Greek filmmaker Costa Ferris's 1983 feature Rembetiko is one part national epic, one part populist melodrama, and one part musical showcase. Through a highly-fictionalized biography of folk singer Marika Ninou (1922-1957), Rembetiko follows the fortunes of Greece from the evacuation of more than a million resident Greeks from Asia Minor in 1922 following the nation's defeat in the Greko-Turkish War, through the Axis occupation in World War II, and the subsequent civil war.

Marika (played as an adult by Sotiria Leonardou) is the daughter of itinerant musicians who fled to the slums of mainland Greece from Asia Minor following the Greko-Turkish War. While still a young girl, she sees her drunken father pimp her mother and then kill her when she falls for her...Read the entire review

The recent 2-disc release from Facets entitled Tales of a Terror Cult: A/A2 is actually a bundled rerelease of two documentaries from Japanese director Tatsuya Mori made in cooperation with the Aum Shinrikyo cult in the wake of the 1995 sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system. The first of the two documentaries, A, began filming exactly one year after the attacks. Aum Shinrikyo is in utter disarray following the arrest the previous year of 150 members including nearly all the group's leadership. It's unclear how many of the estimated 9000 members in Japan and 40,000 worldwide abandoned Aum in the aftermath of the attacks, but it is clear that those remaining are much reduced in number and still in shock when filming commences.

Mori doesn't use his extraordinary access to Aum to probe the sect's history or theology or the motivations of those behind the attacks. Instead he del...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE

"On the Beat" marks the second entry in the "Beijing Trilogy" by director Ning Ying. Ying's film follows a local Beijing precinct as they combat such dangerous problems as rabid dogs, flim-flam men, and smut peddlers. None of these foes though compares to the boredom that drives them to tackle these issues with unrelenting seriousness.

Ying's approach to this very black comedy is nothing short of brilliant. Instead of employing professional actors to tackle these roles, she goes straight to the source and enlists actual policemen in this production, Li Zhanho and Liangui Wang as the burnt out veteran and fresh-on-the-job rookie, respectively. These men all come across as natural actors which brings an air of sadness to the story, since it confirms the absurdity Ying has written is likely not far from the truth. The humor is rarely broad and the subtle absurd nature of ...Read the entire review

The New Americans is a sprawling seven-hour documentary following five diverse groups of legal immigrants to the United States over four years as they leave their homelands in pursuit of something better. All find extremes of happiness and heartache in their pursuit of an American Dream. Executive producer and series editor Steve James, best known for his Oscar-nominated documentary Hoop Dreams, expertly intermixes the work of five documentary film crews into a rich chronicle of the contemporary immigrant experience.

The New Americans originally aired on PBS over three nights in the spring of 2004 under the Independent Lens banner. Three narratives were introduced in the first two-hour episode, with an additional narrative added in each of the following episodes. The original trio of immigrant narratives included a pair of Dominican baseball players with major leag...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

"Sometimes...the meaning vanishes."

I'm going to be up front with you. I really don't want to spend much time on this review. Faced with spending another hour or more gathering my thoughts on a movie that already bored me for 82 minutes is not my idea of a good time. I feel like I am getting out of prison for a crime I did not commit...but only after I complete a written test to prove that I was actually in jail for the full sentence. I swear, I sat through the whole thing!

Diary of a Suicide is a 1972 French film from writer/director Stanislav Stanojevic. If they give out awards to copywriters who write the back cover blurbs on DVDs, the scribe that put together the piece on this film should win it this year, because it was based solel...Read the entire review

Based on a short story by Anton Chekov and produced by the Soviet Union's Lenfilm Studios in commemoration of his centenary, Iosif Kheifits's film of The Lady with the Dog (Dama s sobachkoy, or Дама с собачкой , 1960) is a slight but visually beautiful, well-acted and faithful adaptation. Chekhov scholars and enthusiasts with find it rewarding; from a cineaste's perspective, I found it interesting and well-made but not quite the "forgotten masterpiece of Soviet cinema" as touted on the box.

Set in late-19th century Czarist Russia, The Lady with the Dog's title character is Anna Sergeyevna (Iya Sawina), a married woman va...Read the entire review

Film
If I asked you if you wanted to watch a seven hour film your first reaction might be to say, "No, probably not". If I then tell you that the film is very slow paced, has a grungy look, has rain in almost every scene, is in black & white and has subtitles you will probably laugh and say, "No way". If I then tell you that the film is somewhat confusing at times, has one 35 minute real time scene where an old drunk writer stumbles around his dingy house looking for plum brandy till he collapses and also includes an extended sequence where a young girl abuses and kills a cat you might turn the other way and run.

But there are some of you out there who will be intrigued and wonder why this film has the reputation that it does and has been called one of the best films of the 1990's.

I won't lie. Sátántangó is a tough film, a rigorous experience and not one I am completely sure is to...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

I am almost at a loss as to where to begin to talk about Hungarian director Bela Tarr's 1994 human epic Satantango. Taking two years to film and clocking in at seven hours, Tarr's adaptation of László Krasznahorkai's novel is a masterwork of cinema, managing to maintain the style and scope of a rich prose work while still speaking with the living tongue of film language. The best capsule comparison I can come up with is that it's like Andrei Tarkovsky working from a script by Krzysztof Kieslowski adapting a novel by Leo Tolstoy. If that description at all makes sense to you, and if you like those guys, then this new boxed set of the film is something you must check out. Which isn't to say I wouldn't recommend Satantango to any adventurou...Read the entire review

I love the art of silent films.  From the technical wizardry ofTheLast Laugh and Metropolis to the eerie atmosphere ofTheCabinet of Dr. Caligary, the fun adventures of Douglas Fairbanks, andeven the melodramas that were so common at the time, I really enjoy mostof them.  My favorite type of early film, however, is slapstick. Yeah, it may be a bit low brow to admit it, but watching someone fall downa flight a stairs or slip on a banana peel gets me laughing and the earlycomedians were better at that than anyone since.  That's why I wasso excited to discover that All Day Entertainment was releasing a secondcollection of shorts by some of the overlooked silent clowns.  Likethe first installment, American Slapstick Volume 2 is a hilariouscompilation of rare and mos...Read the entire review

There were three unarguable geniuses in silent comedy: CharlieChaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton. They all started out inshorts and quickly graduated to feature films, something that was fairlydifficult for silent screen clowns. To keep an audience laughingthrough a 20-minute two-reeler was one thing, but to sustain that laughterfor well over an hour was something all together. There were manytalented comics who never made the jump to features, and some that did,such as Larry Semon, soon found themselves back in shorts when their longerpictures bombed.

Therewas one other comic who had a string of successful features. A manwho was compared more than once to Chaplin and who Mack Sennett f...Read the entire review

The Film:

Mexican director Arturo Ripstein borrows the premise behind Medea for his Asi es la Vida a.k.a Such is Life (2000). Set in the slums of Mexico City pic favors a minimalistic structure which isn't too far off what a theatrical rendition of the notorious Greek tragedy might have looked like.

A long and continuous monolog welcomes the viewer to Such is Life. A poor woman (Arcelia Ramírez) is abandoned by her husband (Luis Felipe Tovar) - she cries, curses, and damns the man she once loved. Her Godmother (Patricia Reyes Spíndola) attempts to console her but further exacerbates the anger and frustration raging in the abandoned woman's soul.

Driven by emotions rather than events Such is Life presents a contemporary take on Medea where the main characters have been replaced with low-income Mexicans. As expected the tone of the fi...Read the entire review

The American War in Vietnam remains a lingering wound for both nations a generation later. Between 1959 and 1975, over 5 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans were killed, and approximately 350,000 Americans and millions more Vietnamese were injured. Many on both sides continue to suffer from physical and psychological injuries suffered then that have never fully healed.

Recorded in 1998, Vietnam Long Time Coming documents a historic 1200-mile, 16-day bicycle ride from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City (formally, Saigon) by 45 American and 20 Vietnamese riders, many of whom are disabled vets. Organized by the charity World T.E.A.M. Sports, the group of 65 riders, including blind participants riding tandem with able-bodied riders and paraplegics on hand-powered bikes, made the long trek south through Vietnam while engaging in medical and education outreach along the journey.

These outreach ef...Read the entire review

The Film:

Independent distrib PolArt Video are responsible for the release of Leonard Buczkowski's Marysia I Napoleon a.k.a Maria and Napoleon (1966). A story of love and political intrigues pic offers a hilarious but ultimately disappointing read on some well-known events.

Napoleon (Gustaw Holoubek) meets 20-something-year-old countess Maria Walewska (Beata Tyszkiewicz) and the two embark on a passionate rendezvous. At first passive and obedient Maria quickly learns how to manipulate the Emperor. In time Napoleon becomes a puppet in Maria's hands.

Skipping between contemporary reality and the 1800s Maria and Napoleon is an intriguing attempt at twisting the validity of known historic facts. Conveniently betting on humor as the missing link in a scattered sea of images the film does not pretend to be original, it aims to entertain.

The main character...Read the entire review

The Film:

Jill Godmilow's documentary about the making of a documentary focused on the rise of Solidarność in Poland provides an intriguing but ultimately unconvincing look at the largest anti-communist movement from the ex-Soviet block. Occasional bits of revelatory info suggest that the director knew where to look for authentic material. Sadly, pic fails to convincingly deconstruct the social conditions that led to the Velvet Revolution.

Setting out to shoot a film in the early 80s about Solidarność, Lech Wałęsa, and the social changes that took place in Poland must have been quite a challenge. Especially if you were an American director with a laughable budget and a passport lacking Polish visa. Yet, Jill Godmilow took the challenge.

What the director's determination produced is a controversial film where th...Read the entire review

The Film

Indulge me in a bit of autobiographical fiction:

It's winter 1985 and I'm reading the latest semi-monthly issue of a mimeographed underground movie fanzine put out by a guy from Madison, Wisconsin on bi-folded 11x14 red paper. I spot a purple-prose blurb about a fetishistically violent, 16mm Japanese punk film called Yami no Carnival. The blurb is accompanied by a small, high-contrast, black-on-red still of a punk girl naked from the waist down lying on a slab of concrete bleeding profusely from the vagina. I read that although it played at the Berlin and Montreal International Film Festivals and at Cannes' Critic Week in 1983, it's commercially unavailable in the US. Four years later, away at college, I finally manage to procure a 4th gen, off-speed German-subtitled VHS copy of Yami no Carnival in trade for an even worse copy of <...Read the entire review

The Film
Free Cinema began in 1956 as a marketing ploy by a group of young filmmakers to get their work screened. By the time Free Cinema completed its sixth and final program of shorts in 1959, it had helped propel British cinema out of an extended period of post-war stagnation and into perhaps its most vital period before or since: the British New Wave. For the first time on DVD in North America, Facets' new 3-disc box set, Free Cinema, gathers together eleven shorts released under the Free Cinema banner, as well as five more that followed in the movement's wake.

On four cold evenings in February 1956, sellout crowds packed into London's National Film Theater to see a triple bill of shorts under the program title 'Free Cinema'. The shorts had been made separately, but shared similarities in technique and aesthetics. All were made with small crews, and...Read the entire review

The Film
Who Was Kafka continues documentarian Richard Dindo's signature style developed in several previous works including the feature-length documentaries Arthur Rimbaud: A Biography (1991) and Ernesto Che Guevara: The Bolivian Diary (1994) of depicting its titular subject through recasting personal writings as documentary interviews presented against a visual backdrop of locales germane to the subject matter. In Who Was Kafka, Dindo does this by employing actors to give voice to the words of Franz Kafka and his closest friends and lovers.

Franz Kafka, author of perhaps the most important German-language fiction of the last century, was born into an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Prague in 1883. Prior to his death in 1924, he published little, and received commensurately little attention, but left behind a treasury of importa...Read the entire review

I was intrigued by the title of the Facets Video disc, A Christmas Family Tragedy, a documentary on the infamous 1929 Lawson Family murders in Stokes County, North Carolina. I seem to remember reading about this horrific act in a true-crime compilation some years back, but the details had since escaped me. Watching director Matt Hodges' sincere but inept documentary, I didn't get much more out of it than what I remember reading, with Hodges' limitations as a filmmaker effectively sinking the project.

On Christmas Day, 1929, in rural Stokes County, North Carolina, tobacco farmer and respected member of the community Charlie Lawson committed a horrendous act of multiple murder, killing his wife and six of his children (the youngest was four months old) by eithe...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Spanish surrealist Luis Bunuel spent the 1950s in Mexico making low-budget potboilers that had flickers of his comic touch and irreverent attitude despite working in conventional parameters. Like many great European directors who moved to Hollywood in WWII and turned budget constraints and genre tropes to their advantage, so did Bunuel find that what might be restrictions for others could actually be an advantage in his hands.

Susana was released in 1951, adapted by Bunuel from a novel by Manuel Reachi. Though on the surface it is merely a lusty melodrama, Bunuel has his impish way with the material, drawing parallels between ecstasy of the body and the spirit that exposes the dangers inherent in both while making it clear that the pleasures of ...Read the entire review

What Do You Think?:

The Paul Leduc short film Como Ves? (English translation; what do you think?) asks that musical question against a backdrop of mid-'80s Mexican rock and roll. Leduc closes his film with a dedication to the World Monetary Fund - an answer for you if you couldn't find one amongst the almost stream-of-consciousness flow of the movie.

What Do You Think? almost wordlessly follows varying groups of nameless individuals through a few days of entrenched poverty so all-encompassing that if they see it as a problem they can hardly see a way out. Macho bullying, scarce low-wage jobs, and squalor are accepted with resignation as a way of life. The younger ones sense something is wrong as their eyes are slowly opened by a groundswell of rock and roll, but examine poor solutions in an effort to escape.

More of a languid documentary than an engaging narrative, What Do You Think? i...Read the entire review

Medieval films set during the Crusades, when truthfully captured outside of such pieces as those in the Robin Hood universe, hold the capacity to captivate moviegoers with a plethora of stimulating and enlightening flavors. Krzyzacy, a Polish epic adventure from director Aleksander Ford, makes certain to latch onto historical essence for a sturdy, expansive film set during that time period. Though the language can be a bit monotonous and the considerable length grows wearisome, this knightly story still formulates enough historical context and enveloping aesthetics to hold fair interest.


The Film:

The Film:

A story of depravity, anger, and difficult to analyze religious symbolism repeatedly condemned by the Catholic Church, Polish director Andrzej Zulawski's "The Devil" (1972) is not a film for the easily offended.

In war-thorn Poland the Prussian Army has besieged a half-dilapidated convent. Amidst the chaos a supposedly insane man by the name of Jakub (Leszek Teleszynski) is rushed away by a nameless stranger dressed in black. Once far and away from the Prussians the man in black urges Jakub to go home. When he arrives he discovers that his father has burnt down their house and committed suicide, his pregnant fiancée has married another man, and his mother has become a whore. Followed by the man in black and struggling to piece everything together Jakub is quickly labeled a mad man. Yet, he appears to be the only sane human being in a world full of lunatics.

L...Read the entire review

Luis Buñuel has been quoted as calling his 1951 A Woman without Love (Una mujer sin amor) his worst film, which can be taken as a warning never to trust film directors when they assess their own work. Following Buñuel's celebrated Los Olvidados, the resolutely non-surrealistic soap opera was surely a conceptual step backward for the Spanish director working in exile in Mexico. The story adapts a novel by Guy de Maupassant to serve as a vehicle for a female star. In Buñuel's more celebrated fantasies, we're accustomed to seeing his subversive subtext leap to the forefront. The disturbing undercurrent in A Woman without Love is the whole concept. Not quite a straight soap opera, the film is a stealthy examination of the institutions of marriage and motherhood, and social compact that requires women to sacrifice themselves...Read the entire review

Café Setareh:
Lately I've been listening religiously to World Have Your Say on National Public Radio. It's a BBC radio show that deals with worldwide issues, inviting the international audience to comment. I'm so happy to have access to this kind of information; it's like a lemon-scented scrub straight through the greasy grime of brain-dead xenophobia that is American media and culture. It is for beginners what World Cinema is to skilled players.

Take Café Setareh, writer/ director Saman Moghadam's examination of the lives of three modern Iranian women, for example. A skilled and assured piece of filmmaking, Setareh follows the three through an intertwining plot that often overlaps itself, Rashomon or Memento style, giving three perspectives on a small group of players. Fariba runs the titular café while her husband Fereidoon generally acts like a lazy, drunken buffoon, greatly hinderin...Read the entire review

The Movie:
This 1954 Polish feature is like an Eastern European cousin to both The Grapes of Wrath and Norma Rae as it explores the trials and tribulations of Szczeny (Jozef Nowak), a peasant's son who, after his father sells his farm, attempts to find work in the "big city," only to come in contact with radicals and unions of various stripes and creeds.

A pallor of sadness and anger colors the entire production, as Szczeny find his every attempt to better himself stifled by the powers that be, as well as various warring unions, each with their own agenda. Interestingly, though this film is a product of the then newly-Communist Polish Republic, the "Reds" (as they're called here) are shown to be only one of several competing ideologies, though the tenor of the times makes sure that they are literally the "politically correct" one by the film's end.

Director Jerzy Kawalerowi...Read the entire review

Independent underground films are frequently evaluated on a different scale than commercial work, both to encourage new directions in cinematic experimentation and to acknowledge that films made by individuals should not be expected to mimic the look of commercial movies. An independent vision in the cinema art gallery is something to be nurtured.

New York's Jim Finn has a well-established art film career, as can be seen on his elaborate website. His string of shorts and two features appear to be screened frequently at festivals and he's collected some glowing reviews, with accolades and encouragement from champions of fringe film experimentation like Jonathan Rosenbaum. Finn is wired into the film art world, no question of it. I was attracted to his independently-distributed InterkosmosRead the entire review

Though he was not famous during his lifetime, you'd be hard pressedto find an avid horror reader who doesn't know the name of H. P. Lovecraft. Indeed his name is synonymous with tales of dread and horror and his workhas spawned movies (one of the best being an amateur production of TheCall of Cthulhu [review]),TV episodes, radio shows, a roll playing game, and countless imitators. In 1998 filmmakers Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic decided tomake a documentary of the man's life and it was broadcast, ironically sinceLovecraft was American and wrote in English, on French TV.  Now TheCase of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a unique look at the writer's life,is available on DVD.

The filmmakers had a problem when they started this project:  alack of visual ...Read the entire review

Review:

Teenage girls are often portrayed as spoiled brats ("My Super Sweet 16") or mean ("Mean Girls") in popular culture. The reality is that teenage girls often go through serious issues, such as trying to fit in with their peer group, academic pressures and self-esteem/self-image issues. As a guy, I can't imagine what woman have to go through, as they are constantly bombarded with images of what they should wear, how they should look, what they should have and how they should be.

Director Maria Finitzo's "5 Girls" is a portrayal of five young women between the ages of 13-17 trying to deal with growing up around Chicago in different situations. Corrie is a lesbian who feels as if she's an outcast at home (there is an early scene between Corrie and a classmate that is so quick and yet so mean that I'm surprised that the filmmakers got it on camera.) At home, she talks about how s...Read the entire review

Facets Video has released Magnificent Obsession: Frank Lloyd Wright's Buildings and Legacy in Japan, a fascinating yet moribund documentary on the legendary architect, and the influence he had on modern Japanese architecture. Running over two hours, Magnificent Obsession: Frank Lloyd Wright's Buildings and Legacy in Japan sheds light on a critical time in Wright's career, when he visited Japan and designed what many say was his finest creation: The Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. And while I found the doc nicely dense in details about Wright's work, the slow, plodding presentation works against the excitement of the subject matter.

Magnificent Obsession: Frank Lloyd Wright's Buildings and Legacy in Japan chronicles Wright's early fascination with Japanese woodblo...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Oh, for the days of Antonioni, when films about alienation and the interplay of nature and man's futile attempts to overcome it at least made a little sense along the way. This 1987 Japanese film by director Masashi Yamamoto seems on the verge of actually saying something relevant several times throughout its rambling two hour playing time, but those moments evaporate in strange tangential dead-end storylines and bizarre dialogue sequences that feature one non sequitur after another.

As any fan of anime will tell you, the Japanese have a love/hate relationship with their technologies and their cities. Robinson's Garden frequently feels like a live-action precursor to a lot of anime's themes, though it is not well realized enough to even rise to a cartoon level.

One must assume that alot of the disorientation in the film is intentional, an apt metaphor for its displaced...Read the entire review

The Movie:
There's a humorous story that has been passed down in my family for a couple of generations: some company came over to my family's house, where all of my great-Uncles were out on the porch, arguing about some arcane matter. Over an hour later, one of the guests stuck his head out and came back with a look of disbelief on his face. "Are they still at it?," someone from my family asked, laughing. "Yes," replied the guest, "but that's not the strange part--they've all changed sides in the argument and are still going strong!" That dialectical spirit is alive and well in this elegantly produced and beautifully shot and scored documentary about the Talmud, the written exegeses on scripture's more perplexing issues (e.g., did Adam, the first man, have a belly button?) as well as discussions about more mundane everyday laws that ostensibly attempt to answer deep questions, but just a...Read the entire review

The Movie
So much of the information about Iran in North America is purely political in nature; it is useful and heartening then to be reminded that actual people live there, people who write poetry and make films and smoke cigarettes and have regular, boring lives that, despite everything, are not defined by the stupid, anti-human dictates of their government. Those who wish to learn more about this, however, are advised to go avoid Facets's new DVD, The Mirror of the Soul. A collection of three short documentaries on the late, legendary Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad - The Green Cold, The Mirror of the Soul and The Summit of the Wave - these films are so unfocused and poorly made that I fear they would discourage anyone who might be interested in modern Iranian culture or Persian literature.

The worst of the bunch is the first entry, The Green Cold,...Read the entire review

African filmmaking is alive and well, judging by the two features in ArtMattan and Facets' Great African Films - Volume 1 disc set. Although partially French-produced, the directors are African. Haramuya and Faraw! are polished productions that show African life from the inside out, with a local sensitivity.

In 1995's Haramuya director Drissa Toure presents a complex view of life in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso, formerly the French colony known as Upper Volta. The city has a mix of the modern and ancient and a slum rife with unemployment and prostitution. A dozen interesting characters intersect to demonstrate the collapse of both tribal and religious traditions. Fousseini (Fatogoma Konate) is the patriarch of a family living under the old rules. His older son is a married film projectionist w...Read the entire review

In Akira Kurosawa's final film, Madadayo (1993), a beloved teacher and literary giant spends his remaining years holding court in his home and at annual reunion parties where his devoted students hang on his every word, while his dedicated wife attends to his personal care-giving needs. Kazuo Hara's almost simultaneously released A Dedicated Life (Zenshin shosetsuka, 1994) perhaps unintentionally reveals a darker, singularly unflattering side to this same situation. Tracing the physical decline of famed postwar writer Mitsuharu Inoue, who early in the film is diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer, the film purports to be a "tribute to a courageous man" but instead is really a portrait of a self-absorbed artist-charlatan more akin to Rasputin than Kurosawa's protagonist. Like Hara's other excellent documentaries, the director-cinematographer's subject is an adamant outsider, simultaneousl...Read the entire review

It was common on college campuses in 1971 and '72 to see showings of 'revolutionary' films, mostly documentaries advocating political positions far to the left of center. The Argentinian La hora de los hornos, about neocolonialism and oppression in Argentina, was shown constantly even though it was banned in its home country for several more years. One of the best- received advocacy docus was The Murder of Fred Hampton, a movie begun in 1969 to show the community work of the Illinois Black Panther Party. When Hampton was killed in a "police raid" on December 4, the film became a prime record of an incident that has gone down in history as an officially sanctioned murder.

The docu is balanced in that it shows both the rhetoric-spouting Black Panthers and the brazenly cocky police officials for what they were. By avoid...Read the entire review