Never 1 to decide on a single tone or milieu, Jarmusch followed his 1995 acid western “Lifeless Guy” with this modestly budgeted but equally ambitious film about a dead male of the different kind; as tends to happen with contract killers — such given that the just one Alain Delon played in Jean-Pierre Melville’s instructive “Le Samouraï” — poor Ghost Pet soon finds himself being targeted with the same Adult men who retain his services. But Melville was hardly Jarmusch’s only supply of inspiration for this fin de siècle
The story centers on twin 12-year-aged girls, Zahra and Massoumeh, who have been cloistered inside for nearly their entire lives. Their mother is blind and their father, concerned for his daughters’ safety and loss of innocence, refuses to let them outside of the padlock of their front gate, even for proper bathing or schooling.
“Jackie Brown” may be considerably less bloody and slightly less quotable than Tarantino’s other nineteen nineties output, nevertheless it makes up for that by nailing every one of the little things that he does so well. The clever casting, flawless soundtrack, and wall-to-wall intertextuality showed that the same guy who delivered “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction” was still lurking behind the camera.
This sequel for the classic "we will be the weirdos mister" 90's movie just came out and this time, one of many witches is really a trans girl of shade, played by Zoey Luna. While the film doesn't live around its predecessor, it has some exciting scenes and spooky surprises.
The patron saint of Finnish filmmaking, Aki Kaurismäki more or less defined the country’s cinematic output during the 80s and 90s, releasing a steady stream of darkly comedic films about down-and-out characters enduring the absurdities of everyday life.
Oh, and blink so you gained’t miss legendary dancer and actress Ann Miller in her final huge-display screen performance.
The ingloriousness of war, and the foundation of pain that would be passed down the generations like a cursed heirloom, can be seen even in the most unadorned of images. Devoid of even the tiniest bit of hope or humor, “Lessons of Darkness” offers the most chilling and powerful condemnation of humanity inside a long career that has alway looked at us askance. —LL
Nobody knows accurately when Stanley Kubrick first go through Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 “Traumnovelle” (did Kubrick find it in his father’s library sometime within the 1940s, or did Kirk Douglas’ psychiatrist give it to him over the list of “Spartacus,” pornworld as being the actor once claimed?), but what is known for specified is that Kubrick experienced been actively trying to adapt it for at least 26 years through the time “Eyes Wide Shut” began principal production in November 1996, and that he experienced a lethal heart attack just two days after screening his near-final Minimize with the film’s stars and executives in March 1999.
And nonetheless “Eyes Wide Shut” hardly requires its astounding meta-textual mythology (which includes the tabloid fascination around Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s sick-fated marriage) to earn its place as being the definitive film of the nineties. What’s more important is that its release in the last year of the last ten years of the twentieth century feels like a fated rhyme for that british porn fin-de-siècle Power of Schnitzler’s novella — set in Vienna roughly one hundred years before — a rhyme that resonates with another story about upper-class people floating so high above their very own lives they can begin to see the whole world clearly save for that abyss that’s yawning open at their feet.
A poor, overlooked movie obsessive who only feels seen with the neo-realism of his country’s national cinema pretends to generally be his favorite director, a farce that allows Hossain Sabzian to savor the dignity and importance that Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s films had allowed him to taste. When a Tehran journalist uncovers the ruse — the police arresting the harmless impostor while he’s inside the home from the affluent Iranian family where he “wanted to shoot his next film” — Sabzian arouses the interest of the (very) different neighborhood auteur who’s fascinated by his story, by its inherently cinematic deception, and by the counter-intuitive chance that it presents: If Abbas Kiarostami staged a documentary around this gentleman’s fraud, he could correctly cast weaning Sabzian as mallu sex the lead character on the movie that Sabzian experienced always wanted someone to make about his suffering.
“Public Housing” presents a tough balancing act for a filmmaker who’s drawn to poverty but also dead-established against the manipulative sentimentality of aestheticizing it, and nevertheless Wiseman is uniquely well-geared up for that challenge. His camera simply lets the residents be, and they reveal themselves to it in response. We meet an elderly woman, living on her own, who cleans a huge lettuce leaf with Jeanne Dielman-like care and then celebrates by calling a loved one to talk about how she’s not “doing so scorching.
Newland plays the kind of games with his individual heart that just one should never do: for instance, In case the Countess, standing on the dock, will turn around and greet him before a sailboat finishes passing a distant lighthouse, he will visit her.
With his third feature, the young Tarantino proved that he doesn’t need any gimmicks to tell a killer story, turning Elmore Leonard’s “Rum Punch” into a tight thriller anchored by a career-best performance from the legendary Pam Grier. While the film never tries to hide the fact that it owes as much to Tarantino’s love for Blaxploitation because it does to his affection for Leonard’s supply novel, Grier’s nuanced performance allows her to show off a softer side that went criminally underused during her pimp-killing heyday.
Time seems to have stood still in this place with its black-and-white TV established and rotary phone, a couple of lonely pumpjacks groaning outside offering the only sound or movement for miles. (A “Make America Great Again” sticker on the back of the defeat-up car or truck is vaguely amusing but xxbrits seems gratuitous, and it shakes us from the film’s foggy temper.)