Summary:

McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) escapes work on a prison farm by feigning mental illness, but he finds himself in a far more coercive institution than the one he left behind. The other men, both sane and insane, are just like him: they hide in the locked ward from the law, their families, or the despair of their own lives.

McMurphy animates the dull monotony with fractious games, pranks, and excursions, but he encounters stiff opposition from the head nurse, Mildred Ratched (Louise Fletcher), whose system provides her with pills and electroshock to maintain control. When the nurse discovers that McMurphy has smuggled two women into the ward, she threatens to tell the mother of young Billy (Brad Dourif). Billy commits suicide and an enraged McMurphy tries to strangle Ratched. McMurphy is lobotomized and returned to the ward only to be smothered by his friend Bromden, who then escapes.

View full annotation

Summary:

In 1954, a United States Marshal (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner (Mark Ruffalo) take the ferry to Ashecliff Hospital, a forbidding asylum for the criminally insane located on Shutter Island.  Their mission is to investigate the disappearance of an inmate who has apparently escaped without a trace.  Under the supervision of the chief psychiatrist, Dr John Cawley (Ben Kingsley), they become increasingly entwined in a twisting tale of fear and suspicion.

View full annotation

Summary:

Sixty-year old Martha DeClerq cares for her mentally disabled sister, Pauline (Dora van der Groen), in a small town between Brussels and the seaside. Pauline cannot feed herself, tie her shoes, or speak in full sentences; she is stubborn, loving, occasionally mischievous, and particularly devoted to her sister, Paulette (Ann Petersen), who owns a small, tidy shop in town. Cecile (Rosemarie Bergmans), the youngest sister, lives in Brussels with a French intellectual, Albert, and has little contact with her siblings.

When Martha dies, her will stipulates that her estate be split equally between the three sisters, only if Paulette and Cecile care for Pauline themselves. They agree to share Pauline’s care. Although the sisters are fond of Pauline, their relationship with her is awkward and tentative. Initially, Paulette brings Pauline home, and they negotiate the new living arrangements with a mixture of embarrassment and kindness, frustration and delight. When the burden of caring for her sister becomes overwhelming, Pauline is deposited in Brussels at Cecile’s tiny, meticulously kept apartment. When these arrangements become unworkable, Pauline is eventually institutionalized.

View full annotation

Summary:

This annotation is based upon the version presented at The Mint Theatre in New York City in 2010, translated and directed by Gus Kaikkonnen.  It featured Thomas M. Hammond as Dr Knock and Patrick Husted as Dr Parpalaid, with Chris Mixon, Scott Barrow, and Patti Perkins in supporting roles.

A middle-aged but recently licensed physician, one Dr Knock, has arrived in rural France to take over a practice purchased from the genial old country doctor, Dr Paraplaid.  Much to Dr Knock's surprise, he discovers that Dr Paraplaid has done very little over the past three decades, seeing only a few patients a week and enjoying much of the time playing pool, riding around in his jalopy, and admiring the countryside.  Feeling slightly cheated, Dr Knock realizes that the practice he has purchased at some expense amounts to very little at all. He is, however, an ambitious man.  He did not become a licensed physician in the eager flush of late adolescence but as a man of the world, or rather, a man of the entreprenurial modern world where opportunities are seized and technology is transformative.  

Once Dr Paraplaid has gone, Dr Knock promptly sets about employing the town crier to advertise his practice so that the entire valley knows he is there.  He meets up with the local school teacher and the pharmacist, enlisting them as allies.  With everybody he encounters, he smilingly and then sharply insists that unlike Dr Paraplaid, he will not go by "Monsieur" but by "Doctor".  And when he actually opens the office, he begins by offering free consultations.  Of course, he always seems to find something wrong, elaborately explaining the aches, pains, and illnesses he discovers (or induces), but the free consultations, like free "samples" are designed to create grateful customers.  Invariably, they learn that the cost of the treatment is commensurate with the exact maximum amount they could pay.  And thus, Dr Knock takes a placid, lazy practice and builds up an expanding medical business. 

View full annotation

Summary:

This is an imaginative documentary film by director-producer Su Friedrich, of her experiences with health problems, physicians, the health-care system, and how these affected her relationship with her female partner over a period of more than two decades. The narrator-subject takes us through her numerous surgeries, hormonal (prolactin) imbalance, and her growing disenchantment with the traditional health-care system.

She films herself: getting dressed into the "humiliating" paper garb prior to being examined by her physician; in exchanges with her various physicians; reading from medical texts and self-help books as she tries to understand her condition(s); taking t'ai chi classes and preparing herbal potions; gardening and doing needle work. As the film ends, she is grappling with the prospect of menopause, but she feels that she has taken charge of her body and of her own care, that she tends herself as she tends her garden.

View full annotation

Summary:

Driving-school instructor Marco (Marcello Mastroianni) feels unwell, especially in the mornings; his stomach swells, and he develops emotional lability. His wife, the hairdresser Irène (Catherine Deneuve), is sympathetic – but only to a point--and insists he seek help.

View full annotation

Summary:

In 1818, the newly trained physician, John Keats (1795-1821) (Ben Wishaw) is living with his well-off friend, Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), and they are trying to devote themselves to the art of writing. Keats cannot abide the idea of having to practice medicine. 

The uneducated, fashion-conscious Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), notices Keats, moved by the care that he bestows on his dying brother. She offers a gift of a beautifully embroidered pillow, which soon finds it way into the lad’s coffin.

Affected by the young man’s death and the mystery of poetry, Fanny flings herself at Keats, undeterred by Brown’s open disapproval of her lack of class, education and bearing. Flattering his work, she asks Keats for lessons in literature and then reveals herself to a reasonable judge of poetry. In spite of himself Keats is drawn to her and declares his love.

But the poet’s health is fragile. Funds are raised to send him to Italy, and Keats announces that he must go, because his friends have decided. He seems to know that he will die. Fanny is brave and hopeful. Chastened, Charles Brown comes to Fanny’s home to announce the death of Keats in Rome.

View full annotation

Summary:

Séraphine (Yolande Moreau) is a housekeeper, ill-treated by her employers, but she finds solace in painting naïve images of flowers, fruit, and birds, using vivid colours that she makes herself from plants and animals. Her mistress rejects the art as junk.

Séraphine sympathizes with the apparent loneliness of the German tenant Uhde (Ulrich Tukur) who is a connaisseur of art. He admires one of her tableaux and is astonished to discover that the artist is his housekeeper. He encourages her and buys some paintings.  But war in 1914 forces him to return to Germany.

Spiralling downward deeper into poverty and mental alienation, Séraphine continues to paint works that grow larger, bolder, and more colorful. Finally her bizarre behavior leads to her arrest and commital in an insane asylum, and her painting ceases.

Uhde eventually returns to France and organizes the first Naïve Art exhibition featuring work by Henri Rousseau and Séraphine. But only years later does he bother to look for her. She is miserable. He arranges for her to be given a more comfortable room, but he doesn’t speak to her and she never paints again.

View full annotation

Summary:

Some 40 years after a ceasefire that ended the Cylon wars, the 12 human colonies across the galaxy have been lulled into a state of calm complacence.  This is abruptly interrupted by a Cylon attack that annihilates billions of humans, leaving only 50,000 survivors in a small fleet of ships, led by the one remaining ship from the Colonial Fleet, the Battlestar Galactica.  Fleeing the Cylons, they set out to find the legendary 13th Colony: Earth.

View full annotation

Summary:

An animated documentary is the unlikely category assigned by producer/director/writer Ari Folman to this distinguished film.  In broad strokes the film is a memory-recovery narrative, the director’s pursuit to fill in the "black holes" in his recollection of the days, during the 1982 Lebanon War, surrounding the massacres at the Palestinian Refugee Camps of Sabra and Shatila by Christian supporters of the assassinated Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayal.  While the film finds its climax in the Palestinian genocide, along the way it examines the experience of ordinary Israeli soldiers in richly provocative storytelling –as these accounts are textured by a twenty-year time lapse, which offers perspective, insight, telling gaps, and small revelations, as, for example, when we learn that one character abandoned his ambitions to be a scientist after the war, left Israel to grow wealthy selling falafel in The Netherlands.

Folman recounts the soldiers’ narratives of disorientation, terror and loss by representing not only their experiences, but their dreams, hallucinations, distorted memories –all of which are rendered with exquisite power, mostly in vividly nightmarish cut-out animation. Added to these narratives are interviews with a psychologist, a trauma expert, a reporter who was on the scene at the refugee camps and others –adding texture and commentary to an already multi-layered story.

This films provides a fresh engagement with issues of memory and trauma, and explores the dynamics between the trauma of a nation –not only a war but the deep unexamined scar of “indirect responsibility” for a genocide— and the trauma of an individual soldier.  Representing the soldier’s war as a lonely, companionless and even passive experience, the film works to undermine a host of cinematic conventions. The viewer becomes alert to the paradox that the animation has the estranging effect of making what it recounts more “real” through its access to characters’ interior states.

View full annotation