art house cinema Archive

“At the end of 1879,  the doctors examining Dostoyevsky discovered that he had a progressive lung disease. On the morning of February 28, Dostoevsky told his wife: ”I know I must die today!..”  At 20:38 of the same day...
Hollywood has had an obsession with, well, Hollywood. While shooting in the Hollywood/L.A area  is an obviously smart business move, you may run into problems where your movies may be seen as something by-Hollywood-for-Hollywood that celebrates the industry. (An...
Takeshi Kitano’s Dolls (2002) weaves the stories of three couples together with a poignant thematic thread. Told in a series of overlapping vignettes Kitano artfully emphasizes the notion of love remaining constant despite an equally constant hardship. The introductory...
  I believe in two things. The power of reading, and the catharsis of writing. In my life thus far, these two universal truths have served to be invaluable beyond belief. And, while I do consider myself a decent...
Dostoevsky has never been far from Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz’s mind. Crime and Punishment figures prominently in Diaz’s debut feature, The Criminal of Barrio Concepcion (98), with the quietly impressive Raymond Bagatsing playing a version of Raskolnikov as a kidnapper...
VM Productions is ringing in the holiday and winter season by revisiting Claude Sautet’s Un Coeur En Hiver (A Heart in Winter) (1992). The French film, which competed in the 49th Venice International Film Festival, features excellent performances all...
This year at VM Productions we bid our final farewell to the wonderfully spooky Halloween season and celebrate “#Noirvember” (a celebration of Film Noir, throughout November) with Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow­ Up (1966), a work that combines traditional Film noir...
Two men; one from Melbourne, Australia and one originally from St. Petersburg, Russia. Melbourne and St. Petersburg have been “sister” cities since 1989. And the two men may be considered “brothers” in their individual re-imagining of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ into film. The...
From the dawn of film to the present day, there is very little that has not been written about. Stories about cowboys, stories about aliens… Hell, stories about cowboys AND aliens; and, love it or leave it, there is...
  Film is a reflection of the society from which it is created, and while glitzy special-effects and blockbuster titles dominate the summer, the real creativity goes on at hundreds of independent art-house production studios around the world. These studios...