A group of armed and masked men belonging to the Muslim Abu Sayyaf group burst into a hotel on an island resort and kidnap twelve foreign guests. The abductees are tourists and Christian missionaries who are now forced on a gruelling foot march through the Philippine jungle. Together, the hostages and the kidnappers find themselves having to cope w...
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In Comedy of Innocence, the tireless Franco-Chilean director Raúl Ruiz tells the story of a boy with two mothers. The innocent Camille (later Paul) questions his family about his origins (childbirth included), delving into past conflicts and accounts not settled. The story, additionally, poses another kind of questionings, but of an aestheti...
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“No matter what’s the story I want to tell, I can’t help but making a comedy. I’m interested in films that stir the audience. I feel comfortable with that because I think it takes courage to be happy, and above anything else, I want to avoid the trap of sordid realism. I rather suggest that sort of things. And I always had a...
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On his first English-spoken film, Hong Sangsoo decides to take the light that both his cinema and Isabelle Huppert irradiate, and make it fractal. A prism of himself, Hong refracts Huppert (the perfect catalyst for his sense of the unease, the certainty, the comedy of everyday life –which makes it absurd) in three different stories, managing...
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In this film of eccentric beauty and wild feeling, printed words sometimes fill the screen, almost obliterating the puny creatures struggling beneath the type. Based on Joseph Conrad’s very dry, very vicious long short story, ‘The Return,’ the film concerns a man who, having married a woman for whom he apparently feels nothing, be...
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This erotic drama about the incestuous relationship of a mother and daughter is based on the autobiography of Italian theater actress Piera Degli Esposti, though it focuses more on her mother Eugenia (Hanna Schygulla, who won the Best Actress award at Cannes for this film.) The liberated Eugenia and her spaced-out husband (Marcello Mastroianni) &nd...
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“We are game machines,” “an actor is like a blind person walking confidently towards a cliff.” The lady of icy and cutting beauty who seems to gloat on being evil on the screen turns out to be a shy and warm person, capable of acting like a big child while also presenting herself (and her craft) with enviable depth. Toubiana...
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The Piano Teacher’s study in lurid sexual pathology occasions a tour de force by Isabelle Huppert as the title character –a four-alarm lunatic with a heart consecrated to Schubert and a head churning up fantasies to make Leopold Sacher-Masoch blush. There’s hardly another actress in movies who could inhabit this Viennese specimen...
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Born of a time when its dual leads were on their way to becoming two major stars, and to a film industry on the verge of significant transition, Loulou in many ways defines French cinema of the period. There’s a reason Pialat was called the Cassavetes of France. Here, faded neons are partially replaced by garish fluorescents, turning every pu...
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Podría decirse que Chabrol estuvo filmando Madame Bovary a lo largo de toda su carrera, pero quizá esta película le permitió dejar de tener a Flaubert, como dijo alguna vez, “sobre sus hombros”; filmar en un pueblo de Normandía cerca de Rouen, reuniendo detalles precisos como ropas, comidas y tics f&ia...
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A film about people who chase cars in order to hunk their horn. Or about the eternal tension that exists between industrial bourgeoisie and the workers. Passion is an absolute simultaneity, the destruction of a fragmented world; it’s the world exploding in images and sounds as evidence of a fragmented world. It’s a realist film, the way...
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The prolific Jacquot reunites with one of his longtime actresses, the great Isabelle Huppert, for a fascinating yet elusive films, one those films that are small in appearance but ultimately very complex and ambitions, that aims to talk about the feelings, the moods, the intimacy, the introspection of a woman who decides to end with his previous li...
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María (an unstoppable Isabelle Huppert) is not planning on leaving her coffee plantation in Cameroon nor her ideal of resistance, which is not only political. When the French army, from a helicopter in retreat, tells her that it’s her last chance for going back to France and leaving the hostile place where she lives with her family, sh...
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