Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film making style is mostly categorized as ‘high art’ making him a Cannes favorite and an acquired taste. His Three Monkeys (Üç Maymun) was one of the PIFF 2009 movies that I didn’t like then but think about even now. I have now finalized one interpretation. It is amazing how much [...]
Posts under ‘Foreign’
PIFF Movie Review: Drifting Clouds
Drifting Clouds (Kauas pilvet karkaavat) is the movie that introduced me to Aki Kaurismäki’s world, a world unlike any other. Before the movie, PIFF 2009 screened his ten-minute long short movie Dogs Have No Hell as a primer. I learnt that the acting would be minimal, humor deadpan, reel old, and the setting Helsinki. I [...]
PIFF Movie Review: Meurtrières
After Die Fälscher and Fame Chimica that morning, Patrick Grandperret’s Meurtrières was the third movie that used the same screenplay technique. The opening is followed by a movie-long flashback which leads to the opening. I thought it worked best in Meurtrières. Die Fälscher would have been no worse without that opening, Fame Chimica would have [...]
PIFF Movie Review: Fame Chimica
Fame Chimica grips the viewer immediately by opening with an explosion. Sadly, that remains the highest point of the movie to which we return only at the end. The narrator is young Claudio, a silent man who is apparently the only responsible one of his age in the neighborhood. He has been telling himself that [...]
PIFF Movie Review: Portret podwójny
I could not help not watching the Polish movie Portret podwójny. There was no other movie slotted around the same time, except for the movies that contested for the International Student Film Competition. I could not watch those of course. I’m not a judge or jury; I’m just judgmental. For the first time ever, I [...]