The quest for success in Hollywood. The dream of becoming an actress. Novella McClure is in her early thirties and has several problems. 1) She didn’t become a star. 2) Not only that, but she also didn’t get any parts in the last three years. 3) Her name sounds like a porn star from the past century. 4) There are younger actresses willi...
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An eternal advocate of the love for the pictorial and elegance on the screen, is now trying to capture his cinephile Holy Grail: the Mexican period that changed the life of Sergei Eisenstein, one of the most mythical and refractory silent film directors. As a fundamentalist worshiper of the Russian director who is dazzled in an almost intentional w...
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When Alejandro Agresti made The Act in Question, he had already directed several films –some in Argentina, some in the Netherlands– and his filmography surpassed in quality and extension the ones of his contemporaries (and not just the local ones). But nothing could have foreseen the imaginary biography of magician Quiroga (played by an...
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The Hunger is a film both assured and ambitious, wringing subtlety and slow-boiling tension out of a shamelessly ridiculous plot involving a vampiric vixen that has persisted since Ancient Egyptian times in the graceful form of Catherine Deneuve, with lover David Bowie riding her coattails through the centuries. It’s also a vampire film that...
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The Empty Classroom is a kaleidoscope of stories, a collective film made of precise and smart short films from countries such as Argentina, by the hand of Fendrik and Martel; Mexico, with Pereda and Chenillo; Brazil, with Castro and Rocha; Peru, with Vera; Uruguay, with Stoll; Colombia with Gaviria Pérez; and El Salvador, with Huezo Sá...
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Following his acclaimed 2010 documentary Nostalgia for the Light, legendary Patricio Guzmán delivers an equally stunning achievement with The Pearl Button. Whereas Nostalgia… vividly explored Chile’s national heritage through its distinctive skies and deserts, The Pearl Button takes water as its central metaphor through which fl...
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I only shot one film Buenos Aires: that first feature-length film, Invasion, which I wrote with Jorge Luis Borges. 43 years later, I suddenly felt a clear need to plunge immediately into my city and film it again, with a passion. So, I wrote with Mariano Llinás… a fable? a Sufi tale?, or let’s rather say a plot within the pure t...
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“Watching Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates, or Sayat Nova, is like opening a door and walking into another dimension, where time has stopped and beauty has been unleashed. On a very basic level, it’s a biography of the Armenian poet Sayat Nova, but before all else it’s a cinematic experience, and you come away re...
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It’s not easy to tell a documentary from a false documentary, and inventing a character is not that different from describing it. This is the case of Guillermo Gaede, a government employee turned musician, engineer, spy employed by five countries, and a dissident theoretical physic whose extraordinary life is beyond the reach of any possible...
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Mabuse is the dark hero of Weimar cinema. Full of charisma, sardonic charm and nasty ideas, he is the wicked genious of crime –a German Fantomas. Fritz Lang shot four Mabuse films, including his very last film in 1960. Other directors tried as well, but never reached Lang’s superb ability and social-pathological depth. This double-featu...
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A women escapes with her son and goes deep into the forest, the scenery of a call that will leave more doubts than certainties. Who’s escaping, who’s after who and who is lost.
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If documentary is an endless genre is not just because it can take any element in the world (a person, a city, or an object) and turn it into its subject, but rather because of the endless ways it can portray and question that element. In the case of Mudmen, the eye is on an old man who lives in Rio Negro and makes bricks out of mud. A young interv...
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A young couple is about to move from the apartment they rent to the one they plan to buy on the day that begins. Everything is already packed: the place is deserted. That place is no longer home, and the next one is still not available. They have to buy an apartment, move a large sum of cash –a practice that is typical of the economical absur...
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“Theater is nervousness, a monstrous nervous tension. The previous instants, the energy overflowing the bodies, the salutes, and the rituals. Something comes off, like killing or dying, I think. The audience arrives and then the moments of loneliness, concentration, the ferocious attention to detail… The party of the monster.” Th...
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Based on the true story of a family who kidnapped people for ransom. Alejandro, the youngest son, finds himself before an important decision when his father asks him to take part in the kidnapping of one of his schoolmates.
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There’s an essential difference between Fifteen Days at the Beach, Flavia de la Fuente’s previous film, and The Walk. While the first one’s matter is the natural beauty of the ocean, the second one seeks beauty where apparently there is none. And, even better, it finds it. In both films we can strongly perceive that typical melanc...
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The director of Garage Olimpo approached the figure of Vera Vigevani Jarach, a loving 86 year-old woman who was born in Italy and came to Argentina in 1939, and later joined the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. Her heartbreaking story synthesizes two different horrors: the Holocaust and the last military dictatorship. She lost her grandfather, who died on...
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Aldo is 55 years old and lives with his older brother Pablo. From their home they run together a religious discipline their father invented and is preached through the Internet. Aldo is tired of being a pastor, but doesn’t know how to say so.
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A documentary about one of the unfairly forgotten pioneers of Argentine rock music: Roque Narvaja, who back when the Sixties turned into the Seventies went from being the author of beat hits in the years of La Joven Guardia to become a solo artist of exquisite compositions and a socially committed stand, with one foot on Third World priests and the...
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María José and Norberto live in the outskirts of Belo Horizonte. They have been married for 35 years, shared a life together, and have two children. One of them is André Novais Olivera, director of this film that discovers his parents in very simple and everyday-like domestic situations through which we’ll learn their hab...
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Agustina wonders through an electronic party in ecstasy. She goes back home early in the morning, sleeps a bit, and then goes out to the park. There, she starts playing with Martín and later meets his father Pablo. Agustina manages to seduce father and son; they spend the afternoon getting to know each other and slightly developing a romance...
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The difference between how we think a love story should work and how it actually works is at the comical heart of In the clouds, an exploration of the cultural disagreements on intimacy, love and marriage proposal in the YouTube era.
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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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Lea, who has just arrived from the province of Córdoba, decides to go and pick up some stuff that was left at his ex-girlfriend’s place in Buenos Aires, now that she’s away. When he goes inside, he finds Lubre, a friend of her ex that is in charge of the house and taking care of a cat. The cat disappears, and now both of them mus...
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Miss Chile 1985 has been kidnapped by Tarzan, the king of the jungle and highest exponent of the Patriotic Anti-Pinochet Command Manuel Rodriguez.
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An intense and moving elegy for the fugaos or Asturian Maquis who were murdered in the Spanish Civil Post-war at the hands of Franco’s repressive forces, Here and in Other Time not only intends to be a political film, but also to work with the forms of cinema in a radically political way. After a prologue that conjures the ghosts of some of t...
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Emanuel arrives in his apartment in a hurry. He fixes some dinner for his girlfriend. For his ex-girlfriend. Some messages in the answering machine change his most immediate plans and make the world he’s trying to escape from collapse over him, but the world can always become lighter.
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Scenes 1932 is a collective piece that reflects the work of those Pedagogical Missions from the II Spanish Republic that for many years took culture (not out of a didactic will but more of a recreational one) to the most forgotten corners of Spain. It is undoubtedly a vital experience that became crucial for the work and thinking of Val del Omar, w...
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In one of their many songs –the one entitled “What Belongs to Everyone Belongs to No One”, Los Aldeanos say, among many other things: “Justifying all with the blockade / you need to get a license to fart / I see, I see, how ugly this is getting (…) / no evil lasts a hundred years, yup, but half, yes.” Los Aldean...
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The San Fernando Valley, in Southern California, where, according to the song, it never rains. Stories converge and there’s a split screen. The main storyline involves two actors and two actresses in the adult film industry, whom we see showering, shaving (body and face), travelling to the set, performing, and returning. Also, there’s a...
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