Broken Circle Breakdown, Belgium’s official Oscar submission should make the short list. It’s both a feel-good film and a wrenching drama with a glorious cast, and like its wonderful soundtrack it will play in your mind after you leave the theatre.Elise (Veerle Baetens) and Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) are a golden couple. They meet, fall in love and build a perfect world around Didier’s Bluegrass band. Life exacts a terrible price. Their winsome daughter Maybelle struggles with Leukemia and dies, sending their life against the shoals. But director Felix Van Groeningen leavens this downward spiral with Bluegrass classics and newer tunes.Lacing…
Author: Robin Menken
Robin Menken
Robin Menken Robin Menken lives in Los Angeles. She was the Artistic Director of the Second City Workshops, taught at UC Berkeley, USC, Barcelona\'s Ateneu and the Esalin Institute. She was Roberto Rossellini\'s assistant, and worked with Yevgeny Vevteshenku, Glauber Rocha and Eugene Ionesco. She sold numerous screenplays and wrote the OBIE winning The FTA SHow (touring with Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland and Ben Vereen.) She was a programming consultant and Special Events co-ordinator for numerous film festivals, including the SF, Rio, Havana and N.Y Film Festivals. Her first news outlet was the historic East Village Other.
Giedrė Beinoriūtė’s unadorned little gem “Conversations On Serious Topics” (Lithuania’s official Oscar Foreign submission),sets a series of adolescent and teenagers in front of a camera and asks penetrating questions. As Beinoriūtė explained in an interview with CWB’s Bijan Tehrani, she was inspired by Lithuanian writer Vanda Juknaitė. featuring interviews with children with special needs and at risk children at risk. The result is a moving, somewhat melancholy trtise of the state of the world, leavened with some amusing body language. Beinoriūtė is an adept at letting body language speak. Her relaxed style of questions pries her characters open like a…
Filmforum welcomes French filmmaker Nicolas Rey to present the Los Angeles premiere of his epic film “Les soviets plus l’électricité” (Soviets Plus Electricity) (2001, 15mm, 175 min.) at the Velaslavasay Panorama on Sunday December 8. Nicolas Rey in person! “Soviets plus electricity” is a cinematic journey through Russia to Magadan, a city famous in Soviet times for being synonymous with deportation. Based on excerpts from his acoustic diary, documentary footage and some autobiographical insights given on the way, the roving reporter searches for imaginary roots and its historical and political implications. The film was shot in August and September 1999. A…
Guadalajara International Film Festival In Los Angeles FICG in LA returned to the Egyptian Theatre for its third annual edition in Los Angeles. The 3-day festival (November 1-3) showcased outstanding and award-winning titles from FICG28, which was held earlier this year in Guadalajara.Critics Note: I have two recommendations in a sterling slate of multi-awarded films.Juan Carlos Maneglia & Tana Schémbori’s delicious thrill ride “7 Cajas”, which I saw at Baja, is a MUST SEE. When freelance teenage wheelbarrow delivery boy Victor (wonderful newcomer Celso Franco) gets a ‘break’ and agrees to deliver 7 boxes in the sprawling central food market…
Multi-award winning documentary filmmaker Mark Moro’s “Bette Page Reveals All” is the authorized autobiography of the curvaceous, raven-haired Queen of the Pin Ups. Built around taped interviews conducted near the end of her life, the film features Bette’s Texas twanged account of her adventures spiced with Celebrity quotes and talking heads interviews. Todd Oldham, Dita Von Teese, Model Paula Klaw and photog Bunny Yeager (responsible for her most famous photos), Illustrator and Fanzine publisher Greg Threakston, adoring ex-lovers, plus clients, members of the Photo-clubs that used nudie models, all weigh in. I could have dome Gary Guttman’s abrasive score but…
Co-presented by the Consulate General and Promotion Center of the Argentine Republic in Los Angeles. Sponsored by Wines of Argentina.The 12th annual Argentina New Cinema series returns with another impressive lineup, including Argentina’s official entry for the 2014 Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar, THE GERMAN DOCTOR, Lucía Puenzo’s tense historical drama about a Patagonian family who unwittingly entrust their daughter’s medical care to Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele. A contemporary thriller, THESIS ON A HOMICIDE, stars Ricardo Darin as a university law professor who, while investigating a campus murder, comes to suspect one of his own students. Heist films have universal…
Cinema Italian Style 2013 opens November 14th at the Egyptian theatre with the U.S. premiere of Paolo Sorrentino’s THE GREAT BEAUTY, Italy’s entry for Best Foreign Language Film for the 2013 Academy Awards®. Sorrentino will be joined on the red carpet by Academy Award Winner Bernardo Bertolucci. Both directors will receive the Cinema Italian Style Award prior to the film screening. The opening night presentation is in collaboration with AFI FEST which will be presenting THE GREAT BEAUTY in its World Cinema program. Written and directed by Sorrentino and featuring the iconic Toni Servillo (Il Divo, Gomorrah), THE GREAT BEAUTY…
AFI FEST 2013 returns the historic, newly restored TCL Chinese Theatre, the Chinese 6 Theatres, the Egyptian Theatre and the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.Agnès Varda, considered “the Mother of French New Wave cinema,” will serve as Guest Artistic Director Trained as an artist, without formal cinematic training, she created her film production company Ciné-Tamaris in 1954 to write and direct her first feature “La Pointe Court” often considered the unofficial first New Wave film. After several documentaries, she released her acclaimed nouvelle vague film CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7 (CLÉO DE 5 À 7) in 1962.Varda, a seminal force in art…
There have been some classic gastronomy documentaries in these days of Cuisine as Event: David Gelb’s 2009 “Jiro Dreams Of Sushi” and Gereon Wetzel’s 2011 “El Bulli: Cooking in Progress. Joseph Levy’s “Spinning Plates” takes another tack, focusing on three very different restaurants, and in the process reflecting class differences in the new Globalized world. It is also a meditation on the meaning to these restaurateurs of serving food, and how they see themselves in their individual communities.Each of the three restaurants, which are linked emotionally in the last act, hides some fascinating human dramas. (No spoilers here!)Chef Grant Achatz,…
This year marks the first edition of DOORS TO RUSSIAN CINEMA, collaboration between the American Cinematheque, Roskino and the Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia. Vladimir Lenin once declared, “The cinema is for us the most important of all the arts,” and the Soviet system fostered such master directors as Sergei Eisenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky – even as it imposed rigid censorship on their work. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s brought greater creative freedom, drawing Andrei Konchalovsky back after a stint making American hits like RUNAWAY TRAIN, and the Best Foreign Language…