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The Seventh Continent 1989
“Looking at the life we have lived straight in the eye makes any notion of the end easy to accept.”
A nauseating cloud of dread and despair hangs over The Seventh Continent, Michael Haneke’s masterful first film, a brutal interrogation of the monstrousness of modern urban living. With extraordinary precision and restraint, the film presents a bleak portrait of bourgeois life and examines the soul-deadening sickness that underlies the inevitable acceptance of alienation amid repetitive and meaningless routines enacted in…
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The Sacrifice 1986
“We are simply blind. We see nothing.”
In a cottage, Alexander, a retired actor and philosopher, celebrates a birthday with his family when it is announced that nuclear war has begun. As those gathered attempt to cope with the news, Alexander turns to God, to whom he offers a selfless sacrifice in exchange for restoring the world as it was before; he agrees to forego all that he has and leave all those he loves.
Dedicated to his son, Tarkovsky’s…
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Mirror 1975
“You should never return to ruins.”
An overwhelming sense of sadness and regret permeates Mirror, Andrei Tarkovsky's fourth film and a cathartic meditation on the impossible mourning of people, places, and events that are impermanent and thus lost through time.
This is illustrated through the poetic and abstract remembrances of Tarkovsky's alter ego, Alexei—a man in his forties. As he nears death, he recalls moments of his life and desires to relive them, wanting to feel again the radiance of…
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Nymphomaniac: Vol. II 2013
“It's my own fault. I'm just a bad human being.”
Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac is not a movie about sex; it is a deconstruction of human sexuality and, by proxy, a deconstruction of the human condition. It gets to the core of what makes humans tick and exposes the ways in which our complex and unnecessarily repressed relationship with sex manifests into internalized and externalized self-hatred and shame and perpetuates violent and misogynistic bigotry that alienates and degrades the oppressed.
It…
