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Director: Ursula Meier
Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Gourmet, Adalaide Leroux
Year: 2008

Family who lives an isolated but happy existence beside an unfinished highway, falls apart when the road opens.

Comments: Somewhat stylized and surrealistic, but very riveting. Aptly described as a "road movie in reverse," reflects some existential questions about home and family. The highway which runs literally across the family's front door, serves as an effective metaphor.

Recommended.

Revanche

Director: Gotz Spielmann
Starring: Johannes Krisch, Irina Potopenko, Andreas Lust, Ursula Straus
Year: 2008

Ex-con Alex works as a odd-jobs guy at an Austrian brothel. He is compelled to put into action his dream of running away and liberating his prostitute girlfriend, only to find that his plan goes terribly awry. He is then obsessed with getting revenge.

Comments: Gritty and yet at times somewhat improbable, the film maintains a ominous and suspenseful pace. Excellent acting performances.

Recommended.

The Wind Journeys ("Los viajes del viento")

Director: Ciro Guerra
Starring: Marciano Martinez, Yull Núñez
Year: 2009

A musician travels a great distance to return an instrument to his elderly teacher. (source: IMDB)

Comments: The film is beautifully shot against the landscape of Columbia. But what makes this movie special is the music and the earthy performances of the Columbian troubadours, whose voices and lyrics are haunting. For only his second feature film, Guerra does a masterful job juxtaposing the beauty of the landscape with the harshness of the lives of his characters.

Recommended.

Gervaise

Director: René Clément
Starring: Maria Schell, François Périer, Jacques Harden
Year: 1956

Like a Greek tragedy, "Gervaise" is a tale of inevitable destruction. The heroine, Gervaise (Maria Schell), is a Parisian working-class woman during the Second Empire (1860s) who attempts to improve her social status. Her efforts are doomed, however, by a couple of selfish alcoholics-- her first lover Lantier (Armand Mestral), and her husband Coupeau (Francois Perier). The fascination of the character of Gervaise is her courage against all odds and the tragedy of her inevitable downfall and destruction, given the social dictates of the era. (source: IMDB)

Comments: Wonderful performances, especially from Maria Schell, whose eyes and innocently hopeful expression makes the tragic ending of the film even more pointed.

Recommended.

Woodpecker

Director: Alex Karpovsky
Starring: Jon Hyrns, Wesley Yang
Year: 2008

What starts as a documentary about the purported sighting in 2004 of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird previously determined to be extinct, the film is an exploration of the soul. This is the second film of young director, Karpovsky.

Comments: The search for an elusive bird that turns into a poetic interpretation of human nature. It is about hope and truth. The film is quirky, at times funny, and is a must-see for any bird watcher.

Highly Recommended.

I am Cuba ("Soy Cuba")

Director: Mihail Kalatozov
Starring: Sergio Corrieri, Salvador Wood, Raul Garcia
Year: 1963

An artistic view of the Cuban Revolution, the film traces the different stages of the revolt -- from the poverty and exploitation of pre-Castro Cuba to the student demonstrations to the revolutionaries' resistance in the Sierra Maestra mountains to ultimate victory.

The film was made Soviet filmmaker Mihail Kalotizov ostensibly as a propaganda film, but Kalotizov took advantage of the film's big budget and total cooperation of the nascent Cuban government to make instead an artistic expression filled with iconic images that pushed cinematography to new frontiers. Kalatosov took Eisenstein's montage technique to the other extreme, and built the film around long, almost improbable, continuous shots. One of the most amazing sequences of the film is a shot where the camera starts atop a high-rise, where a group of musicians and bikini-clad women perform, then descends down the side of the building to a crowded swimming pool and finally — without a cut — underwater, where it follows the movements of the swimmers.

Comments: The cinematography is astounding. This film must be seen.

Highly Recommended.

Luxury Car ("Jiang cheng xia ri")

Director: Chao Wang

Starring: Yuan Tian, He Huang, Yiqung Li, Youcai Wu
Year: 2006

A country schoolteacher reaching retirement comes to Wuhan in search of his only son, whom his dying wife has requested to see one last time. He is met by his daughter Yanhong who works as an escort in a karaoke bar. Yanhong introduces him to a policeman who sympathizes with his plight and agrees to help him to find his son. The two quickly become friends, as they search for the missing son. Yanhong also presents her father to her boyfriend, the owner of the karaoke, an older man, who drives a luxury car. However when the four of them meet for dinner one night the old policeman recognizes the boyfriend as a man he arrested over ten years ago...

Comments: The film offers a glimpse in the dark side of the new China. Very nice performance by Yuan Tian (Yanhong), who infuses her character with tenderness and vulnerability..

Recommended.

The Ascent ("Voskhozhdeniye")

Director: Larissa Shepitko

Starring: Boris Plotnikov, Vladimir Gostyukhin, Anatoli Solonitsyn
Year: 1977

A band of starving Soviet partisans are wandering through the woods in Nazi-occupied territory during WWII. Two of the group are sent to a nearby village to find food only to be captured by the Nazis along with a peasant woman who tried to save them. Their subsequent interrogation and their ultimate fates reveal much about their souls.

Comments: This was Shepitko's last film before her premature death in a car accident at the age of 42. The movie was banned during the Soviet era, probably because of its heavy religious overtones. It is a Soviet version of the Passion Play, with Sotnikov (played by Boris Plotnikov) as a Jesus figure who is condemned to death by his Nazi-sympathizer interrogator (played by Solonitsyn), and Rybak as his Judas who betrays his comrades by agreeing to become a Nazi policeman in order to save his life. Aside from the incredible acting performances, the moral dilemma it raises, Shepitko's cinematography is intense from beginning to end.

Recommended.

White Night Wedding ("Brúðguminn")

Director: Baltazar Kormakur

Starring: Hilmer Guonason, Margret Vithjalmdotter
Year: 2008

On a remote island off the coast of Iceland, it is the day before his wedding as Jon (Guonason), a middle-aged professor prepares to marry one of his ex-students half his age. Jon is reticent bridegroom, having to contend with his cantankerous future mother-in-law who is obsessed over money she is owed by Jon from a failed business venture to build a golf course. Jon also must deal with his drunken best man who has lost his shoes and the memories of his failed marriage with his first wife from the same island. When the guests start arriving to the island, Jon starts getting cold feet. After a very long night of drinking and reflection, will Jon be able to make it to the church on time?

Comments: Based on Chekov's Ivanov. At times funny, bittersweet, and eccentric. The film;s setting is beautiful.

Recommended.

End of Summer ("Kohayagawa-ke no aki")

Director: Yasujiro Ozu

Starring: Ganjiro Nakamura, Setsuko Hara, Michiyo Aratma
Year: 1962

This is a very different film from Ozu's Tokyo Story. More playful, slightly less melodramatic yet just as peotic as the accepted masterpiece by Ozu. Set in Kyoto, Ganjiro Nakamura, a well known kabuki actor seen also in Floating Weeds, plays Manbei, the father of a family. Just as in many of Ozu's films, his main concern is the arrangement of his daughter's marriage. However, she is torn between appeasing her father and pursuing another man. Meanwhile, Setsuko Hara, his widowed daughter-in-law, is also encouraged to remarry a respectable gentleman but she finds that she has nothing in common with him. Through this simple premise, Ozu explores the conflict between the pressure of conformity and desire for modernisation in Japanese society. The humour of the film comes from Manbei's secret excursions to his lover's house. Nakamura's acting in these little episodes are a gem.

Comments: This is Ozu's second to last movie. Zhanna really liked it, while Steve thought is was somewhat disjointed and meandering compared to Ozu's other films. A small point in the film, the daughter of the central characters lover is a party girl who goes out with foreigners. This provide some interesting insight into the attitudes of post-war Japanese and Americans.

Recommended.

Lust, Caution ("Se, Jie")

Director: Ang Lee

Starring: Joan Chen, Wei Tang
Year: 2007

In China, during the Japanese occupation World War II, a young student named Wong Chia Chi (Chen) is recruited by her school's acting troupe who have joined the resistance against the Japanese. Wong agrees to be the central figure in the assassination of a brutal Japanese collaborator, Yee. The troupe creates an elaborate ruse in which Wong takes on the alias of a wife of a bourgeoisie to befriend Mr. Yee's wife, Yee Tai Tai. Wong eventually seduces Yee in order to kill him but becomes emotionally entangled.

Comments: Lushly shot, very sensual, and intense. Chen and Tang have amazing on-screen chemistry. You may not like all his films, but Ang Lee knows how to make a compelling film.

Recommended.

A Serious Man

Director: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen

Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamedm Sari Lennick
Year: 2009

"A Serious Man is the story of an ordinary man's search for clarity in a universe where Jefferson Airplane is on the radio and F-Troop is on TV. It is 1970, and Larry Gopnik (Stuhlbarg), a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith (Lennick) that she is leaving him for one of his more pompous acquaintances, Sy Ableman (Melamed), who seems to her a more substantial person than the feckless Larry. Larry's unemployable brother Arthur (Kind) is sleeping on the couch, his son Danny is a discipline problem and a shirker at Hebrew school, and his daughter Sarah is filching money from his wallet in order to save up for a nose job."

Comments: Modern story of Job set in the 1970 jewish suburbia. "Imaginatively exploring questions of faith, familial responsibility, delinquent behavior, dental phenomena, academia, mortality, and Judaism -- and intersections thereof"

Recommended.

Runaway Train

Director: Andrew Konchalovsky

Starring: Jon Voight, Eric Roberts Rebecca De Mornay
Year: 1985

Two escaped convicts and a female railway worker find themselves trapped on a train with no brakes and nobody driving.

Comments:

Recommended.

The Window ("La Ventana")

Director: Carlos Sorin

Starring: Antonio Laretta, Roberto Rovira
Year: 2008

80-year-old, bedridden Antonio awaits the visit of his estranged son. Looking out his window at the Patagonian landscape, he decides to secretly leave the house, unseen by his faithful caretakers, to take what might be a last walk in his fields. What could otherwise seem like insignificant memories or moments in one’s life, take a special, beautiful meaning and weight in this poetic, humanistic film.

Director Sorin casts the great Uruguayan writer and scriptwriter Antonio Larreta in the lead role, establishing a link between fiction and reality that makes the protagonist’s fears, hopes and wishes even more palpable.

Comments: Zhanna really liked this film.

Recommended.

Man From Aran

Director: Robert Flaherty

Starring: Colman "Tiger" King, Maggie Durraine, Michael Durraine
Year: 1931

A fictional "documentary" depicting life on the Aran Islands off the western coast of Ireland. It portrays characters who live in premodern conditions and their hardships, documenting their daily routines such as fishing off high cliffs, farming potatoes where there is little soil, and hunting for huge basking sharks to win their liver oil for lamps.

After living two-and-a-half years on the Arans, Flaherty (the director) was able to convince local residents to act in his film through equal parts cajolery, a priest's assurance that the boy wouldn't be made into a Protestant, the promise of payment, and a hard-hitting local brew known as potheen.

Third in the corpus of Flaherty's four major films, Man of Aran is preceded by Nanook of the North (1922), Moana (1926), and is followed by Louisiana Story (1948).

Comments: A beautiful film like a visual poem.

Recommended.

Adrift on the Nile ("Thartharah fawq al-Nil")

Director: Hussein Kamal
Starring: Ahmed Ramzy, Imad Hamdi, Magda El-Khatib
Year: 1971

A simple Egyptian worker, Anis (Hamdi)y, who cannot tolerate the hypocrisy of the Egyptian government (for whom he works at the Ministry of Health) and the illiteracy of the Egyptian public and decides to hide from all the problems in the country by taking up smoking hashish in a shisha, a popular smoking habit in Egypt, to escape from reality.

Comments: A decidedly moralistic, anti-drug movie set in the days before the six-day war in Egypt.

Recommended.