Wednesday, October 7th – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

Let the Right One In

2008 – Sweden – Directed by Tomas Alfredson

The vampire coming-of-age movie ‘Let The Right One In’ begins and ends with snow. Incessant, bleak, snow. Falling against a backdrop of impenetrable night. The film is a genre movie by way of Ingmar Bergman. It’s a contemplative, deliberately-paced meditation on loneliness, adolescence, friendship and adulthood. In terms of approach, the film by director Tomas Alfredson de-romanticizes the vampire genre to an extreme degree, one not seen, perhaps, since George A. Romero’s ‘Martin’ in 1976. – John Muir (Reflections on Film)

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Thursday, October 15th – SUL 353 YJean Chambers Hall @ 6:30pm

Tesis

1995 – Spain – Directed by Alejandro Amenabar

‘Tesis’ is a film about a film student writing an assignment on violence on film, which is appropriate because Tesis is itself, an assignment written by Alejandro Amenábar on violence and the state of the Spanish film industry. The film is a quietly creepy psychological thriller about a young college student, Ángela, investigating the social fascination with sensational violence for her thesis project. In her search for violent video footage, she stumbles onto what may be a real live snuff film, a videotape that her professor was watching before his untimely death. Amenabar’s skill at weaving a paranoid world where evil may lurk behind every friendly face is undeniable. – (FilmBug.com)

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Wednesday, October 21st – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

Oldboy

2003 – South Korea – Directed by Park Chan-wook

‘Oh Dae-su has been locked up for 15 years without once seeing another living person. ‘Oldboy’ watches him objectively, asking no sympathy, standing outside his plight. When he suddenly finds himself freed from his bizarre captivity 15 years later, he is a different person, focused on revenge. In its sexuality and violence, this is the kind of movie that can no longer easily be made in the United States; the standards of a puritanical minority make studios unwilling to produce films that might face uncertain distribution. But content does not make a movie good or bad — it is merely what it is about. ‘Oldboy’ is a powerful film not because of what it depicts, but because of the depths of the human heart which it strips bare. – Roger Ebert

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Thursday, October 29th – SUL 353 YJean Chambers Hall @ 6:30pm

Onibaba

1964 – Japan – Directed by Kaneto Shindo

The premise of ‘Onibaba’ has the ring of folklore: in feudal Japan, two women – a mother and her daughter-in-law – manage their hardscrabble existence on a marshy plain by luring errant samurai to their deaths and selling off their wear. Onibaba shows less interest in laying bare its meanings than in offering the occasion for the viewers’ meditations on life, existence, and whatever lies below. Kiyomi Kuroda’s black-and-white cinematography haunts as much as the proceedings themselves, particularly in the picture’s eerie nighttime passages. And Hikaru Hayashi’s unnerving score has a fever to it equal to the strangest images on-screen. – Jake Euker (filmcrtic.com)