destroy the virus - or do they feed it? The film has a
soundtrack that rivals my memories of early Glenn Branca symphonies,
and Aoyama's vast, desolate landscape imagery is open enough to
accommodate the din. - Amy Taubin, Film Comment Jul/Aug 05
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Fri
Feb 17: 5
Sun
Feb 19: 6
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"In a remote Kyrgyzstan
village nothing is quite right. An oppressive sense of ennui fills the
air as the locals, about a decade into their Central Asian
independence, are having trouble coming to grips with their post-Soviet
condition. The bureaucracy has become localized, money has evaporated,
and the resident mullah can't seem to get it together to make it to
morning prayer. But guess what? This one's a comedy. Very funny, very
poignant, and at times filled with an ethereal spirit, it's the kind of
genuine artistic anomaly that could have easily slipped beneath the
radar. Saratan was the grand-prize winner at the 5th annual Marrakech
Film Festival." - Chris Chang, Film Comment Jan/Feb 06
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Sat
Feb 18: 2:45
Wed
Feb 22: 4:45
Fri
Feb 24: 1
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When you see what the
workers in this globetrotting documentary have to do to make a living,
you'll think twice next time you start complaining about your lousy
job. Consisting of "Five Pictures of Work in the 21st Century," plus a
final coda in Germany, Glawogger's stunning filmmaking feat grapples up
close with the reality (and surreality) of manual labor. Glawogger
descends into the abyss of an abandoned Ukrainian mine with unemployed
miners scavenging for coal; tags along with Indonesian bearers hauling
loads of sulphur on foot down the slopes of a volcano in East Java;
takes in the frenzied cyclic activity of an open-air slaughterhouse in
Nigeria; spends time with Pakistani ship breakers tearing apart a
beached oil tanker for scrap metal; and interviews steelworkers in
China. Mesmerizing, humbling, and guaranteed to make Werner Herzog
green with envy.
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Sat
Feb 18: 4:45
Tue
Feb 21: 6:30
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Horror is so rarely played
straight these days - or made suitable for thinking adults - that it's
bracing to get such a direct dose of the dark stuff. First-time
director Billy O'Brien doesn't waste any time making his intentions
clear, setting us up for what's to come from the first scene. While
trying to birth a calf, farmer John Lynch discovers that there's
something 'weird and pissed off' inside his cow. From this ominous
opening O'Brien loses all kinds of unpleasantness upon the desolate
Irish countryside, mixing strains of science fiction and
Cronenberg-style biological panic in a relentless horror film that
never gets distracted from the business at hand. - David Cox
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Sat
Feb 18: 9:30
Sun
Feb 19: 2
Tue
Feb 21: 4:30
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"Following a spate of
murders in an off-season resort town, a plainclothes cop, a photo-store
clerk, and a hotel maid come together to stage a series of outlandish
murder re-enactments. Their attention to detail is exhaustive, their
efforts are obsessive, but the scientific purpose is... questionable.
And a distinct air of perversity hangs over this nameless trio's
cryptic "performances." Imagine a minimalist anti-CSI with almost no
dialogue, an elliptical narrative and the most vertiginous, twitchy
handheld camerawork since the Dardenne Brothers' Rosetta and you're in
the right ballpark. Lanthimos is a talent to watch." - Gavin Smith, Film
Comment Nov/Dec 05
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Sun
Feb 19: 4
Mon
Feb 20: 6
Wed
Feb 22: 2:45
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"In this bracing, relentless
portrait of social persecution, a young female humanitarian aid worker
returns to Japan after being held hostage in Iraq. But instead of being
celebrated for her bravery, she is excoriated for embarrassing her
country. Her boyfriend deserts her, her father and mother lose their
jobs, and that's not the end of it. Kobayashi's style is as obdurate as
his heroine, played by the impressively defiant Fusako Urabe" - Amy
Taubin, Film Comment Jul/Aug 05
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Tue
Feb 21: 9
Wed
Feb 22: 1
Wed
Feb 22: 9:30
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For the past five years the
Jeonju International Film Festival in Korea has financed a unique
ongoing project in which a trio of notable up-and-coming Asian
filmmakers are invited to make a short film with digital technology and
total creative freedom. The completed films are then assembled in an
omnibus format. The latest edition features Japanese cult filmmaker
Tsukamoto's Haze, an experiment in uncanny claustrophobia; Magician(s)
by Korea's Song, in which the boundary between past and present
dissolves during a reunion of the former members of a rock band; and Wordly
Desires, in which Tropical Malady director Apichatpong
Weerasethakul returns to the jungle for a film within a film about the
shooting of a love story by day and a music video by night.
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Thurs
Feb 23: 4:30
Fri
Feb 24: 9:45
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"From its opening images of
a bare landscape and a dilapidated house, The Forsaken Land
is unmistakably the work of someone in complete control of his
material. This Cannes prizewinner for first feature is a spare,
poetically fragmented, and haunting look at life in the Sri Lankan
hinterlands in the aftermath of decades of brutal civil war, where the
specter of violence still stalks the land. The central trio - a home
guardsman, his disaffected young wife and his older sister - live
uneasily together at a lonely outpost, frozen in a state of
post-traumatic limbo that mirrors their nation's shattered psyche. The
film's pervasive sense of hopelessness and disconnection, with its
pointless brutality, desperate sexual interludes, and unarticulated
domestic tensions, unforgettably conveys the way in which war blights
the lives of all involved long after the fighting ends." - Gavin Smith,
Film Comment Jul/Aug 05
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Fri
Feb 24: 3:10
Fri
Feb 24: 7:35
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The cult director of Pulse
and Cure returns to the horror genre for this quietly creepy
ghost story. After a bout of vomiting up mud in her agent's office,
successful novelist Reiko (Miki Nakatani) moves into a remote country
house to overcome writer's block and make the deadline for her next
book. Traces of the house's previous occupant are all around -
including the manuscript for a novel. But Reiko is soon distracted by
the goings-on in the house next door, where a university research
scientist (Etsushi Toyokawa) is studying a thousand-year-old mummified
corpse exhumed from a nearby swamp. After agreeing to store the mummy
in her house overnight so that the researcher can conceal his
activities from visiting colleagues, Reiko is visited by an apparition
- is it the house's previous occupant, the mummy's spirit, or both?
Seemingly more straightforward than Kurosawa's previous genre outings, Loft
is strong on atmosphere and mounting unease, but as usual Kurosawa has
a few improbable twists up his sleeve.
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Wed
Feb 22: 7
Fri
Feb 24: 5:20
Sat
Feb 25: 9
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This China/U.S.
co-production is based on a true story about a band of volunteer
environmentalists desperately trying to defend the lives (and
commercially lucrative pelts) of the endangered Himalayan antelope.
"The narrative tension hinges upon the arrival of a journalist who has
come to meet the leader of the animal activists. He then follows him
and his band of sometimes merry men as they track the poacher's elusive
ringleader - an Ahab-like quest that has been going on for years. This
nature-versus-man-versus-everything story, rendered in jaw-dropping
'scope, reaches a climax as savage (and ineffable) as the landscape
itself." - Chris Chang, Film Comment Jan/Feb 06
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Sat
Feb 25: 7 |
She was one half of a
legendary 60s comedy team. She's a brilliant comic actress (California
Suite, Small Time Crooks). She's a playwright and a
screenwriter (Heaven Can Wait, The Birdcage). Most
mysteriously, she's a member of that exclusive secret society of script
doctors (Tootsie, Reds). But the multitalented
Elaine May is above all the director of four masterpieces: A New Leaf, in which she also starred
opposite Walter Matthau; the devastatingly funny Neil Simon adaptation The Heartbreak Kid; the legendary Mikey and Nicky, starring John Cassavetes and
Peter Falk; and the wondrous and unfairly maligned Ishtar,
co-starring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman. Join us to meet a genius
of modern American comedy, here in person to talk about her career.
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Please Note:
There is a limit of TWO [2] tickets per customer to this special event.
Ticket prices: $75 FSLC members, $85 non- members.
Judged a debacle of
world-historical dimensions and called "a lifeless, massive, lumbering
exercise in failed comedy" by Roger Ebert, Elaine May's satire was so
rarefied that it went all but unnoticed. Dustin Hoffman and Warren
Beatty are Rogers and Clarke, a transcendentally awful musical comedy
team who find inspiration in the unlikeliest sources. Their stalwart
manager (Jack Weston) secures them a hotel gig in the fictional nation
of Ishtar,
where they are quickly embroiled in the local revolution when they fall
for a local revolutionary (Isabelle Adjani). Every comic moment, from
the
musical numbers to the blind camel to the vultures arriving "on spec,"
is perfectly realized. With Charles Grodin as the CIA agent who enlists
one of
the boys, and rationalizes the low salary with this upbeat
qualification: "You can't really put a price on democracy, can you?"
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Sun
Feb 26: 7
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A New Leaf is one
of the finest and funniest directorial debuts in Hollywood history.
Walter Matthau, perceptively cast against type, is old-money WASP Henry
Graham, who finds himself bankrupt and laments: "All I am - or was - is
rich. It's all I wanted to be." May herself is Henrietta Lowell, a
ditzy heiress with a passion for botany and a fondness for Mogen David
Extra Heavy Malaga, in whom Henry sees his financial salvation. "Miss
May's film, though contemporary, belongs oddly to what I think of as
Depression Comedy," wrote Vincent Canby, who rejoiced at May's expert
mixture of two of that earlier era's best comic traditions, screwball
and slow burn. The film is blessed with many brilliantly funny scenes,
such as the moment when Henry skewers some party guests by asking if
they are "by any chance related to the Boston Hitlers," but its comic
peak is a peerless bit of slapstick: the writer/director/star trying to
get into and out of a nightgown on her wedding night.
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Sat
Feb 25: 2
Tue
Feb 28: 1
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This gut-wrenching tale,
about an upwardly (or outwardly) mobile New York Jewish boy (Charles
Grodin) who marries within the faith only to meet the shiksa of his
dreams on his Miami honeymoon, is told in the coolest manner imaginable
- every perfectly observed and appointed interaction plays out so
smoothly and quietly that the full impact of the story is that much
more devastating when it hits you during the film's final plaintive
moments. Few movies are better cast. Grodin's brilliant performance in
the lead was career defining, and it was with this movie that Cybill
Shepherd became the iconic 70s golden girl. And if Walter Matthau's
slow burns in A New Leaf are things of rare beauty, Eddie
Albert's in this movie belong in a museum. But The Heartbreak Kid
wouldn't have been possible without May's daughter, Jeannie Berlin, as
the haplessly gauche, grating and pitiful Lila. Few directors would
dare to cast their own child in such a role, and few actresses could
bring so much life to a character that is, in the end, the embodiment
of bad luck.
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Sat
Feb 25: 4:15
Sun
Feb 26: 1
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The saga behind Mikey
and Nicky is legendary - a lengthy production on the streets of
Philadelphia during which a million feet of film was shot in the
pursuit of spontaneously generated raw drama; 18 months in the editing
room; May and Peter Falk kidnapping the footage to keep it away from
prying studio execs; a botched and desultory 1976 release; and May's
preferred version finally seeing the light of day a decade later. The
film itself is utterly without precedent: red-hot and behaviorally
alive in a way that few films can match, yet dramatically drum-tight
(it's one of the few great American films that observes the unity of
time principle), with a shattering, genuinely tragic conclusion.
There's not a wasted moment - every exchange, every reaction, is pure
gold. John Cassavetes, giving a performance that's alternately
ferocious and touching and quite unlike anything he did in his own
work, is Nicky, the small-timer who's embezzled money from the mob and
who has a contract out on him. Falk is Mikey, his buddy of 30 years,
shepherding him all the way down to the end of the road. And Ned
Beatty, in one of his best roles, is the hit man. Look out for cameo
appearances by legendary acting teachers Sanford Meisner and William
Hickey as two Mafia bosses.
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Sun
Feb 26: 3:30
Tue
Feb 28: 3:15
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