Undoubtedly, Kuba Czekai’s Baby Bump (2015) will divide audiences. It is certainly one of the strangest films to ever be made, boasting furthermore some of the most explicit shots of taboo objects such as piss, penises, cum, blood, vaginas, breasts, and masturbation. It is vulgar beyond reproach and unapologetically so. Czekaj wanted to show how the grotesque nature of reaching puberty and facing bodily changes is not for the faint of heart.
A different perspective on futuristic dystopias is the view of the utopia without limitation. What does society do when faced with freedom without restriction? The Oculus Rift has already made it possible to experience virtual reality in an entirely new way. Technology has afforded us promise to rebuild reality, one that is limitless in its use and format.
The story told in Closer to the Moon is the sort lonely obnoxious people like to store away so they can have examples ready to prove their point that truth is stranger than fiction. In 1959 in Romania, five well educated Jews, former rising stars in that country’s communist party, robbed a…
When Ida opens, its title character is an almost literal nonentity. She exists at the bottom corner of director Pawel Pawlikowski’s frames, hidden from the world, but also largely hidden from herself. Raised in an orphanage and known as Anna, this girl (Agata Trzebuchowska) seems to have gone from one place where she…
The first thing you’ll likely notice about Venus in Fur, the new stage-to-screen adaptation from Roman Polanski, is the extraordinary physical resemblance between the film’s lead actor and its director. Mathieu Amalric makes for an absolute dead ringer of Polanski, who turned 80 last year. The casting may seem at first like a cute joke…
Does a Polish anti-capitalist film made under communist rule (1975) adapted from a book written during the turn of the century (1898) at a time of Russian-Emperor rule tell us anything about contemporary America? Martin Scorsese seems to thinks so and has included it in his Masterpieces of Polish Cinema series.
Ari Folman wowed me again with his surreal and beautiful animation. His last animation Waltz with Bashir (2008) hailed him as a unique filmmaker and The Congress only serves to confirm these declarations. Living up to expectations is one thing, surpassing them is entirely another. With Folman’s animation style, his thought provoking narrative, and experimenting with the genre of sci-fi, The Congress is, in a nutshell, the most inventive film I’ve seen so far this year and has become an instant favourite.
Martin Scorsese knows his stuff. He has seen more films than seems humanly possible for such a prolific filmmaker. Innocent Sorcerers is one of his recommendations from Andrzej Wajda’s collection, a romance film which has been beautifully photographed and now restored to show all its detailed creative camerawork. You can see that this is a stepping stone to the Before… trilogy by Richard Linklater and many other simple, character-driven romance pieces. Wajda is aided by the screenplay written by Jerzy Andrzejewski and Jerzy Skolimowski which has created two intriguing, dynamic characters that blend but also clash in scenes that are bleeding sexual tension.
Austeria (The Inn) is director Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s adaptation of the 1966 novel by Julian Stryjkowski. It’s a dramatic comedy set in the early days of the first world war and it’s tone, not surprisingly, is rather austere.
Often films delve into religion but it feels like most delve into its salvation, its hope, its faith and its goodness. Mother Joan of the Angels is much more complicated than that. It may help promote the selfless sacrifice that religion strives for but it certainly doesn’t entirely condone religion either. Nor does it promote atheism either. The villagers who are outside of the church are tempters who are there to stir the pot, laugh at their rules and seem like heretics. The film seems to want a discussion with Christianity especially but it does dance around the topics of living a careless life too. Satan and bad impulses are equally destructive temptations.