Schneeland 雪国

You never think of anyone but yourself!    Although quite far from Aoyama's meditations on guns & violence in his earlier work, SHADY GROVE as a romantic drama still feels weird and alien from minute one. It's one of those awkward films in colour and tone which make you really uncomfortable and clearly state that human interaction is deficient, because people from "the big city" are made from cement. Especially when they are company people working for big firms. They do have a life and loved ones at home, but that's just meaningless words in an environment of cold-hearted company politics and career decisions.  But Aoyama's film is not really focussing on the salaryman's side, but has its female protagonist in the center of attention. It's an anti-romantic drama filled with troubles, silence, and angst. Which makes it even more devastating.  Basically SHADY GROVE is about two love-stories that never come to realization because of t...

 The sixth film of Bengali film director Anjan Das is a slowly moving arthouse film which features good actors and beautiful music. It is a literary adaption from the novel The Flautist by Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay and that instrument obviously has been one of the inspirations for the very lyrical, melodical songs here. Anjan Das already died in 2014 after directing eight feature films - for Banshiwala he was awarded two prices at international film festivals.  The film basically asks the moral question if a house as a building is merely a property (of investment) or if it's somehow a sacred place of remembrance. In this case, the house even is a little bit run-down but still an impressive ancestral manor which bears memories of multiple generations of the family. So, selling it would be the equal to giving away the familial heritage. But there's a dark and hidden secret, too, which has to be challenged as the story comes to a close. In some abstract scen...

~ by Arsaib Gilbert  (Arsaib Gilbert is a film critic contributing to Yam-Magazine and filmlefou.com. He lives in New York.)   Patang (Prashant Bhargava, 2011) An impressionistic collage of visions and emotions, Patang (The Kite), similar to the city symphony films of the silent era, employs a lyrical, quasi-documentary approach in its portrait of daily life within a metropolis while capturing the pulse of the setting through its fractured visual and montage techniques. Loosely structured around a Delhi-based businessman's long-delayed visit back home to his family in old Ahmadabad, the film is appropriately set during the city's annual kite festival, herein symbolizing the precarious, indeterminate nature of life and relationships. Debutant feature director Prashant Bhargava, a Chicago-born multimedia artist of Indian descent who passed away in 2015 at the young age of 42, seldom veers toward the indulgent as he strikingly forges his fragmented aest...

My first film at this year's Film Festival in Hong Kong was very enjoyable. Although the rotoscoped animation style is realized in a watercoloured way focusing on simplicity, there is an enthralling beauty to that world with an astounding range of details when it comes to diverse facial expressions of the characters, for example. So, reduction is the first word that pops to mind seeing THE MURDER CASE OF HANA & ALICE. And it's a very simple story as well. Though I read somewhere that the film was boring plotwise, I cannot agree to that. It's very focused with a straight narrative. Not one of those films that mix together every genre just to please any kind of audience anywhere in the world. So, it's a playful prequel, sometimes almost otherworldly, to Iwai's own HANA & ALICE film from 2004, 11 years ago: now the original stars playing their own roles as younger versions of themelves. Basically, 14-year-old Tetsuko "Alice" Arisugawa (Yu A...

Alka Singh (who is Revolver Rani aswell), angry young woman and leader of a dubious political party, loses her heart to Bollywood wannabe-actor Rohan. Needless to say, he is is just an impostor with hopes and dreams he doesn't believe in himself. When he finally decides to leave Alka Singh for another woman, his chances are bad - she is already pregnant with his child. Besides, leaving Rani is never an option, because she is fast with her guns and gets easily carried away in her anger. If there's something she doesn't like, Rani fires. Since two or three days (now: weeks) already I've been thinking about Revolver Rani and wonder about what I could prossibly write that could be of interest - and thus contribute to the discourse of this peculiar film that seems to stand midway between commercial filmmaking and exploitation. A point that would interest me a lot at least. Seemingly only that is, and that's the biggest problem of the film, because it definitely...

The media buzz concerning CHENNAI EXPRESS is sensational. At least in India. The "highest grossing movie ever" (even bigger than 3 IDIOTS?) is a veritable blockbuster and the comments on social media platforms like Twitter go head over heals: who, when, where and how often has been to the cinema. Some have already seen the movie multiple times. Ram Gopal Varma for example claims to having been in movietemples for five times – and there is little reason to doubt him. Well, maybe the film is indeed getting better the more often you see it, like Shah Rukh Khan posted on his Twitter account. Room for improvement though is plentiful in this half-baked and uneven romantic comedy that is indeed pretty funny and charming at first, but then drags itself – after the intermission – rather boringly to a really violent finale. And CHENNAI EXPRESS is, at least, half an hour too long. The film is just like one would expect it to be: it depicts beautiful people in beautiful landscape...