News

Aki Kaurismäki's Fallen Leaves is screening exclusively on Mubi in many countries.Fallen Leaves.There’s a moment early in Aki Kaurismäki’s latest film, Fallen Leaves (2023), that will surely tug at the heartstrings of shy lovers everywhere. A man, Holappa (played by Jussi Vatanen), and a woman, Ansa (Alma Pöysti), sit across from each other in a bar. Between them, his friend tries vainly to flirt with hers, getting nowhere, but Holappa and Ansa themselves do not speak, and instead merely stare meekly into their drinks, the gap of a few meters opening up like a yawning chasm. Then, for just a moment, Holappa looks up from his beer and their eyes meet. And as they do, the first cascading piano chords of Franz Schubert’s “Serenade” are heard and a besuited man takes the karaoke stage to start singing: “Softly my songs plead / through the night for...

It’s time for last orders at Corona, Dubrovnik and Kafe Mockba, as the legendary Helsinki complex, co-owned by Finland’s best known directors, will close down for good in June. After undergoing complete renovation, the building on Eerikinkatu will then be turned into a hotel.

The decision to serve eviction notices to one of Helsinki’s most beloved spots provoked a general outcry. Sadly, it is now final, with Andorra Culture and Entertainment Center – consisting of Corona Bar, Dubrovnik and Kafe Mockba, as well as movie theatre Kino Andorra – shutting down its long-serving doors already in June. “There was nothing to be done” – explains Nuppu Koivu, who has been working there for 17 years. Scoring a part of a waitress in Aki Kaurismäki Berlin Silver Bear-winner “The Other Side of Hope” somewhere along the way. “The owners of the building decided not to renew our contract, there will be a...

Aki Kaurismäki. Photo courtesy of Janus Films.Watching an Aki Kaurismäki film can feel like dropping in on a world just out of step with our own. All the elements are there—the streets, the buildings, the people (and their docile dogs). But something is always off. A man’s desk is taken away while he’s still sitting at it to indicate he’s been laid off. A woman asks a pharmacist what rat poison does. “It kills,” the pharmacist says blankly. It’s as if the Finnish filmmaker is recreating a version of planet Earth with all the nuance removed. These highly orchestrated facsimiles should feel foreign, but their simplicity and dry humor instead allows for a familiarity to sink in. His universe is in fact far more relatable—and far more human—than meets the eye. Although he’s gained a reputation as a comically cynical auteur,...

Chicago – What is amazing about the texture of this 1992 film version of the 1848 Henri Murger novel, “La Vie de Bohéme,” is that it looks like it could have been filmed during the French New Wave period of the late 1950s/early ‘60s. The Criterion Collection offers a stunning new Blu-ray transfer of a now classic adaptation.

Rating: 4.5/5.0

Directed by Aki Kaurismäki (“Le Havre”), a Finnish filmmaker, but co-produced by France, Italy and Sweden as well, this version of “La Vie de Bohéme” – there have been over a dozen versions, including the opera “La Bohéme” and the Broadway musical “Rent” – has an international cast and beguiling black & white cinematography by Timo Salminen. It plays like a verité documentary, as all of the performers have such a naturalistic virtue in their portrayals. They are desperate but free, and even a woman searching for love cannot resist their slovenly grace. Each ne’er...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Jan. 21, 2014

Price: Blu-ray/DVD Combo $39.95

Studio: Criterion

A group of impoverished, outcast artists living the bohemian life in Paris in La vie de bohème.

The 1992 film La vie de bohème by Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki (Le Havre, Leningrad Cowboys Go America) is a deadpan tragic-comedy about a group of impoverished, outcast artists living the bohemian life in Paris.

Based on stories from Henri Murger’s influential mid nineteenth-century book Scènes de la vie de bohème (the basis for the opera La bohème), the film features a marvelous trio of Kaurismäki regulars, André Wilms, Matti Pellonpää, and Karl Väänänen, as a poet, painter, and composer who scrape by together, sharing in life’s daily absurdities.

Gorgeously shot in black and white, La vie de bohème is a vibrantly scrappy rendition of a beloved tale and one of Kaurismäki’s most beguiling works.

Presented in French with English subtitles,...

MoMA’s film exhibitions for June include a look at the influence of melodrama and soap opera on cinema, as well as some of Finland’s best documentaries.

Good to note is that the price of a film ticket may be applied toward the price of a Museum admission ticket with the presentation of the film ticket stub within 30 days of the date on the stub!

June 4-19, 2011: Drama Queen: The Soap Opera in Experimental Cinema

Through filmmakers such as Eija- Liisa Ahtila, Dara Birnbaum, Stan Brakhage, Ximena Cuevas, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Hollis Frampton, George Kuchar, Kalup Linzy, Tony Oursler, Yvonne Rainer, Douglas Sirk, Andy Warhol, and John Waters, “Drama Queen” tackles the cinematic reinvention, deconstruction and parodying of melodrama within experimental filmmaking.

The series’ titles include:

Far from Heaven. 2002. USA. Written and directed by Todd Haynes. With Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid, Dennis Haysbert, Patricia Clarkson. 107 min.

Coming Apart.

MoMA’s film exhibitions for June include a look at the influence of melodrama and soap opera on cinema, as well as some of Finland’s best documentaries.

Good to note is that the price of a film ticket may be applied toward the price of a Museum admission ticket with the presentation of the film ticket stub within 30 days of the date on the stub!

June 4-19, 2011: Drama Queen: The Soap Opera in Experimental Cinema

Through filmmakers such as Eija- Liisa Ahtila, Dara Birnbaum, Stan Brakhage, Ximena Cuevas, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Hollis Frampton, George Kuchar, Kalup Linzy, Tony Oursler, Yvonne Rainer, Douglas Sirk, Andy Warhol, and John Waters, “Drama Queen” tackles the cinematic reinvention, deconstruction and parodying of melodrama within experimental filmmaking.

The series’ titles include:

Far from Heaven. 2002. USA. Written and directed by Todd Haynes. With Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid, Dennis Haysbert, Patricia Clarkson. 107 min.

Coming Apart.

When it comes to ranking my favorite months of the year, there are none that I enjoy bidding good riddance to more than February. Sure, it’s a short month that signifies events I look forward to, but February’s passing means that better times (i.e. the end of winter) is soon on its way. But early March typically doesn’t offer much to confirm my impression (maybe more like wishful thinking) that spring is in the air, and this weekend here at my home in West Michigan very much fit that pattern as a slab of dull grey mediocrity hung low overhead, drizzling a sullen slushy mix of rain and snow that’s been giving my basement sump pump a pretty thorough workout over the past several days. Such mundane, pedestrian observations of my personal life may seem irrelevant to a movie review, but the conditions I described...

It's a little strange to single out three of Aki Kaurismäki's earliest films as his "proletariat trilogy"; that's akin to roping a few Alfred Hitchcock movies into a "suspense trilogy." The Finnish director has always made the outcast and downtrodden his people, and his eccentric, minimalist tragicomedies speak to their struggles and honor their dreams. Each film in the "proletariat trilogy," now collected under Criterion's stripped-down Eclipse line, takes a different tack (romantic comedy, deadpan crime drama, revenge), but all are committed to showing how the working poor scrape together a living on factory lines, in trash pickups, and the odd port job. Kaurismäki's third film, 1986's Shadows In Paradise, created a solid prototype for many projects to follow—a short, bleak, yet oddly hopeful and sweet-natured tale that incorporates a soundtrack loaded with vintage American blues, Finnish pop music, and jukebox rock 'n' roll. Matti Pellonpää and Kati Outinen,...

By Michael Atkinson

When we first met Aki Kaurismäki, in 1989 when "Ariel" had its run as probably the first Finnish film to play theatrically in America since Jörn Donner's "Portraits of Women" (1970), we more or less fell in love. Lost in the hollow skull of the Reagan-Bush '80s, suffering the ascension of Spielberg and Ivan Reitman and Shane Black, wondering what remote atoll international art cinema had escaped to, and more or less completely ignorant of Finnish life, we had every reason to embrace this last of the red hot deadpan existentialists, whose films somehow altered the cellular structure of working class depression and turned it into cool comedy. His distinctively bittersweet dyspepsia established Kaurismäki, in a thick run of films that included "Leningrad Cowboys Go America" (1989), "The Match Factory Girl" (1990) and "La Vie de Bohème" (1992), as a new arthouse brand name, a kind of vodka-weary Bresson-meets-Tati.

Kaurismäki...