Wednesday, April 4 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
2010 – Thailand – Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
“An eerie yet serene vision of death, “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” is director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest vision of his personal twilight zone: the forests of his native Thailand. This haunted non-horror film, which won the top prize at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, is decidedly strange, but also gentle and sweet”. – Mark Jenkins, Washington Post.
Thursday, April 12 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm
The Class
2008 – France – Directed by Laurent Cantet
“Laurent Cantet’s scrappy mesmerizer of a movie about a life in learning sneaks up and floors you. The film is based on an autobiographical novel by François Bégaudeau, a French schoolteacher who grapples with junior-high students in a racially mixed section of France”. – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
Wednesday, April 18 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm
The Tree of Life
2011 – USA – Directed by Terrence Malick
“Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” is a film of vast ambition and deep humility, attempting no less than to encompass all of existence and view it through the prism of a few infinitesimal lives… His scenes portray a childhood in a town in the American midlands, where life flows in and out through open windows. There is a father who maintains discipline and a mother who exudes forgiveness, and long summer days of play and idleness and urgent unsaid questions about the meaning of things.” – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times
Thursday, April 26 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm
The White Ribbon
2009 – Germany/Austria/France/Italy – Directed by Michael Haneke
“’The White Ribbon’ captures a mood of thickening tension and mounting violence as a series of brutal but apparently unrelated events — vandalism, fires, accidents and abductions — turn the people of the village against each other and shatter what remains of a fragile social consensus… ‘The White Ribbon’ is a dense account of childhood, courtship, family and class relations in a painfully repressed and repressive society.” – Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.Com
Posted by Nathaniel Sexton, Monday, April 2nd, 2012 - 10:45 am.
Filed under: General News
Thursday, March 1 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm
Zelig
1983 – USA – Directed by Woody Allen
“Released in 1983, Woody Allen’s mockumentary drama Zelig was in some quarters regarded as a one-joke technical novelty. But in 2011, it looks like a masterpiece: a brilliant, even passionate historical pastiche, a superbly pregnant meditation on American society and individuality, and an eerie fantasy that will live in your dreams. Using spoof and real newsreel footage, deadpan modern-day talking-head interviews and some tremendous special effects that hold up triumphantly in this digital age, the movie tells the story of Leonard Zelig, the little 1920s Jewish guy with a “chameleon disorder” enabling him to resemble anyone in whose company he finds himself. ” – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian.
Wednesday, March 7 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm
Crimes and Misdemeanors
1989 – USA – Directed by Woody Allen
“Crimes and Misdemeanors is not, properly speaking, a thriller, and yet it plays like one. In fact, it plays a little like those film noir classics of the 1940s, like “Double Indemnity,” in which a man thinks of himself as moral, but finds out otherwise. The movie generates the best kind of suspense, because it’s not about what will happen to people – it’s about what decisions they will reach. We have the same information they have. What would we do? How far would we go to protect our happiness and reputation? How selfish would we be? ” – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Thursday, March 22 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm
Manhattan Murder Mystery
1993 – USA – Directed by Woody Allen
“This is the way Carol’s mind works. She can’t help it; she was probably raised on Nancy Drew. She drives her husband nuts. He wants her to shut up and go to sleep, but all night and all day her mind is at work, threading together facts and possibilities into an obsessive theory: This nice guy has killed his wife, and unless she does something about it, he’ll get away with murder. This is the kind of plot you might expect on “Murder, She Wrote.” In the hands of Woody Allen, in his new comedy, “Manhattan Murder Mystery,” what happens is more or less what would happen in a 1930s novel about an amateur detective. But how it happens is more or less the way it would happen in one of the “Thin Man” comedies, where Manhattanites are stacked side by side in luxury apartment buildings where the walls are just thin enough to arouse suspicions, but too thick to permit proof. “ – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Wednesday, March 28 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm
Midnight in Paris
2011 – Spain/USA – Directed by Woody Allen
“Midnight in Paris opens as a loving postcard to all things Eiffel and then turns into a fairy tale balancing the timelessness of dissatisfaction with the beauty of human aspiration. Along the way, Allen trots out a troupe of classic literary characters played by actors who seem to be having a lot of fun, and the high is contagious. The fantasy is sweet, but there’s also real tension here, with the protagonist both a prisoner and traveler in time. Ultimately, though, and happily, Midnight in Paris is a loving embrace of the city, of art and of life itself.” – Tom Long, EW
Posted by Nathaniel Sexton, Thursday, February 23rd, 2012 - 5:42 pm.
Filed under: General News
Thursday, February 2 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm
The Snow Walker
2003 – Canada – Directed by Charles Martin Smith
“There’s something refreshingly old-fashioned about The Snow Walker, a film based on a short story by Farley Mowat. Director Charles Martin Smith…imbues the movie with a distinct classical feel and as a result, the film feels as though it could’ve been made in the ’50s. Set in 1952, the film casts Barry Pepper as Charlie Halliday – a cocky pilot with an inability to see beyond himself. While on a routine job ferrying cargo, he picks up a sick Inuit woman named Kanaalaq and the two begin a plane ride back home. Engine troubles ensue, and the plane goes down – stranding the pair in the middle of a vast and desolate area of the Arctic outback.” – D. Nusair, Reel Film Reviews.
Thursday, February 9 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm
Older Than America
2008 – USA – Directed by Georgina Lightning
“The movie is set partially during the Indian boarding school era that stretched from the 1880s to the 1990s, a time that is either forgotten or rarely talked about by American Indians today. But it’s a time that remains vivid in director Georgina Lightning’s mind. Lightning, who plays the role of a young Native American woman whose haunting visions reveal a tragedy that occurred as a result of the Indian boarding school experience – an ill-conceived effort to essentially snuff out their culture where children weren’t allowed to speak their own language and often were starved for affection.” – Duluth News Tribune
Thursday, February 16 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm
Rabbit-Proof Fence
2002 – Australia – Directed by Phillip Noyce
“More than a century after slavery was abolished in the Western world, a Western democracy was still practicing racism of the most cruel description… Aboriginal children of mixed race were taken by force from their mothers and raised in training schools that would prepare them for lives as factory workers or domestic servants. The children affected are known today in Australia as the Stolen Generations. Phillip Noyce’s film is fiction based on fact. The three young stars are all aborigines, untrained actors, and Noyce is skilled at the way he evokes their thoughts and feelings.. The end of [their] journey is not the same for all three girls, and there is more heartbreak ahead. The final scene of the film contains an appearance and a revelation of astonishing emotional power; not since the last shots of “Schindler’s List” have I been so overcome with the realization that real people, in recent historical times, had to undergo such inhumanity. “ – Roger Ebert
Thursday, February 23 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm
Even the Rain
2010 – Spain/Bolivia – Directed by Icíar Bollaín,
Even the Rain is “graced by a lushly evocative natural setting, gritty, documentary-like urban scenes and fantastic performances from its gifted cast… telling an old story in a new way and infusing what might have been a dry political polemic with poetry, passion and unlikely warmth. As Even the Rain” begins, a movie crew led by a director named Sebastian (Gael Garcia Bernal) and his producer, arrives in Bolivia, to film a historical epic about Christopher Columbus and his conquest of the Americas. But Sebastian doesn’t intend to film another mythologized portrait of the early explorer; instead he’s focusing on Columbus’s oppression of indigenous populations and the efforts of two little-known priests to object to their Christian brethren’s brutal attempts at conversion.” – A. Hornaday, The Washington Post
Posted by Nathaniel Sexton, Monday, January 30th, 2012 - 5:51 pm.
Filed under: General News
Thursday, November 3 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm
Karmen Geï
2001 – Sénégal – Directed by Joseph Gai Ramaka
Africa’s first full-length musical, according to critics, debuted on July 22, 2001, to some 1,200 viewers in Bel Arte Space of the International Center of Foreign Commerce (CICES) in Dakar, Senegal. The Director, Joseph Gaï Ramaka, achieved in this film a remake of Carmen a novel written in 1845 by Prosper Mérimé and turned into an opera in 1875 by Georges Bizet. The character of Karmen, played by Djenïnaba (the producer’s wife), is a veritable femme fatale, a woman of uncontrollable desire, lust and longing, who uses her sexuality and her own notions of love as weapons of destruction of men and women alike. A rebel against established authority, she becomes a voice for the voiceless and downtrodden in her country, making the film an allegory in postcolonial times, which indicts corruption and greed in the governmental establishment.
Wednesday, November 9 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm
Femmes aux yeux ouverts AKA Women with Open Eyes
1994 – Togo – Directed by Anne-Faure Folly
A film about African women is a rarity, even more one made by an African woman. In Femmes aux Yeux Ouverts, award-winning Togolese filmmaker Anne-Laure Folly presents portraits of contemporary African women in four West African countries: Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal and Benin. We meet a woman active in the movement against female genital mutilation read circumcision]. She explains why in Africa it is easier to oppose this practice as a health issue than as a women’s rights issue. We also join a health worker demonstrating condom use in a marketplace and explaining how diseases are sexually transmitted. Women are the traditional market traders in Africa. Successful businesswomen describe how they have set up an association to share expertise and provide mutual assistance. Women with Open Eyes shows that women are organizing at the grassroots level to play a prominent role in Africa’s current opening to democracy. It demonstrates why Africa’s development is inextricably linked to the social and economic progress of its women… – (Oregon State University Library)
Thursday, November 17 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm
Faat Kine
2001 – Sénégal – Directed by Ousmane Sembène
Key words in this film are feminism/Womanism, nonconformity and single parenthood, as Fatou Kiné, 40 years old, twice abandoned by men in her life at critical moments, but with determination and fortitude, creates a life and a profession for herself in a field that normally excludes women, making a decent living as an owner cum manager of a gas station, while giving her two children educational opportunities she herself did not have. Faat Kiné is critical of the complexities and contradictions of traditional and modern lifestyles in Senegal among the middle class today.
Wednesday, November 30 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm
Monday’s Girls
1993 – UK/Nigeria- Directed by Ngozi Onwura
Monday’s Girls explores the conflict between modern individualism and traditional communities in today’s Africa through the eyes of two young Waikiriki women from the Niger delta. Although both come from leading families in the same large island town, Florence looks at the iria women’s initiation ceremony as an honor, while Azikiwe, who has lived in the city for ten years, sees it as an indignity. Ngozi Onwurah, director of such feminist classics as Coffee Coloured Children and Body Beautiful, herself an Anglo-Nigerian, turns a wry but sympathetic eye on the cross-cultural confusions. [...] [The film] calls into question the idea of a single, “ethnographically correct” representation of tradition. Rituals are revealed as fluid, polysemous texts, social contracts continuously renegotiated between individuals and communities. For millions of Africans like Azikiwe, tradition is increasingly seen as a matter of individual choice not social coercion. – (California Newsreel)
Posted by Nathaniel Sexton, Monday, October 31st, 2011 - 10:24 am.
Filed under: General News
Thursday, October 6 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm
Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux
1962 – France – Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Godard frames and edits his shots, moves the camera, uses music, and deploys his actors in ways that still seem radical – even as several generations of directors since have cribbed and stolen from him. [...] Vivre Sa Vie, for all its demoded, midcentury Gallicness, remains both a dazzling cinematic experiment and a heart-mover. Nana’s curiosity, her loneliness, her almost casual descent into prostitution – and her flashes of simple joy – are captured with elliptical precision in the 12 chapters of Godard’s film. When Karina, a transfixing beauty, stares directly into the camera, it’s like she’s burning a hole into the viewer’s soul. – Steven Rea (Philadelphia Inquirer)
Wednesday, October 12 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm
La Chinoise
1967 – France – Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
One of Jean-Luc Godard’s most underrated and misunderstood films, this 1967 feature isn’t so much an embrace of France’s Maoist youth movement as a multifaceted interrogation of it—far more nuanced and lively than the theoretical agitprop Godard would make with others after the May 1968 uprisings. Though it explores the dogmatism and violence of a Maoist cell in Paris, Godard is equally preocccupied by such things as French rock, the color red, the history of cinema, the “revisionism” of the French Communist Party, and the rebels’ youthful romantic longings. The spirited cast–including Anne Wiazemsky, Jean-Pierre Léaud, and Juliet Berto–make all this touching as well as troubling. – Johnathan Rosenbaum (Chicago Reader)
Wednesday, October 19 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm
Tout va bien
1972 – France/Italy – Directed by Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin
TOUT VA BIEN is perhaps Godard’s strongest attempt to bring [radical] political thought into popular film. In order to deliver his message of class struggle Godard signed two famous actors–Jane Fonda and Yves Montand. The plot of TOUT VA BIEN exists only, as Godard says in the film, to provide “a story for those who shouldn’t still need one.” Fonda is an American news reporter living in Paris with her husband, Montand, a former “New Wave” film director. Paying a visit to a sausage factory the couple find themselves in the middle of a work stoppage. The workers spout Maoist slogans and read political speeches into the cameras while taking over the factory’s corporate offices. The plant manager is locked in his office [along with the film's primary stars] – (TV Guide Movie Guide)
Thursday, October 27 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm
Film Socialisme
2010 – Switzerland/France – Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
“Film Socialisme” (first shown in 2010 at the Cannes Film Festival), is, like many of its predecessors, an assemblage of vignettes, allusions and tracts, a three-part invention in which music, voices and pictures are arranged in a loose, contrapuntal pattern that is by turns provocative, grating, gorgeous and tiresome. In typical Godardian fashion the film manages to be both strident and elusive, argumentative and opaque. [...] Mr. Godard finds fragments, including splinters of the lost dreams of modernity alluded to in his film’s title. He seems to be mourning the death of those dreams — or the combined ideal of cinema as a supreme collective art form — and at the same time, in the same gesture, trying to keep them alive, at least for himself and whoever is left in the village. – A.O. Scott (New York Times)
Posted by Nathaniel Sexton, Sunday, October 2nd, 2011 - 2:08 pm.
Filed under: General News
