The Monsters (2011)

The Monsters (2011)

Directed by PedroDiogenes,Guto Parente,Luiz Pretti,Ricardo Pretti
Country: Brazil
Runtime: 81 min

 The combination of free jazz with the quest for artistic freedom is the off-handed focus of rambling and scruffy "The Monsters," the second feature by Brazilian filmmaking quartet Guto Parente, Luiz Pretti, Pedro Diogenes and Ricardo Pretti, Luiz's twin brother. The same, ultra-loose sensibility in the group's previous "Road to Ythaca" underlies this oddly titled pic, in which a couple of jazz musicians and their sound recordist pals -- all hardly monstrous -- ultimately get together for a remarkable jam session and possible artistic breakthrough. Music and Latin-accented fests are likely destinations beyond ultra-art confabs.
In line with their usual practice, the four play the leads, though unlike their road movie "Ythaca," each have more individual moments during the course of a film that seems for long stretches to have no detectable structure. This is partly due to the film's total immersion in free jazz, which starts immediately, when Joao (Luiz Pretti) does a three-minute solo on his sax-like, handmade horn. His wife's (Natasha Faria) silent response is to kick him out of their house -- and after a drunken night, he crashes at the flat of Joaquim (Diogenes) and Pedro (Parente), who hate their jobs as part of the sound crew on a dumb commercial movie.

Joao's hopes for emotional relief with a gig at a small club owned by tubby impresario Antonio (Ythallo Rodrigues) proves a bust when his radical and atonal improvisations drive away the customers. The guys get some consolation with a long night of partying, but the real turnaround comes with the unlikely arrival (on a raft!) of guitarist Eugenio (Ricardo Pretti).

The 13-minute finale is extraordinary, as Joao and Eugenio launch into an extended jam recorded by Joaquim and Pedro, and marks one of the rare examples in recent cinema of uncompromising jazz played onscreen. It's certainly a first for filmmakers to perform such difficult music so audaciously. The influences of horn men Sam Rivers, Eric Dolphy and Anthony Braxton and guitarist Derek Bailey can be powerfully heard, and rep an entirely different kind of jazz sound than Brazil's sturdy, familiar decades-old Bossa Nova style.

Vid lensing (by team Ivo Lopes Araujo and Victor De Melo), and the overall production package, is as unrefined as the slacker lifestyles inside the film. Multiple oncamera music perfs rack up 23 minutes of the pic's 81-minute running time.

The Conductor (2012)

The Conductor (2012)

 

Director: Pavel Lungin
Country: Russia
Runtime:86 min

 

 

 

 

The conductor and his orchestra is sent to Jerusalem to perform the oratorio "St. Matthew Passion." But the tour turns into a tragedy. Black sun of Jerusalem rips the masks, forcing to see himself naked in selfishness and cruelty. Sometimes a person can fully reassess and rethink his life.

Venus in the Garden (2011)

Venus in the Garden (2011)

Director: Telémachos Alexiou
Country: Greece
Runtime:63 min

Mid-summer heatwave. Nikos and Alain, two male prostitutes and a female pimp, Monica, get tangled in a peculiar relationship after meeting in a dark street called POUTANA. They fall in love, play with guns and talk about card games, money and theatre castings. Is this a game of role playing the three of them have invented to pass their time in a remote, empty summer house? Have they been reading Jean Genet? Whether a mirror image of the characters’ reality or an elliptic depiction of their distorted, dream-like perception of it, I Afroditi Stin Avli, by juxtaposing disparate literary and art references, leads its isolated characters towards dissolution. And yet, in its strange language, it presents this dissolution as a triumph.

Maleficarum (2011)

Maleficarum (2011)

Director: Jac Avila
Country: Bolivia
Runtime: 102 min

 Maleficarum (2011) directed by Jac Avila is a good screen play by an independent Bolivian film company. It is good historical fiction loosely based on María Francisca Ana de Castro, a Spanish immigrant to Alta Peru, who was renowned for her beauty and wealth. She was arrested and accused of “judaizing”. After many days of torture she confessed and was burned at the stake in 1726. This event was a major spectacle in Lima, but it raised questions about possible irregular procedures and about the corruption within the Inquisition, this lead to the end of The Holy Office (The Inquisition) in Peru. The director and actors do an admirable recreating the actual realistic suffering in great detail of what the victims of the Spanish Inquisition had to endure. The best was the director’s use of the actors’ facial and body language, it was very cerebral and visual at the same time. This viewer marveled at the simplicity of that movie and how it got its complex message across, the script and the story plot was very well thought out. The dialogue of the accusers and witnesses did well in showing the bias and superstitions of that time.
A wealthy orphan (an adult, but whose parents have died and is as yet, unmarried - so, in that period, unprotected) befriends another woman who has lost her husband and is now a homeless widow. Their relationship has lesbian elements - which of course are "beyond the pale" in the era; additionally, the friend is "horror of horrors" - a Lutheran - in other words - a heretic! And the orphan is wealthy... The Inquisition steps in soon enough and when the two women prove 'uncooperative'- this film pulls no punches. The film shows both how the two women are slowly but surely broken in graphic detail and, showing interviews the inquisitors have with various witnesses, also how the common beliefs of the time justified it. The torture is shown historically accurately being done to the women's totally nude bodies.

The Minister (2011)

The Minister (2011)

Director: Pierre Schöller
Country: France | Belgium
Runtime: 1 hour 52 minutes





French Minister for Transport Bertrand Saint-Jean is woken in the middle of the night by his personal private secretary: a bus has crashed into a ravine, initiating a dark odyssey through a treacherous world for the State official. In staging one man's effort to occupy the complex spaces of power – between conviction and compromise; command and obedience – Schöller invites us to reflect on one of Michel Foucault's preoccupations: the minister – a figure half-way between state administrator and religious pastor.
 

The Door (2012)

The Door (2012)
Director: István Szabó
Country: Hungary
Runtime: 1 hour 34 minutes



 The Door (Hungarian: Az ajtó) is a 2012 Hungarian drama film directed by István Szabó and starring Helen Mirren. Movie based on the award-winning novel of the same name by Magda Szabo  tells the story of a writer and her housekeeper who develop an enduring relationship.

Mirren plays the role of housekeeper Emerenc in the novel which has been adapted for the screen by Istvan Szabo and Andrea Veszits.

The film has been selected to be featured in the competition programme at the 33rd Moscow International Film Festival.

The Last Elvis (2012)

The Last Elvis (2012) 

 

Director: Armando Bo
Country: Argentina
Runtime:91 min 

 

 In the unique world of the Buenos Aires celebrity-impersonator scene, “Elvis” Gutiérrez is a star. By day, though, he must contend with a dead-end factory job and an ex-wife who worries about how his obsessive behavior affects their young daughter, Lisa Marie. Feeling more connected to his persona as the King than to his own family, Gutiérrez retreats from reality until a tragic accident interrupts his plans and forces him to grapple with his real-world responsibilities.

Armando Bo’s stylish, yet tender, feature debut illuminates the glamour and grace that a stage can bring to any performer with the soul of an artist. The Last Elvis, buttressed by a stunning central performance by real-life Elvis tribute artist John McInerny, imbues its protagonist with depth and dignity, creating a realistic portrait of a broken man who seeks shelter in his dreams. As our Elvis takes flight within the King’s music, so too does the film around him.

Alpeis AKA Alps (2011)

Alpeis AKA Alps (2011)

Director: Giorgos Lanthimos
Country: Greece
Runtime:93 min






A nurse, a paramedic, a gymnast and her coach have formed a service for hire.

They stand in for dead people by appointment, hired by the relatives, friends or colleagues of the deceased. The company is called Alps.
Their leader, the paramedic, calls himself Mont Blanc. Although Alps members operate under a discipline regime demanded by their leader, the nurse does not.

For the Love of Movies: Story of American Film Criticism (2009)

For the Love of Movies: Story of American Film Criticism (2009)

Director: Gerald Peary
Runtime: 80 minutes
  Directed and written by Gerald Peary, Boston Phoenix critic and one-time Acting Curator of the Harvard Film Archive, For the Love of Movies offers a 100-year history of film criticism through clips from Hollywood movies and illuminating, entertaining interviews with many of America’s key rev

iewers, including Roger Ebert (The Chicago Sun-Times), A.O. Scott (The New York Times), Lisa Schwarzbaum (Entertainment Weekly), Wesley Morris (The Boston Globe), and Harry Knowles (aintitcoolnews.com).

Narrated by Patricia Clarkson, the documentary explores the beginnings of criticism before The Birth of a Nation through the incendiary Pauline Kael-Andrew Sarris debates of the 60s and 70s, and follows the battle today between youthful one-liners and the print establishment.

 Gerald Peary says, "For the Love of Movies is the first feature documentary to tell the rich, colorful, and undeniably controversial story of the American film critic... I had to sort of invent what I think is the history of film criticism, because there wasn’t any formally written book on it."

Partly due to difficulties in getting financial backing, the documentary took nearly a decade to make. Peary says, "I guess one of the things that happened during that period was the so-called decline of print journalism... eight years ago, film criticism still seemed a viable profession... by now, there are over fifty critics who are made redundant”.

Filmmaker Magazine asks: What is the crisis of criticism? Gerald Peary replies: Simply that if you are a print critic you are in danger of losing your job at any moment. As newspapers are worried about dropping dead, it seems like film critics are a particular target. The film begins by saying, "There are 24 critics who have lost their jobs in the last several years," but since we finished the film, many more have lost their jobs. A lot of people are tagged with a title of ex-critic, but they were not ex when we filmed them just a few years ago. Sure, you can work on the web, but if you do that you're not getting paid much, or at all. And critics should be paid — this isn't an amateur thing to do, it's not like Sunday painting.
"It's a stop-the-bleeding movie," Peary tells Variety "I hope that those who watch the movie value criticism and will read it and demand it in their newspapers."

Peary laments, "Today, people select which movies to see based on advertising. Lots of excellent little pictures — foreign, independent, and documentaries — are passing through without being seen. The only way to get people to go to those films, because they have no advertising budgets, is reviews by good critics... We want people to read criticism. One way to motivate people to do that is by showing the critics’ faces and letting their voices be heard.” SOURCE: Wikipedia

Free Men (2011)

Free Men (2011)

Director: Ismaël Ferroukhi
Country: France
Runtime:99 min 



 In Paris, in 1942. Arrested by the French police, Younes is accused of complicity and threatened with being shot. But the police detective offers him a deal: his freedom in exchange for keeping surveillance over the Paris Mosque, which is suspected of helping Resistance fighters and Jews. In the Mosque, Younes meets Algerian-born singer Salim Halali. Touched by his voice and personality, he becomes friends with him, discovering soon afterwards that he is Jewish. Despite the risks, Younes puts an end to his collaboration with the police. A friendship is born between Younes and Salim, which develops as events unfold. Anti-Jewish laws and German repression don’t prevent Salim from continuing his activities as a singer. But the net gradually tightens around him. One evening, Salim is arrested by the Gestapo who suspect him of hiding his Jewish identity. Faced with this barbarity, immigrant worker Younes, who has no political education, gradually turns into a freedom activist.