Author Archives: Mark Peranson

Jose Henrique Fonseca’s 2002 feature debut is a blackly comic riff on the notion that blonds have more fun. Maiguel, an unemployed Brazilian, is obliged to bleach his hair after losing a sports bet. When a local punk makes fun of his new look, Maiguel kills him. Instead of being prosecuted as a murderer, he’s […]

John Cadigan’s autobiographical documentary gives new meaning to the phrase “filmmaking as therapy.” Afflicted with schizophrenia in college, Cadigan was institutionalized after failing to respond to shock therapy, but thanks to new medications and the encouragement of his sister, who chronicled his fight for sanity with a video camera, he made a remarkable recovery and […]

Alex, the protagonist of Christoffer Boe’s showy debut, meets Aimee, the wife of a famous author, and is immediately smitten. But after a night of passion, he discovers that his life has somehow been erased—his friends and family no longer recognize him. But then everything, intones a portentous narrator, is a construction. Scripted by Boe […]

Hsiao Ya-chuan’s playful debut is set mostly in a Taipei pawnshop, run by the young Tung-ching (a droll Lee Jiunn-jye) since his father’s stroke. Tung-ching hangs around with a girlfriend he met on the Internet who’s fascinated with palmistry, in no small part because his fingerprints were erased in a motorcycle accident. A mysterious woman […]

Peter Greenaway is setting out to prove that cinema is dead by fashioning a massive, multimedia personal history of the 20th century. Standing in for Greenaway is Tulse Luper, a Gump-like globetrotter who comes to possess 92 suitcases—92 being the atomic number of uranium. In this first installment of what’s sure to be an endless […]

1 hour 39 min

A Cuban postal worker, waiting for a visa that will let her travel to the U.S., tries to “help people understand each other better” by illegally rewriting their letters, with predictably comical results. Shooting in black and white with spots of color—a flower here, a taxi there—first-time director Juan Carlos Cremata Malberti wants to challenge […]

Annette K. Olesen’s amiable debut, in which a mother’s unexpected death and her husband’s ensuing illness expose tensions in an eccentric extended family, bears a similarity to Lone Scherfig’s Italian for Beginners (2001), and it too won an award at the Berlin film festival. This family-relationships-in-crisis dramedy is, not surprisingly, even more reminiscent of Mike […]

We realize the title is ironic when in the opening scene a woman gives birth on a laundry floor, then sells her baby without batting an eyelash. Peter, who’s just been released from prison, moves in with his sister, who owns the laundry and now the baby, then proceeds to get involved with the new […]

Unsubtle injections of cinema verite and a plot reminiscent of Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore propel this southern-white-trash mother-daughter road movie. Four-times-married Mary Jo (Janet McTeer) needs companionship to survive but flees town after town once her luck runs out. By the time she shacks up with a ticking bomb of a truck […]

Yongyoot Thongkontoon’s crowd-pleasing volleyball comedy embraces gay stereotypes with gleeful energy, creating a group hug for inclusivity. When a lesbian coach is hired to manage an A-level volleyball squad in Lampang, Thailand, the regulars walk out, so she restocks the team with a range of gay types—an army sergeant, a transsexual beauty queen, three screaming […]

1 hour 39 min • 1999

What if legendary perfectionist F.W. Murnau entered into a Faustian pact to cast an actual vampire in his 1922 horror classic Nosferatu? Skirting over what cinephiles would find intriguing in a Murnau biopic, director E. Elias Merhige poses this odd and somewhat pointless question in his revisionist take on German expressionism. Murnau (suitably effete ham […]

This Death in Venice set in the moral decay of Medellin, Colombia, has its faults, but it’s Barbet Schroeder’s most relevant and interesting film in over a decade. Based on an autobiographical novel by Fernando Vallejo, the film stars German Jaramillo as a gay exiled writer (reminiscent of Pasolini) who returns home to die, only […]

This 2001 historical piece, set in 1893, revolves around the languorous game of cricket, which makes the nearly four-hour running time appropriate. The title comes from a tithe paid by villagers to the local raja and to the British for protection. Indian superstar Aamir Khan, also the producer, plays a tempestuous villager who offends a […]