Entre les murs – Teacher Franois Marin and his colleagues are preparing for another school year teaching at a racially mixed inner city high school in Paris. The teachers talk to each other about their prospective students, both the good and the bad. The teachers collectively want to inspire their students, but each teacher is an individual who will do things in his or her own way to achieve the results they desire. They also have differing viewpoints on the students themselves, and how best to praise and discipline them. The administration of the school tries to be as fair as possible, which includes having student representatives sit on the student evaluation committee. Marin’s class this year of fourteen and fifteen year olds is no different than previous years, although the names and faces have changed. Marin tries to get through to his students, sometimes with success and sometimes resulting in utter failure. Even Marin has his breaking point, which may result in him doing things he would probably admit to himself are wrong. But after all is said and done, there is next year and another group of students.
Gomorra – Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato) is a timid middleman, who distributes money to the families of imprisoned clan members. When making a delivery, he is ambushed by two angry clan members with an obvious grudge against their fellows; there is a feud within the clan. Wanting to save his own skin, he later offers to defect to their side. They explain to him their families were murdered by the clan and want retribution, and that they have no need for a money-carrier. Instead, Ciro leads them to the location where he is given the money for distribution. The pair raid the place, killing everyone but Ciro, and take the money. Ciro quietly walks off to an uncertain future.
Blindness – The film starts out with a plague of white blindness that is spreading throughout a city at a pretty rapid pace. Its different from regular blindness, in the fact that the blind person usually sees nothing but black; while these infected people see white, milky nothingness instead. Fearing that this strange plague is highly contagious; the government panics and begins sending infected people to a quarantine zone that happens to be inside of an old, abandoned mental hospital with three wards. It is, in fact, contagious; as we see the blindness spread from a single, random person to a guy that helps him and then steals his car, to an eye doctor (Ruffalo) and then to all of his patients. The only person who seems immune to this outbreak is the eye doctors wife (Moore), who accompanies him to the quarantine facility- lying about her condition. The old sanitarium turns out to be a cramped, squalid hellhole and the more people that are brought in, the more problems start to occur.
Palermo Shooting – In every serious artist’s life there’re great oscillations and changes. Years of great and masterful work are followed by long passages of creative drought and emptiness. But every artist who takes himself seriously one day must understand and face facts that his best years are over and it would be wise to drop the pencil and leave the field for a new, emerging generation. After seeing Wender’s latest “work” at its premiere in Berlin last night I felt that everyone in the audience quietly shared the same thoughts about this flick: That this can hardly be called a film anymore – but is a preposterous, embarrassing, empty and painful blow to anyone who liked some of the better of Wender’s works in the past.
Serbis – A drama that follows the travails of the Pineda family in the Filipino city of Angeles. Bigamy, unwanted pregnancy, possible incest and bothersome skin irritations are all part of their daily challenges, but the real “star” of the show is an enormous, dilapidated movie theater that doubles as family business and living space. At one time a prestige establishment, the theater now runs porn double bills and serves as a meeting ground for hustlers of every conceivable persuasion. The film captures the sordid, fetid atmosphere, interweaving various family subplots with the comings and goings of customers, thieves and even a runaway goat while enveloping the viewer in a maelstrom of sound, noise and continuous motion.
Synecdoche, New York – Theater director Caden Cotard is mounting a new play. Fresh off of a successful production of Death of a Salesman, he has traded in the suburban blue-hairs and regional theater of Schenectady for the cultured audiences and bright footlights of Broadway. Armed with a MacArthur grant and determined to create a piece of brutal realism and honesty, something into which he can put his whole self, he gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse in Manhattan’s theater district. He directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a small mockup of the city outside. As the city inside the warehouse grows, Caden’s own life veers wildly off the tracks. The shadow of his ex-wife Adele, a celebrated painter who left him years ago for Germany’s art scene, sneers at him from every corner. Somewhere in Berlin, his daughter Olive is growing up under the questionable guidance of Adele’s friend, Maria. He’s helplessly driving his marriage to actress Claire into the ground. Sammy Barnathan, the actor Caden has hired to play himself within the play, is a bit too perfect for the part, and is making it difficult for Caden to revive his relationship with the alluringly candid Hazel. Meanwhile, his therapist, Madeline Gravis, is better at plugging her best-seller than she is at counseling him. His is second daughter, Ariel, is disabled. And a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his autonomic functions, one by one. As the years rapidly pass, Caden buries himself deeper into his masterpiece. Populating the cast and crew with doppelgangers, he steadily blurs the line between the world of the play and that of his own deteriorating reality. As he pushes the limits of his relationships, both personally and professionally, a change in creative direction arrives in Millicent Weems, a celebrated theater actress who may offer Caden the break he needs.
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