In a Russian coastal town, Kolya is forced to fight the corrupt mayor when he is told that his house will be demolished. He recruits a lawyer friend to help, but the man's arrival brings further misfortune for Kolya and his family.
Director:
Andrey Zvyagintsev
Stars:
Aleksey Serebryakov,
Elena Lyadova,
Roman Madyanov
Georges and Anne are an octogenarian couple. They are cultivated, retired music teachers. Their daughter, also a musician, lives in Britain with her family. One day, Anne has a stroke, and the couple's bond of love is severely tested.
Strange events happen in a small village in the north of Germany during the years before World War I, which seem to be ritual punishment. Who is responsible?
Director:
Michael Haneke
Stars:
Christian Friedel,
Ernst Jacobi,
Leonie Benesch
While both participating in a production of "Death of a Salesman," a teacher's wife is assaulted in her new home, which leaves him determined to find the perpetrator over his wife's traumatized objections.
Director:
Asghar Farhadi
Stars:
Shahab Hosseini,
Taraneh Alidoosti,
Mina Sadati
When five orphan girls are seen innocently playing with boys on a beach, their scandalized conservative guardians confine them while forced marriages are arranged.
Two days in the life of Saul Auslander, Hungarian prisoner working as a member of the Sonderkommando at one of the Auschwitz Crematoriums who, to bury the corpse of a boy he takes for his son, tries to carry out his impossible deed: salvage the body and find a rabbi to bury it. While the Sonderkommando is to be liquidated at any moment, Saul turns away of the living and their plans of rebellion to save the remains of a son he never took care of when he was still alive.Written by
LaoKoon
The short text at the beginning says, that the members of the 'Sonderkommando' were killed after 3 months, but this is a simplification of the more complicated history. While it's correct that these men were supposed to be killed and replaced after a few months, in some cases they were killed much earlier and in other rare cases they could survive for over 2 years, like Filip Müller. This depended mostly on the skills of the individual 'Sonderkommando' slave worker, who was sometimes needed by the SS to train the new 'Sonderkommando' members, but also on pure coincidence and luck. See more »
This movie is not taken on lightly as an audience member.
To classify it as 'entertainment' would certainly be wrong because the subject matter is so uncompromisingly challenging.
I wanted to love it unreservedly for the bravery of its content but I'm afraid I was left a little cold.
The film is shot in square format (possibly 4:3) which is immediately disarming and unusual (the last time I saw this was in the very different Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest Hotel) and it's used effectively because it gives the viewer a voyeuristic look into the mayhem that is Dachau where the movie is set. It also helps the director from a budgetary point of view because it eschews the need for expensive wide shots.
The opening scenes are astonishingly harrowing as we see the "pieces" of Jewish bodies essentially processed through the factory of death with disturbing, off screen, dog barks, German soldier orders and mechanical noise. It's brutal and affecting in the extreme.
In some ways this is what I grotesquely wanted from the movie. I wanted to be horrified like no horror movie could achieve.
Forgive me for this but it didn't happen. Yes, the mood was grotesque thanks, in particular, to the extraordinary sound design, but on screen I felt it shirked its potential too much.
In the end this voyeuristic cinematography ultimately becomes both tiresome and limiting.
The fundamental weakness of the movie, in my opinion, is in the storyline. Frankly it's not that credible and doesn't stack up. The main protagonist (Saul) discovers his (illegitimate?) son as a gas chamber survivor and smuggles him out of the situation to seek a Rabbi to give him a proper Jewish burial.
This leads to a sequence of events that side stories with an undercover camp breakout in which he is also inexplicably involved.
Sorry, it's not credible.
And Géza Röhrig as the lead didn't really do it for me. And so the early wonderment of the movie, it really is very moving, starts to erode and gradually descends into incredibility.
I love what this movie stands for. I respect every iota of it.
I just didn't think it was particularly good overall.
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This movie is not taken on lightly as an audience member.
To classify it as 'entertainment' would certainly be wrong because the subject matter is so uncompromisingly challenging.
I wanted to love it unreservedly for the bravery of its content but I'm afraid I was left a little cold.
The film is shot in square format (possibly 4:3) which is immediately disarming and unusual (the last time I saw this was in the very different Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest Hotel) and it's used effectively because it gives the viewer a voyeuristic look into the mayhem that is Dachau where the movie is set. It also helps the director from a budgetary point of view because it eschews the need for expensive wide shots.
The opening scenes are astonishingly harrowing as we see the "pieces" of Jewish bodies essentially processed through the factory of death with disturbing, off screen, dog barks, German soldier orders and mechanical noise. It's brutal and affecting in the extreme.
In some ways this is what I grotesquely wanted from the movie. I wanted to be horrified like no horror movie could achieve.
Forgive me for this but it didn't happen. Yes, the mood was grotesque thanks, in particular, to the extraordinary sound design, but on screen I felt it shirked its potential too much.
In the end this voyeuristic cinematography ultimately becomes both tiresome and limiting.
The fundamental weakness of the movie, in my opinion, is in the storyline. Frankly it's not that credible and doesn't stack up. The main protagonist (Saul) discovers his (illegitimate?) son as a gas chamber survivor and smuggles him out of the situation to seek a Rabbi to give him a proper Jewish burial.
This leads to a sequence of events that side stories with an undercover camp breakout in which he is also inexplicably involved.
Sorry, it's not credible.
And Géza Röhrig as the lead didn't really do it for me. And so the early wonderment of the movie, it really is very moving, starts to erode and gradually descends into incredibility.
I love what this movie stands for. I respect every iota of it.
I just didn't think it was particularly good overall.