The bathroom of a house is the place where Martelli sets her characters: 6 year-old Claire and her Ecuadorian nanny María. With a very precise acting direction and almost no need for dialogue, the action is centered on the bathroom ritual, while the protagonists wait for the arrival of Claire’s mother. The director focuses on a series...
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A comic strip as harmless as Archie is easy to mock, even if its middle tone humor, between the absurd and the commonplace, was, to many, a bridge between the puerile and the adult. It’s harder to understand why it was such a huge hit in the US. Gerald Peary is a film critic, a documentarian, and was –and still is– a fan of the re...
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Sometimes a space of barely one kilometer can hide a universe of interoceanic adventures and family sagas. In the two blocks of Arribeños street between Juramento and Olazábal, sits what is known as Chinatown, a place that hides the possibility of several parallel universes between its two borders, the ones of the generations of Taiwa...
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Ronaldo doesn’t walk alone. Rolando knows that, in every rite, an absence holds his hand; he knows that everything he does used to be done as a couple; he knows that memories stare from the photographs. A cup, a glass, a plate; they can only be justified as a pair. Ronaldo knows it, he knows that if he paints her, he will accept that she&rsqu...
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It’s the year 2015 A.D. Every kid film is crossed by somewhat solemn American franchises and both Happy Meal and Oedipus complexes (ah, the guilt.) All of them? No! The first 3D animated film of Asterix and his friend Obelix (and Dogmatix, of course) adapts the irreducible The Mansions of the Gods to that medium, which has been rather clumsy...
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After losing her long-time husband, an old woman goes on vacations to a place where she used to spend the summers with him. There, she meets other women who are staying at the same hotel, and occasionally disconnects from her grief.
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This is an Iranian film that will perplex those who are familiar with Iranian cinema, and those who aren’t but have homogenizing fantasies. There’s a car owned by one of the protagonists, and two women friends conversing in it. There’s dialogue about politics, dictators, Argo, and, of course, a game with the different levels of re...
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A performatic essay made on different surfaces. A tour through the low. Shot in anamorphic Super 8.
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Léa Rinaldi knows how to observe, which is not the same as watching (that’s an action that deserves the category of subgroup) nor registering or filming (a subgroup within the subgroup). She proves this in Esto es lo que hay –which this year competes for the Human Rights Award in Bafici– addressing a complex issue and obser...
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A poetic vision of Earth from space… Inspired by astronauts who spoke of the life changing power of seeing the planet from above, award winning filmmaker and composer Kenji Williams created Bella Gaia to simulate this transformation called the “Overview Effect”. Working closely with NASA’s scientific visualization studio, t...
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A highly enjoyable look at a career spent duping the art world, Beltracchi introduces an artist who made millions selling fake paintings that allegedly made their way into museums, definitive art books, and collections including that of Steve Martin. The longhaired sexagenarian says he didn’t intend to be a fraudster. Drawn to painting from c...
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The Ben Zaken family is composed of brothers Shlomi and Leon, their mother Dina, and Shlomi’s daughter Ruhi. Ruhi is eleven, and she’s nothing but trouble. Yes, she lacks a mother, or a mother figure, and her father has doubts about her choices. Ruhi –the extraordinary Rom Shoshan– and her family have plenty of grimness in t...
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It’s quite possible that neither Dante, nor Hades, nor Orpheus, are connected at all with the life of a bunny family. But since there must be some explanation about their lives, Esben Toft Jacobsen manages to inquire about the vital transit of these sweet animals that have long ears and eyes filled with tenderness. A winged and feathered king...
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Pascale Ferran’s latest film to date begins with a story of alienation starred by two possible extremes of “consumer aesthetics:” on one side, a Silicon Valley executive who was on his way to Dubai but ends up in Paris, where he decides to cut off (via Skype!) with his job, his family, his country, and everything that up to then w...
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Bogman Palmjaguar presents us a man who became distrustful with people and withdrew into nature. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, Bogman prefers to define himself as “the hidden cat” or “wild outlaw of paradise.”
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Out in desert-like nature, living in the shadows of the immense fence that is erected to control Mexican immigration, seven Americans tell how the border transforms their lives. They observe the haunting traces left by the crossing migrants –people they never come face to face with– as they confide their fear, defiance and at times even...
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If the struggle between novelty and tradition marks the relationship between a family’s generations, it has turned particularly intense in the case of young Malva –as up to date as she is with social networks and techno gadgets– and her grandmother Lalilas, who knows better than anyone that sharing with her granddaughter the knowl...
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Clearly, for Peruvian people cooking is no longer a merely pleasant, playful act. Cooking is perhaps the new national seal.” That’s the introduction of chef Gastón Acurio, a significant militant of culinary arts, a pallet hero in our neighbor country. Amidst ceviches, huancaína potatoes, and anticuchos, Gastón revea...
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Villamediana revises a landscape we all have been through once: memory –only here it is conceived as a mystery, a skein of images, a labyrinth. A strange kind of bull lives in the labyrinth: it’s the Minotaur. Armed with all the haste and despair in the world, the director reinvents a form of memory in which all images seem destined to...
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Machine Cancer is a film as intriguing as its title leads us to assume. The directors are bold enough to go from a human-scale shaped and designed portrait –which stonily observes the people from Médanos, a town in the south of the Buenos Aires province– to the enigmatic detail shots of frogs catching insects in the dark. The fir...
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Originally German and made during the First and Second World Wars, Bergfilms –or mountain films– have an Argentine exponent: Gustav Lantschner’s Canción de la nieve (1954). As a consequence of the war, the German community in Bariloche welcomed their fellow countrymen in the late 1940s. Lantschner was one of them, and his c...
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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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This is a documentary about cartoon artists spoken in the first person by the artists themselves. The list is impressive: from Le Monde’s cartoonist Plantu to Damien Glez from Burkina Faso, the film features professionals of cartoon art in their different work environments, mostly dangerous areas. In the beginning, we hear Plantu’s voic...
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This sublime documentary couldn’t have a better theme song than the resounding “You’re Dead,” by Norma Tanega, which points out with preciseness the main qualities of its protagonists. With quite a steady hand, given the circumstances, Waikiki and Clement (who were also accomplices in Eagle vs. Shark and the series Flight of...
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A funny and tantalizing comedy about risky desire, Casanova 70 follows the romantic exploits of Andrea (Marcello Mastroianni, who else) as he tries to deal with an unfortunate and fairly unusual sexual condition. It seems that Andrea can only become aroused when he is in a dangerous situation, and this leads to all sorts of problems with the variou...
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