Never Coming to a Cinema Near You - Arthouse Cinema 2015

I saw all three parts of Gomes' Arabian Nights yesterday. That is one wild and weird experience... Overlong and boring in parts, but heartily recommended.

this indie western w/ Kurt Russell, Richard Jenkins came and went in a flash in NYC... showing on VOD

http://filmmakermagazine.com/96324-if-you-move-in-a-hasty-manner-ill-put-a-bullet-in-you-s-craig-zahler-on-bone-tomahawk/

looking forward to the new jafar panahi film, which im going to see tomorrow... i thought this is not a film was somewhat overrated (if accurately evaluated in its title ho ho), but this one looks good, if only because i doubt you can go wrong with the format.

i liked it better than his last one.

I think Taxi is merely good. The girl drove me mad.

Good, as in better than Girlhood.

The little girl in Taxi is wonderful, and really the key to the whole film ("sordid realism").

I recommend this humble indie tree-selling dramedy, Christmas, Again (shot by the ubiquitous Sean Price Williams):

http://www.moma.org/calendar/film/1598?locale=en

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZGHw3uJJAk

Pinkerton on Nathan Silver’s Stinking Heaven, a tale of rehabbed junkies set in “Passaic, New Jersey 1990” (when i lived there!)

http://www.artforum.com/film/#entry56672

Bone Tomahawk was really good!

seeing that at MoMA in 2 weeks w/ director q&a

finally caught The Lobster, which turned out to be essentially Animal Farm meets OKCupid. Considerably funnier and less oppressive than I was expecting

should we have a 2016 thread?

Sissako's Timbuktu is certainly worth seiing, but i don't find the filmmaking as forceful as it should be at times. The violence only does upsets once or twice.

― touch of a love-starved cobra (Dr Morbius), Monday, March 16, 2015 1:57

Finally saw this and also saw it on some year-end top lists (Bob Mondello, NPR & others). Worth seeing but main characters still didn't seem fleshed out enough.

that gunshot in the marsh though

terrible and heartbreaking even if one saw it coming. People buried in sand and stoned was pretty upsetting too.

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-35220419

The US National Society of Film Critics has named Spotlight the best film of 2015.

Timbuktu, by Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako, won best foreign language film.

I've never seen Sissako's earlier effort: "Bamako", mentioned below--

http://www.alternet.org/culture/2015-years-best-movies-classic-screen-romance-ghosts-auschwitz-delusional-tv-stardom

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon

Yes, African director Abderrahmane Sissako’s wry, rich, tragic and spectacular tale of life under the rule of Islamic militants in northern Mali’s legendary “library city” was nominated for the foreign-language Oscar last year. (It didn’t win, but I don’t begrudge “Ida” the prize.) That’s because the academy’s rules make no sense; “Timbuktu” did not play anywhere in the United States until late January of 2015. I have previously argued that a confluence of talent and circumstance have rendered Sissako — who was born in Mauritania, raised in Mali, educated in Russia and now lives in France — a figure of unique cultural importance. Far more to the point, he’s a great artist: Watch “Timbuktu” and then “Bamako,” his outrageous Brechtian assault against the Western banks and financial powers, and find out how his films speak to the mind, the heart and the spirit all at once.

I saw Tale of Tales yesterday and it's pretty amazing. So many beautiful shots. And it has a nice light touch when it comes to any interconnections between the different stories.