Reviews

The 31 year old Daphne Vitale leads a free and unruly life: the day at work in a pub with a boss who besieges her with tender discretion, the night free for South London between alcohol, drugs and casual sex. His apparent sentimental indolence masks the anguish for the illness of a mother with whom he has a conflictive relationship and an emotional fragility that struggles to accept. A dramatic and unexpected event requires a moment of inevitable reflection and gradual change. The existential vocation drama with a strong social footprint is one of the most predictable qualities of independent cinema, forced to navigate between cash crunches and an authorial figure with the need to cash in at the first opportunity. If this is true for the already well-established Indie cinema of overseas (with more and more frequent concessions in the manner), it seems as desirable for that of a homeland of emerging directors who take advantage of a tax discount of a quarter of the taxation for a budget of which at least 10% spent within the borders of Her Majesty's Kingdom. Considerations inevitable, especially in times of Brexit, even for the debut Peter Mackie Burns who on one hand engages with the existential discomfort of a generation of many precariousness and that navigates to view and on the other with the need to make ends meet accounts of a talent immediately redeemable in the main festival festivals. The operation seems to have succeeded, at least in part, because of a register of captivating realism and calculated musical counterpoints as for the cute and sulky face of a handsome thirty-year-old redhead of a Sicilian father, who remains hooked from beginning to end along the daily wanderings in search of a self that pretends not to see reflected every morning in front of the mirror. The Anglo-Texan Emily Beecham holds very well the game (and the scene) fielding the fleeting lightness of the aquatic nymph dear to Apollo, in the inebriating dribbling of a love disengagement as a desperate attempt to escape an emotional responsibility with which it will be called to confront oneself in the inevitable predestination of an unexpected event: the aufbruch of a sudden rupture in the placid course of an indolent existence and which is a prelude to the geschehen of a forced restart. Unlike the emptiness of values ​​and the tragic nemesis faced by the tawny Keaton of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, the protagonist of this intimate drama from Southwark seems to know what he does not want but is definitely more afraid of what he wants (l 'concern for the health of a Buddhist mother who refuses the anticancer therapies, the sentimental commitment with a boy who does not take advantage of his hasty sexual availability and who looks at it with different eyes) and for whom the gradual awareness of an emotional gap it will be dictated both by chance and by a lightness of having become unsustainable. All according to script, in short, including the edifying picture of a human and social solidity relived in the domestic psychodrama of heroic behavior in favor of an industrious and warm North African immigration formed family that hardly chews English but knows the priceless human values ​​of hospitality and gratitude; Going home will be a person who has found a different reason for living at the sound of a Ba-ba-ba-ba by LouReed & Velvet Underground. Emily Beecham crowned best actress both in the sunny summer of the Edinburgh International Film Festival and in the winter frost of the Torino Film Festival 2017.

At the center of the exchange of a compromising microchip between opposing factions of secret agents, an unwanted thief and an impassioned chauffeur put in without wanting it. Between vicissitudes, deceptions and various pursuits, they will end up sharing their solitude and ... a great sum of money. Marengo debuts in the long run with a caricaturist metropolitan noir film that mimics the film with the sweetness of Mazzacurati master: the mirage of a different life for two lonely souls fleeing the past failures and the indigence of the present. The spy-story that is the background to the story is obviously a thin pretext that triggers around the subject of a postage stamp controversy, the tragicomic events of a stunning gallery of comic book characters that may arise as between professional failures and personal dissatisfaction, Up to the epilogue of an unlikely story of misunderstood feelings and disputed booties. If the parody of a mix of import registers that would like to contaminate action and reflection is poorly suited to the low quality of our screenwriters, the film shapes more on the side of a frayed and predictable action and the inconsistency of two- dimensional characters that reproduce so many stereotypes Of the overseas cinema: from the secret agent of a lonely Ennio Fantastichini to the bully with the golden heart of a corny Mario Rivera, from the dark lady of a two-bit Giovanna Mezzogiorno to the loser by the sad charm of a lazy Valerio Mastandrea. To make matters worse, the ridiculous overacting of an irritating Francesco Pannofino whirring and agitating throughout the film in the unusual attempt to play the card of a comedy over the lines to counter the unhappy sadness of sophisticated blues atmospheres. In the final, even the arithmetic game of a double cross between destiny fathers and prodigal sons with Cleopatra's complex in the unsatisfied reunion of an appointment for life ... or for death. All wasted effort, including the beautiful soundtrack of a talented Daniele Silvestri and two bus of the ATAC that were destroyed during the scene of the night-time pursuit between urban wreckage. Two nominations to David, two Silver Ribbons and one Golden Globe for an Italian-Polish production that spends three and picks one; Even here unfortunately the accounts end up not coming back at all.

"Hey, you hear the buses at night with certain broken mechanisms do Too much noise ... nobody is looking for anyone waiting for them Even the driver tell me ... what he does"

Two teenagers, Par and Annika, meet by chance during a visit to their relatives guests to a nursing home. Born among them a tender feeling growing in the background of a thin family distress and social impact, including regrets and recriminations of older people and betrayed the expectations of the most 'young people, along the dividing line of a generational crisis that is a mirror and reflection of a country that seems to have lost their national identity. In cold and distant reverberations of a remote Swedish Summer, director Roy Andersson seems to chase the chimera of a 'New Cinema' which (belatedly) aims to public attention through a Scandinavian vigilant attention to the events of the younger generation (teenagers who imitate American riders between leather jackets and juke box), not failing, however, to return the existential sense of a profound inability to communicate like a worm that eats away hopelessly family relationships and decreasing the aesthetics of the new impulses that had troubled European cinema in the previous years in the context mature and aware of non-trivial analysis of social relations and of an irreversible crisis of values, as happened in those years with the extraordinary exploits of Michelangelo Antonioni. Andersson attempts to capture the chorus of this social dimension through the use of medium shots that collect the plurality of appearances that fill the screen as an overview on the evolution of human relationships, often dropping the camera eye on the detail of the first plans from which we grasp the sense of a shared personal pain that makes collective grief (the grandfather crying at the beginning of the film claiming the imprisonment aware of the existence of a terminal condition, the young Eva who confesses his granddaughter premature failure of a personally and professionally project , the hysterical laughter of John shows that the sense of a contemptuous unbearable frustration individual). Against the background of this social and cultural discomfort you shake the manifesto of this new cinema, overlap the 'wave' of this generational aesthetic where you insert the delicate dialectic of a theory of looks that weave the plot of a visual approach, the bitter lust a sweet discovery sentimental, the return in motorbike without headlights in a twilight full of hopes. Striking the ending where in the delirium of ethyl salesman refrigerators will raise the desperate cry of a social failure as a prelude to the final tragicomic in the morning fog, a new sad homecoming. Cinema of passage, between the cold nihilism of a generational disenchantment and the silence of a domestic in communicability family, which returns the thickness of a work that collects 5 nominations and 4 awards at the Berlin Film Festival in 1970. The icy glare of Swedish Nouvelle Vogue.

The dissatisfied and attractive wife of a wealthy businessman faithless an affair with a young employee who, during one of these meetings in a room by the hour, the photographer in compromising poses. The shots end up in the hands of a secret admirer of her that blackmails proposing a meeting in a coastal spa town. She agrees, but followed 'by the jealous boyfriend who is not going to give up on her despite already busy with another girl. Surprise ending. Chasing the restless spirit of a female presence in search of its own identity (sexual, social, emotional) Yoshida's story depicts the intense pages of the Nobel Prize Yasunari Kawabata, in a psychological drama refined and allusive, always torn between a representation a male-dominated society and closed (such as the Japanese of the time) and the new libertarian impulses that was a prelude to a relentless and progressive emancipation of the costumes. Product of an unconventional and innovative conception of art, the work of the Japanese director through as few shameless geography of a woman's body showed how symbolic and figurative representation of this cultural transformation, privileging plasticity in both the eccentric movement of the machine (the limit of mere exhibitionism) and in the choice of shots (often framing the intimacy of the protagonists from the shelter of a morbid indiscreet intrusion) the new prospects for a look that penetrates the epidermal surface of a reality seemingly reassuring to delve into the intricacies of a inner upheaval that does not take long to occur. The stages of this process of instrumental mystification of female identity is well represented by the figure of a protagonist (the beautiful Mariko Okada) as a character in search of a way out from their worries, moving from the role of reassuring gheisha and mother , to that of shameless exhibitionist and faithless to the threshold of a sexual transgression and sentimental that does not mind the subtle skirmishes of seduction and murder as a means of turning the final and decisive blackmail men: a tunnel with no escape from which, however, will come out a loser and unsatisfied . Accompanied by catchy melodies and sweet of you Ikeno and beautifully photographed by Tatsuo Suzuki, shows the soul of an ambiguous japan among the chaotic turmoil of city life to the ambiguity of a perverse and morbid sunny coastal province such as theater, posing for shots forbidden in the back room of a store development and printing to the unusual and daring of a film daring among the wreckage of abandoned ship in dry. The Yoshida movie glimpse an original dystopian sensitivity related to the role of women in Japanese society so far removed from the stereotypes and expectations of the Western audience, yet so intense for the evocative expressive and cultural fascination offering.

Young professor of letters leads to a tired and (un) comfortable routine between the forced cohabitation with his father, an elderly tailor long a widower, and the pitfalls of a mature and unsatisfied married woman. He lived with the dilapidated and neglected country home of his paternal grandfather, rediscovers the unexpected delights of a bucolic life in the care of a garden flourishing and abandoned, the legacy of the ancestor wise farmer and the enigmatic and enchanting presence of a young and mysterious girl. Small moral fable-toned light and sparse, the story of Sulik is a delightful fable ecologist who runs backwards along the path neglected and unknown of a return to nature, to its biological cycles and mystery, its remedies and its consolations, the alienating wisdom and magical alchemy of a rediscovery of self. The echo of a submissive and patient recall atavistic moves from the silent shadows of a garden dormant ancestral to the wishes of the young protagonist as the haunting song of a comely and remote siren that promises sensual reward for hidden treasures and immodest virtue. Ideally divided into 14 chapters (with a title and description) proposes the metaphor explicit diary and secret, the diegesis of a process that goes through the steps required for a journey of discovery and renewed awareness (from the comforts of an indolent life home town and enlightening the simplicity of rural life by the rhythms of time and seasons), where the meeting with the symbolic figures and goggled of mysterious wanderers (the saint who recalls Francis, the natural philosopher that recalls Rousseau and the rationalist conceptual recalling Wittgenstein) is the unexpected event of the fantastic, an unexpected materialization of unconscious desires that embody the prototypes examples of virtue 'philosophers'. Keeping the log lighter than a moral comedy film of the Slovak filmmaker manages to keep a safe distance the easy duplication of the symbolism of a cryptic language and convoluted as is the tired cliché of the grotesque typical of the western film to orient towards the rather rarefied elegy Soviet cinema (Tarkovskji, Konchalovskji) both in the choice of some visual solutions and color (the plane of the prologue sequence that opens the heavy foliage of an apple tree overflowing with fruits never caught, the use of a photograph saturated that enhances the varied polychrome Slovak autumn but especially the final sequence of levitation supine illuminating a lovely hag) that the use of a musical texture suspended between the mystery of the inevitable and that of a revelation. In almost vividly illustrative minimalism of the episodes you can see the thread of a deep feeling and arcane, mysterious sense of the time and nature through the things and people transforming them into the elements of a new cosmogony, the busty sensuality of the female body as a symbol of ancient the fertility of the earth, in the encryption of a mirrored language that you write and you read through the reflection of the signs of the real world, in the allusive complementary symmetry of destiny (the binomial mother-daughter and the father-son). Sulik signing his work original and fascinating at the bottom of the painting that appears at the beginning of the film (in the 'House of Jacob'): the icon of a cubist sore and tortured Saint Sebastian. Special Jury Prize at the 1995 'Karlovy Vary International Film Festival' and the 'International Festival of Young Cinema of Turin' and winner of five Czech Lions in 1996.

Young cabaret dancer and singer married to an intellectual, are subtly deceived and is arrested by the secret police Polish imprisons her in a women's prison. Here suffered repeated beatings and interrogations in order to make them confess to the alleged anti- nationalist, remaining segregated together with the other held for several years, until the end of Stalinist period. Only those who have lived under the oppressive cloak of an autocratic regime can not conceive the horror and distaste for oppression and brutalization of conscience that comes from the climate of suspicion and coercion of a Stalinist system. The thirty-nine years old director Ryszard Bugajski from Warsaw tell us about it with daring and difficult work that produced a few years before the collapse of Soviet bloc, had to hide because of the ostracism and persecution by the authorities Polish. Forced to emigrate to Canada he made in VHS circular at first, until his distribution in 1989 and into the limelight in Cannes in 1990. This is a work rigorous and required where there is a reference, in the exemplary story of a young patriot, the tragedy and absurdity surreal lived by whole genarations of Polish citizens who passed the occupation and horrors of Nazism to the permutation of a cruel and inhuman tyranny in ruthless monster of a Stalinist regime, the generous sacrifice for their country during the war, the disintegration of their national identity through perverse gears of insinuating control by Polish authorities themselves. The onset of a poignant hymn of love for their country (the beautiful 'Piosenka o mojej Warszawie') in the verses and notes sung by the boys who return from the front is the sad prelude to a generation betrayed by being cruel and mocking the history.The look of the young Bugajski rests on the faces and bodies of the tortured protagonist with cold clarity of a cruel realism, the dissection of the dark evil of a nation reduced to the yoke of a dark presence and immanent rushes individuals hell Kafkaesque a mousetrap. The prison (jail) female hold the cold and damp a great drifting ship where men and mice are forced to necessary cohabitation in Desperate to escape an unlikely, wrecks animated bodies that crave the gasping salvation. In tight spaces a subtle promiscuity reveals the design of a perverse inhuman coercion, it stirs up the dark machinations that sets man against man, a cruel game and sadist who delves in the lowest depths of degradation of man. Rare concessions to symbolism (the seeds on the window sill of watered with spit from desperate cellmates) and to easy melodramatic rhetoric, in this microcosm retraces the tragic fate of a woman stripped of the visible signs of his dignity until complete isolation from his past (the fight for his country, the relationship with her husband and his world) and its future (the child who The first being torn from the womb and then the arms) and yet maintains the integrity of fair who does not abdicate the betrayal or the break-up of his own humanity. The stages of events momentous mark the time of the prison of Antonina Dziwisz Between the 34th anniversary of the October Revolution and the end of the great Soviet tyranny. Prize for the best actress at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival for his extraordinary protagonist Krystina Janda. Unappreciated gem of Polish cinema.