Author: Philippe Vigneres

When she was a girl, Esther Khan was plainly unattractive and awkward. She lived in a poor London neighborhood with her large Jewish family: her father Ytzhok, who is a tailor barely eking out a living and makes all his family work in a big apartment…

After losing her beloved son Esteban in a car accident on the evening of his birthday, as he was turning 17 only, Manuela gives up her job as a hospital nurse and runs away from Madrid to go to Barcelona, where she reckons to meet with Esteban’s father. She never talked about him…

A young white boy playing in the schoolyard, a teenage white girl learning to sing in a choir, a middle-aged man walking and wandering in the streets, a housewife cooking: snapshots of a day in Sidney before these members of an upper middle-class family gather at home…

The film’s prologue relies on a virtuoso use of cross cutting editing. It starts quietly as the camera follows a little happy girl walking in the woods surrounding a countryside mansion. Her red plastic mac gives her the looks of the Little Red Riding Hood cavorting on a pleasant autumn day. There is…

It takes nerve and guts to make a film out of such a text as the “Bardo Thödol”, the so-called “Tibetan Book of the Dead”, a key text of the Tibetan Buddhism dating back from the 8th century AD, which intents to depict the hereafter worlds and various stages human conscience go through once the body…

The title suggests descriptions of a domestic world, a tour in private lives, an intimate view opposed to the spectacle of the wider world. The first scene has indeed truly humble and personal contents: in a drawing-room where openings are closed…

The plot centers first on Maurice Faugel, a fretful and frail gangster just out from jail. He kills out of the blue a stolen goods receiver, Gilbert Varnove, who seemed to be a good friend, and flees with banknotes and jewels he later hides away. Back at his home, he talks with two fellow criminals…

The prologue describes a kid who is clearly reluctant to take his lesson in trumpet playing, especially as his neighborhood friends hail him to go with them to play a baseball game. He complains to his hectoring mother he does not like the instrument. But he would then…

The four seasons of a year, a year in the life of Ouyang Feng: this is the time frame of a story set in ancient China. Ouyang Feng has left his home region to put down his roots in a house at the edge of a desert and makes a living as a troubleshooter for the local community and people who…

What happens when love ends? Souls are wandering between drifting away and repeating the game, wary of the next move that could be a step too far either in the direction of a renewed commitment or in the direction of the final separation. Then the game stops, and…

The prologue takes place in the drab streets of Paris in 1962. Pauline, 17, chances upon Suzanne, 22, a former neighbor whom she liked but who had to move away. Both face problems. The former, a high school student, dislikes the bourgeois and conservative way of life…

First a stage director, a job that would keep him busy over a long part of his life, Ingmar Bergman becomes a movie director in 1945, age 27. He gets interested in television in 1969 and in 1973 he shoots a kind of hybrid production: “Scener ur ett äktenskap – Scenes from a Marriage”…

This third film by Philippine filmmaker Isabel Sandoval is topical to a fault. The lead character, Olivia, is a Philippine migrant who traveled to the United States, more precisely to New York, to get a job, another one among the droves of women her southeast Asian nation…

Customary pictures of a penal colony, in this case in French Guyana, with prisoners doing their chores and answering a roll call under a scorching sun, taken in medium long shots or medium shots, quickly give way to an unexpected sequence showing…

“Amarcord” is a crowd. From the start, people are teeming the streets and rushing through the squares of the Romagna’s village where the film takes place, celebrating events and attending shows, sowing mayhem in a classroom or turning into a shouting match a family lunch, an ensemble cast…