Video installation showing the film "A Clockwork Orange", reduced to its colour.
Video installation showing the film "A Clockwork Orange", reduced to its colour.
2013-07-09
8.6
4.6Based on the only extensive prose work by the surrealist painter Josef Capek, Shades of Fern most resembles the philosophical fairy tales and fables of Josef’s older brother, the legendary Czech novelist and playwright Karel Capek. Two young poachers, more boys than men, kill a gamekeeper when they are caught illegally hunting. Panicked, they retreat into a forest that grows steadily more forbidding and deadly as their fear for the future—and guilt over their action—mounts. Loosely based on hundreds of oral folk tales and legends that haunt the woods of Czechoslovakia, Vlácil’s contemporary updating artistically underscores the relationship between man and nature, crime and punishment, isolation and society, and guilt and memory.
7.5After Dr. Bill Harford's wife, Alice, admits to having sexual fantasies about a man she met, Bill becomes obsessed with having a sexual encounter. He discovers an underground sexual group and attends one of their meetings -- and quickly discovers that he is in over his head.
8.0The drug-induced utopias of four Coney Island residents are shattered when their addictions run deep.
8.1A pragmatic U.S. Marine observes the dehumanizing effects the U.S.-Vietnam War has on his fellow recruits from their brutal boot camp training to the bloody street fighting in Hue.
8.2In a near-future Britain, young Alexander DeLarge and his pals get their kicks beating and raping anyone they please. When not destroying the lives of others, Alex swoons to the music of Beethoven. The state, eager to crack down on juvenile crime, gives an incarcerated Alex the option to undergo an invasive procedure that'll rob him of all personal agency. In a time when conscience is a commodity, can Alex change his tune?
8.2World War II soldier-turned-U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels investigates the disappearance of a patient from a hospital for the criminally insane, but his efforts are compromised by troubling visions and a mysterious doctor.
8.0Lester Burnham, a depressed suburban father in a mid-life crisis, decides to turn his hectic life around after developing an infatuation with his daughter's attractive friend.
8.4A ticking-time-bomb insomniac and a slippery soap salesman channel primal male aggression into a shocking new form of therapy. Their concept catches on, with underground "fight clubs" forming in every town, until an eccentric gets in the way and ignites an out-of-control spiral toward oblivion.
8.5A burger-loving hit man, his philosophical partner, a drug-addled gangster's moll and a washed-up boxer converge in this sprawling, comedic crime caper. Their adventures unfurl in three stories that ingeniously trip back and forth in time.
8.5A man with a low IQ has accomplished great things in his life and been present during significant historic events—in each case, far exceeding what anyone imagined he could do. But despite all he has achieved, his one true love eludes him.
8.4Cobb, a skilled thief who commits corporate espionage by infiltrating the subconscious of his targets is offered a chance to regain his old life as payment for a task considered to be impossible: "inception", the implantation of another person's idea into a target's subconscious.
7.8Following the death of District Attorney Harvey Dent, Batman assumes responsibility for Dent's crimes to protect the late attorney's reputation and is subsequently hunted by the Gotham City Police Department. Eight years later, Batman encounters the mysterious Selina Kyle and the villainous Bane, a new terrorist leader who overwhelms Gotham's finest. The Dark Knight resurfaces to protect a city that has branded him an enemy.
8.6The defense and the prosecution have rested and the jury is filing into the jury room to decide if a young Spanish-American is guilty or innocent of murdering his father. What begins as an open and shut case soon becomes a mini-drama of each of the jurors' prejudices and preconceptions about the trial, the accused, and each other.
7.4The story of an Indian boy named Pi, a zookeeper's son who finds himself in the company of a hyena, zebra, orangutan, and a Bengal tiger after a shipwreck sets them adrift in the Pacific Ocean.
8.5The adventures of a group of explorers who make use of a newly discovered wormhole to surpass the limitations on human space travel and conquer the vast distances involved in an interstellar voyage.
7.6The discovery of a severed human ear found in a field leads a young man on an investigation related to a beautiful, mysterious nightclub singer and a group of psychopathic criminals who have kidnapped her child.
8.2After the death of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, his devious son takes power and demotes Maximus, one of Rome's most capable generals who Marcus preferred. Eventually, Maximus is forced to become a gladiator and battle to the death against other men for the amusement of paying audiences.
7.8After learning that a boy their age has been accidentally killed near their rural homes, four boys decide to go see the body. On the way, Gordie, Vern, Chris and Teddy encounter a mean junk man and a marsh full of leeches, as they also learn more about one another and their very different home lives. Just a lark at first, the boys' adventure evolves into a defining event in their lives.
7.7When a mysterious entity possesses a young girl, her mother seeks the help of two Catholic priests to save her life.
8.5Batman raises the stakes in his war on crime. With the help of Lt. Jim Gordon and District Attorney Harvey Dent, Batman sets out to dismantle the remaining criminal organizations that plague the streets. The partnership proves to be effective, but they soon find themselves prey to a reign of chaos unleashed by a rising criminal mastermind known to the terrified citizens of Gotham as the Joker.
10.0A description of some parts of the world - explored, visited, documented, imagined. An abstract attempt at finding them again. The title refers to geographer and civil servant of the Republic of Venice Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1485-1557).
7.4An experimental short from 1923 France which offers silent narrative in diverse, optical multi-exposures and severe close-ups offering dense montages which create psychological constructs that unfold a Parisian love affair which turns into a threesome of great emotion and consequences. Also notable for using Antonin Artaud as the male lead.
0.0An audio collage of snippets of narration culled from true crime TV shows, juxtaposed against serene Super-8 nature footage.
5.0Drawing on VHS tapes of a programme hosted by her mother on Bulgaria’s national television, the filmmaker gives a pop-style and in-depth chronicle of the gentle – even “over-gentle” – 1989 revolution.
Faces pass by in quickly edited, split-screen recordings. A 'structuralist' film in which the film material itself plays an important role. Grain, scratches and flickering give the film texture. The music is by Steve Reich.
5.5A wordless experimental collage of impressions and moods. Grainy fragments of landscapes, flakes whirl in the wind. Fog and mist, shadows of people in the city and by the water… Silhouettes that fade and turn into pure light and shadow until we discern the specks and scratches on the film strip itself. Sometimes, for a fraction of a second, a face, a person. A film as a memory that eludes us.
0.0An experimental film shot with the purpose of trying to create a hostile alien environment using only shots of nature, color correction, and sound design.
5.2Sequence of five shots, each one with a particular color treatment, in which a man carrying a machine gun runs. He moves fast in the beginning but, as the end comes closer, he starts to walk in zigzag. Is he hurt?
4.7This, then, finishes eleven years of editing drawing on 30-some years of photography. I will surely work autobiographically again, but the modes of SINCERITY and DUPLICITY seem completed with this film which on the one hand is as simple in its integrity-of-light as those follow-the-ball "sing-along" early silent movies and on the other as complicated as teen-age metamorphosis. Childhood dissolves in flame, struck from the hearth.
Pyramid is a single screen work on Abraham Maslow's theory on the hierarchy of human needs filmed through the rhythms and choreography of middle class South England. Filmed in color and b&w on 16mm film, it continues Salmon's interest in the performance of the artist/cinematographer within both spontaneous and constructed situations and incorporates methods developed by various movements within documentary and avant-garde history. Using an array of sounds, music and conversation as well as silence, Salmon constructs an abstract documentary which both develops and challenges the themes presented in Maslow's theory as well as her own interest in human iconography, stereotype and domestic rhythm. The image of Maslow's pyramid and his pragmatic dissection of human needs and possible motivations provide a system of organization for the family and a philosophical framework for the video.
8.0An animated film made from approximately 1700 laser printed photo(collage)s, manipulated by hand.
0.0Distorted found footage experiment of a firing squad sequence from a war film.
0.0This is a film made in Toronto, in memoriam, so to speak - a memory piece, a "piecing-together" of the experience of living there. The consciousness of the maker comes to sharply focused visual music - not to arrive at snapshots, as such, but rather to "sing" the city as remembered from daily living...complementary, then, to an earlier film, "Unconscious London Strata." Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2015.
0.0Pun on "light" intended - that short preceding expulsion of breath perhaps the "subject matter" of this film which centers in consideration of death. It is the third tone poem film and did much surprise me by thus completing a trilogy of the "4 classical Elements." (SB)
0.0After a six -or seven- year study of Hammurabi's Code, original Babylonian Text and translation, I've tried to feel my way into the moving visual thought process of this ancient culture (whose numerical system is composed primarily of building materials, nails, joints and the like): this, then, is a visual music which balances the two thought processes of Structure and Nature.
0.0Out of the vagueries of sometime beseeming repetitive light patterns, and the delicately variable rhythms of thought process, the imagination of The Monumental and of the Ephemeral are born to mind hard as nails.
0.0This is an architectural garden of the variably brash rock-solid liquid-encompassing, but always imitative, human mind as it processes the given light thoughtfully. This film is about that.
7.5A short, wordless horror film about the terrors lurking just beyond the veil of reality. Shot almost entirely on Super 8 and taking an experimental narrative approach to cosmic horror, Sungazer is an ultra-grainy, high contrast nightmare beamed from another dimension.
0.0A found footage experiment made using an excerpt from the film Taranula! (1955)