The Silence (2010)

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Directed and scripted by Swiss filmmaker Baran bo Odan from Jan Costin Wagner's 2007 novel, The Silence stylishly blends mystery and drama as it evokes two different timeframes in rural Germany: a hot, 1986 summer, in which a young girl named Pia is raped and murdered whilst riding her bicycle through a wheat field, and, 23 years later, when another girl goes missing in identical circumstances. Told from the point of view of perpetrators, investigating detectives and the parents of both victims, it's a multi-threaded narrative vaguely reminiscent of 2003's Lantana, with its focus on the changing intimacies of a small community whose dormant traumas, both individual and collective, are brought forth.

Hugo (2011)

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As soon as I came out of Hugo on Tuesday I sent the following text message to several friends: "HUGO is unbearably long, sugary, romantic, fantastical, and terribly written. It has certain appeals but little edge. I saw it in 2d, and am not interested in a dramatically weak exercise to showcase how good '3d can be'. A celebration of [Méliès]'s kind of cinema, it betrays something we've known about Scorsese for years, namely that he has little to say about the world, and fancies cinema as something that allows us to escape from it. That's fair and dandy, of course, but he oughtn't be celebrated as much else." Days later, none of these sentiments have diminished.

The Turin Horse (2011)

Srini here

Hungarian director Bela Tarr’s (supposed) final film, The Turin Horse, fulfilled my expectations of it in many ways. Of all the films of his that I have watched, I keep returning to the seven hour epic, Sátántangó (1994) the most. Not so much in terms of number of times I have watched the film, but in terms of how often I think about it. The Turin Horse has many things in common with that film thematically and aesthetically, but there are significant differences.

#FF @winter_reading

Christmas rush: The French Connection, 1971

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If I may begin with a cliché, it seems only five minutes ago when I saw The Tree of Life; it doesn't seem much longer than that when I saw The King's Speech. Early July and early January were the corresponding dates respectively - and now December is upon us!