Maximus Powers' Short Film Collection

[Alpha Blondy]

 

A boy from a broken home finds a friend in an insular, spiritual shopkeeper in this period drama. Set in 1960s Paris, Monsieur Ibrahim revolves around Momo (Pierre Boulanger), a young man who lives alone with his father in the bustling Rue Bleu district. Still smarting over the separation from his wife and other son, Momo's dad neglects his son in ways both minor and major, to the point where the teen spends most of his time out of school alone and isolated. He finds an unlikely ally in Monsieur Ibrahim (Omar Sharif), a Muslim shopkeeper who spends most of his days behind the counter of his store reading the Koran. As time passes, Momo and Ibrahim begin to bring each other out of his respective shell, sharing a series of everyday adventures, culminating in Momo's indoctrination into Ibrahim's faith.

 

8.5/10.

[Hobbesian_Brute]

who are you trying to impress ?? i can't be bothered with watching movies, too boring.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

‘Like Someone in Love” is the latest small, perplexing masterpiece from the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, who in recent years has chosen the path of a world director. The new film is slender, and it plays obliquely with the style of the 20th-century Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu: simple shots of simple people revealing universal truths. But there is more going on in “Like Someone in Love” than it seems initially. A pretty, stressed-out college student named Akiko is revealed to be moonlighting as a call girl. Her latest client is a retired sociology professor, Takashi, who may want a dinner companion to ward off loneliness, or who may want more. The meaning is in the gaps the director leaves for us to fill.

 

“Like Someone in Love” is a quiet, contemplative film that nags at you after the lights come up and that deepens and darkens in the memory. We’re all standing at the windows of our selves, Kiarostami hints, glimpsing what we can and misjudging the rest.

 

9/10

 

dedicated to Naxar Nugaaled. a fellow Kiarostami fan.

[Alpha Blondy]

''Time Out'' in English.

 

From a deceptively simple premise, this deeply moving French drama develops a startling story that works both as a detailed personal portrait and as a rather frightening examination of modern times. Vincent has already been fired from his office job when the film begins, but he has not told anyone. He still leaves the house every morning and fabricates work-related stories to tell his loving wife, Muriel. He even takes business trips. Few have ever worked harder at not working. To support his lie, he convinces his parents and his former friends to invest in a money-making scheme he’s invented. Then a hotel owner figures him out and offers a solution.

 

10/10. Excellent.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

This highly political film about the Algerian struggle for independence from France took "Best Film" honors at the 1966 Venice Film Festival. The bulk of the film is shot in flashback, presented as the memories of Ali, a leading member of the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN), when finally captured by the French in 1957. Three years earlier, Ali was a petty thief who joined the secretive organization in order to help rid the Casbah of vice associated with the colonial government. The film traces the rebels' struggle and the increasingly extreme measures taken by the French government to quell what soon becomes a nationwide revolt. After the flashback, Ali and the last of the FLN leaders are killed, and the film takes on a more general focus, leading to the declaration of Algerian independence in 1962. Director Gillo Pontecorvo's careful re-creation of a complicated guerrilla struggle presents a rather partisan view of some complex social and political issues, which got the film banned in France for many years.

 

10/10.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

In Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring, the seasons stand in for the phases of a life. Each season offers its own vignettes, conflicts, and lessons. The movie starts with our monk being raised by an older monk on an isolated houseboat in a sheltered valley. As a child, he is cruel to a fish, a frog, and a snake, as boys often are, and his master finds the perfect way to illustrate a lesson about cruelty and grief. In later seasons, our monk encounters lust, marriage, anger, atonement, and compassion. The lessons he learns are all part of the Buddhist philosophy, beautifully illustrated on film. The overarching story is simply about one life. It is universal, and it is therefore necessarily broad.

 

9/10.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

In the dead of night, a group of men - including a police commissioner, a prosecutor, a doctor and a murder suspect - drive through the tenebrous Anatolian countryside, the serpentine roads and rolling hills lit only by the headlights of their cars. They are searching for a corpse, the victim of a brutal murder. The suspect, who claims he was drunk, can't remember where he buried the body. As the night draws on, details about the murder emerge and the investigators' own secrets and hypocrisies come to light. In the Anatolian steppes, nothing is what it seems; and when the body is found, the real questions begin.

 

9/10.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

Ken Loach isn't one for cinematic escapism - he wants his audiences to concentrate on the here and now. But although his films confront the key issues of the day, they're not as preachy as his detractors would have you believe. Loach's tales are, first and foremost, about people, and in Ae Fond Kiss he manages to reach beyond social debate.

 

With a Catholic girl and Muslim boy as the star-cross'd lovers, the film's dramatic issues suggest themselves immediately. However, there's more to it than the "be true to yourself" mantra of Bend It Like Beckham or the fairy-tale "opposites attract" romance of Bollywood Queen. Ae Fond Kiss plays out not only in a post-9/11 atmosphere of heightened religious tension, but also against a Glasgow backdrop where deep-rooted racism has often been overshadowed by Celtic-versus-Rangers sectarianism.

 

7/10.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

Based on the 2003 bestseller by Jhumpa Lahiri, the Namesake tells the story of an immigrant Bengali family in America, with the focus on the American-born son named Gogol and his search for identity in his parents' adopted country. The film covers thirty years in the life of the middle-class immigrants, starting from the mid 1970s. Mira Nair, an India-born, Manhattan-based director, thickly lays on us the immigrant experience and the travails over assimilation - the all too familiar tale of the upwardly mobile immigrants conflicted between tradition and modernity is played out for all it is worth.

 

It's a universal story that plays into the American melting-pot story, where there are millions of tales about such ordinary people who have courageously come to America and have gained much but also have lost some intangible things money can't buy. The film pays homage to the strength of the family and tries to give us an understanding as to why the second generation children sometimes can't understand their parents and disobey them; it also tries to show how it's necessary to build bridges between the Old and New World.

 

7.5/10.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

Three teenagers forced to leave their family, friends and homes behind learn to live in yet another hostile country. That country is the UK.

 

9/10.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

Create a fictional family of four. Visit them once a year, filming them as they grow older and more self-aware over a period of 12 years. Then edit the material into a feature film that runs close to three hours and borrows its title, “Boyhood,” from Tolstoy. It sounds like a stunt.

 

Filmed over 12 years with the same cast, this film is a groundbreaking story of growing up as seen through the eyes of a child named Mason, who literally grows up on screen before our eyes. This drama charts the rocky terrain of childhood like no other film has before. Snapshots of adolescence from road trips and family dinners to birthdays and graduations and all the moments in between become transcendent, set to a soundtrack spanning the years. The film is both a nostalgic time capsule of the recent past and an ode to growing up and parenting. It's impossible not to watch Mason and his family without thinking about our own journey.

 

10/10. Excellent.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

Scheming Bruce Robertson, a bigoted and corrupt policeman, is in line for a promotion and will stop at nothing to get what he wants. Enlisted to solve a brutal murder and threatened by the aspirations of his colleagues, including Ray Lennox, Bruce sets about ensuring their ruin, right under the nose of unwitting Chief Inspector Toal. As he turns his colleagues against one another by stealing their wives and exposing their secrets, Bruce starts to lose himself in a web of deceit that he can no longer control. His past is slowly catching up with him, and a missing wife, a crippling drug habit and suspicious colleagues start to take their toll on his sanity. The question is: can he keep his grip on reality long enough to disentangle himself from the filth?

 

9/10.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

"A Serious Man" is the story of an ordinary man's search for clarity in a universe. It is 1967, and Larry Gopnik, a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith that she is leaving him. She has fallen in love with one of his more pompous colleagues, Sy Ableman, who seems to her a more substantial person than the feckless Larry. Larry's unemployable brother Arthur is sleeping on the couch, his son Danny is a discipline problem and a shirker at Hebrew school, and his daughter Sarah is filching money from his wallet in order to save up for a nose job. While his wife and Sy Ableman blithely make new domestic arrangements, and his brother becomes more and more of a burden, an anonymous hostile letter-writer is trying to sabotage Larry's chances for tenure at the university. Also, a graduate student seems to be trying to bribe him for a passing grade while at the same time threatening to sue him for defamation. Larry seeks advice from three different rabbis. Can anyone help him cope with his afflictions and become a righteous person -- a mensch -- a serious man?

 

9/10.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

Inside Llewyn Davis follows a week in the life of a young folk singer as he navigates the Greenwich Village folk scene of 1961. Guitar in tow, huddled against the unforgiving New York winter, he is struggling to make it as a musician against seemingly insurmountable obstacles-some of them of his own making.

 

10/10.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

A 12-year-old boy befriends a mysterious young girl whose appearance in town suspiciously coincides with a horrifying series of murders in director Tomas Alfredson's adaptation of the book by author John Ajvide Lindqvist, who also wrote the screenplay. Oskar is a young boy who can't seem to shake off the local bullies, but all of that begins to change when a new neighbor moves in next door. After striking up an innocent friendship with his eccentric next-door neighbor, Oskar realizes that she is the vampire responsible for the recent rash of deaths around town. Despite the danger, however, Oskar's friendship with the girl ultimately takes precedence over his fear of her.

 

10/10.