By Alex Deleon
Just back from seeing VICE with a couple of friends. Viewed at Cinestar multiplex, Berlin. This is not a review but just some immediate reactions. In short, over long, drawn out, discombobulated, baloney. Really boring because the people described in it are all boring from the top down and what they have to say sounds like a college term paper being recited. Extremely uninteresting. Full of gimmicks like pretending to end the picture in the middle and running some final cred...
By Alex Deleon
A working-class Italian-American bouncer becomes the driver of an African-American classical pianist on a tour through the 1960s Jim Crow American South.
After a string of weak and questionable choices in recent years the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences finally got it right for a change by awarding Green Book the Best Film Oscar of 2019.
Whether or not similar stories have been told before (e.g., Driving Miss Daisy) this one takes the cake on every ...
By Alex Deleon
Tais-toi et sois belle ~ Shut up and look pretty, viewed on Awards night at Kino Arsenal 1. Not to be confused with a 1958 French feature film of the same name, which, in fact had me confused enough not to check up on what I was about to see and therefore stumble into a siege of boredom.
In this talking heads documentary made by French actress Delphine Seyrig, famous actresses talk about their roles in the male dominated movie industry, and the implicit requirem...
Chaplin's Limelight
I have never liked Chaplin's early silent films because I found his "loveable tramp" character more grotesque than amusing. Guess that makes me part of a vanishing minority. However his major bittersweet 'talkie' of 1952, Limelight" I cannot help but thinking of as one of the great all-time cinema masterpieces and one if the first movies that made me start taking cinema seriously. The movie made an overnight star of young British actress Clai...
Rami Malek is the insider favorite for Best Actor on Oscar night
Finally caught it at a sold out Friday night showing (November 18) in Budapest where I lucked out and got the very last ticket. (At the PUSKIN Cinema). Can't say I enjoyed it but I was entertained by the proceedings. I have never heard any Queen or Freddy Mercury music so I was watching it purely as an informational biopic depicting a pop music era that totally passed me by. At the time fram...
The awards ceremony and closing gala was held on Saturday night but Sunday was a festival bonus day with many repeat screenings to help harried film fans catch up on some entries they might have missed because of the vicissitudes of screening schedules. I had a banner final day picking up on four key films from four countries in four different languages; to wit, Polish, Italian, Latvian, and German.
The Polish film Cold War (Zimno Wojna) by Pawel Pawlikowski in the Forum of European film...
Peter Greenaway
Alex Erekle Leonadze <filmfestivals.com>
Day four was marked by personal appearances on the stage of the great hall of the Amirani Theater by special festival guest Peter Greenaway and legendary Soviet Georgian director Griorgi Shengelaya.
Greenaway's extravagant 1989 study of sadism, gluttony, tyranny, wild sex...
By Alex Deleon .
Peter Greenaway on stage enlightened and entertained.The Greenaway event was immediately followed in the same hall by a screening of a famous Georgian film of 1962 Alaverdoba, by notable Russian born Georgian director Giorgi Shengala. (გიორგი შენგელაია) now retired at 81 and residing in Tbilisi. He directed 14 outstandung features following this relatively short 40 minute debut film. His best known work was &qu...
Yesterday in the Cinema Amirani Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa was awarded with the Honorary Prometheus. His films: feature - Donbass and documentaries - The Trial and Victory Day will be screened in the section "Director in Focus".
Sergei Loznitsa was born on September 5th, 1964 in Baranavichy, Belorussia. He studied at school in Kyiv. In 1981 he enrolled in Kyiv Polytechnic Institute and graduated in 1987 as a mathematician.
After graduating, he worked on experiment systems of...
By Alex Deleon
The Tbilisi International Film Festival (Tbilisi Saertashoriso Kinopestivali), held in the center of the bustling capital of the Georgian Republic on the outer reaches of Europe at the far end of the Black Sea, is a relatively modest seven day event but by no means a minor or insignificant one as is evident from the impressive guest list alone. Among notable visitors from Western Europe this year are Erika and Ulrich Gregor, for many years co-directors of the ...
Head of Jury
Raimundas Banionis
Raimundas Banionis was born on 13 May 1957, in Panevezys, in actors' - Donatas Banionis and Ona Banioniene family. For the first time, he went on stage at the age of three, performing the ...
Full programme of 19th Tbilisi International Film Festival, download here:
...
NYITVA (Open)
Viewed at the Múvész art house cinema, Budapest, Nov. 21, 2018
with English subtitles.
Directed by Orsi Nagypal, starring Csilla Radnay and Lehel Kovács.
The subject is how the waning of sex in a long term relationship can undermine a basically good relationship.
Fanni and Bálint are a devoted couple in their early thirties who have been living together for five years as an all but married couple. They...
From November 22 to December 1 in Strasbourg (France), the Week of Ukrainian Cinema "Ukraine in Focus" will take place. 5 Ukrainian feature films will be shown at one of the oldest European film theaters "Odyssey"
The audience will be able to watch such Ukrainian films as "Donbas" by Sergei Loznitsa (November 22), "When the Trees Fall" by Marysia Nikitiuk (November 24), "Falling" by Maryna Stepanska (November 25), "Myth" b...
Napszállta or Sunset, the new film from hot Hungarian director László Nemes (41, director of Son of Saul) is a tedious pretentious shaggy dog story about a fancy women's hat store in Budapest on the eve of World War I.
The director was evidently gaga over the new face of actress Juli Jakab and made sure she is in nearly every frame of the film, mostly in full screen facial closeups. Good looking she is but after a while one has had enough of the...
By Alex Delonian <filmfestivals.com
The Golden Apricot Film festival in Yerevan, the beautiful capitol of Armenia.
offers a selection of films this year as offbeat and unusual as the very name of the festival itself. First of all -- Why apricots? It turns out this tasty golden colored fruit is a major agricultural product of the country and as such has become a kind of national symbol. Moreover, apricots are in season at this time of the year and prominently fill...
Cherchez l'idole, 1962
J'étais un grand fan de Johnny.
Peccato, je ne suis pas à Paris pour voir ces films.
Johnny appeared in over forty films, usually as a spotlighted musical performer only, but occasionally in a full proper role, as for example, in Godard's "Détective", 1985.
One film from 1962, "Chercher l'idole" has Johnny (then only nineteen) performing a rousing rock version of "Bonne chance&qu...
photo by Petr Novák
Czech filmmaker Milos Forman, whose American movies "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Amadeus" won a deluge of Academy Awards, including best director Oscars, died Saturday. He was 86. Forman died about 2 a.m. Saturday, April 24, at Danbury Hospital, near his home in Warren, Conn., according to a statement released by the former director's agent, Dennis Aspland. Aspland said Forman's wife, Martina, notified him of...
John L. Sullivan, a successful but naive director of lightweight motion pictures, decides he wants to make a film about the trials and tribulations of the downtrodden poor. Much to the dismay of his producers, he sets off in ragged tramp's clothing with a single dime in his pocket to experience poverty first-hand and winds up in a chain gang! - but finds a way out...
Veronica's golden Waves were alone worth the price of admission..
Light Screwball Comedy with a h...
Andrzej Wajda. Boguslaw Linda
1. Powidoki, (Afterimages) Polish master Andrzej Wajda's final fllm made when he was ninety is another attack on the Communist system his country suffered under during four long decades. A crippled painter who refuses to follow the party approved style of Social Realism is suppressed by the system but wildly adored by his...
There were also some highly overrated films in 2017.
The Turkey of the year in my estimation was the Swedish attempt at satire entitled "The Square" Described thusly:
"Comedy · A prestigious Stockholm museum's chief art curator finds himself in times of both professional and personal crisis as he attempts to set up a controversial new exhibit".
This film has won numerous festival accolades including...
Misguided Missile in a Pseudo Cold War.
Red Sparrow (Vörös Veréb) was Viewed on commercial release in Budapest in English with Hungarian Subtitle Jennifer Lawrence wears bangs in Cold War Sex Thumper as ex-Ballet diva boffing away for the NKVD... but the cluttered script and lumbering direction sabotage Jennifer's valiant efforts to keep this shipwreck afloat
First let me say that two thin...
Francis McDormand for best actress, Gary Oldman for best actor, and Shape of Water for best film.
So glad that Gary Oldman got it.
By Alex Deleon
"Me too, glad about Oldman.
Disgusted with the two others.
Shapeless Water was a shoe in with all them dumb nominations, but Mme. McDormand was like a piece of hardwood in a piss poor picture. If you haven't seen Three Ebbings outside of Billboard, Misery I strongly advise you to skip it.
I am up at the crack of One ...
Sally Hawkins, speechless before Doug Jones' extraordinary amphibian charm
by Alex Deleon
Forced myself to go out into the icy Budapest cold tonight whenk I found that the hottest Oscar contender "The Shape of Water" was playing at the Művész Art Cinema, only one tram stop away.
Immediate reaction.
The Shape of Water"is a Self indulgent Shapeless piece of confused unanchored crap tied to the fishiest script of the year. Even outdoes Three Billboa...
by Alex Deleon
Marathi Biopic by director Ananth Narayan Mahadevan
The real doctor left, and actress Chatterjee at right
This is a Marathi language biopic spotlighting the life and career of Rukhmabai Raut India's first practicing lady doctor, social rebel and medical pioneer who paved the way for a fight against gender discrimination.
The movie was a revelation at the Jaipur minifilm festival (Four days only).
It was a lat...
