News

Ulrich Seidl's Paradise: Love is playing through January 26 and Paradise: Faith is playing through February 10 on Mubi in the U.S..

***

Above: Maria (Maria Hofstätter) in Paradise: Faith.

Think of the silent film star Pearl White, decamped and tuned up in a boxy frame lit through the middle, giggling or screaming or whispering her perils against a few dozen uncomprehending faces. Split into three, she becomes, in Ulrich Seidl’s vision of her, a botched vigilante of her own wayward desires, long unregulated and frayed, whether by age (Teresa, the giggler on holiday in Paradise: Love), chastity (Anna Maria, the gnarled scream of Paradise: Faith), or by size (the impressionable and adolescent Melanie, the whisperer of Paradise: Hope). Seidl’s three films are really one continuous achievement in the art of corporeal crisis management; taken together, they make a fleshy, nested triumvirate with impeccable feline intuition.

The middle-aged Teresa...

Grand Finale: Seidl’s Final Chapter Strikes Surprisingly Tender Notes

With Paradise: Hope, the crowning chapter of Austrian auteur Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise Trilogy, the provocateur surprises us with perhaps the only way he possibly could after two emotionally grueling chapters—a stroke of tenderness. That’s not to say that Hope is less uncomfortable or bleak as Love and Faith, but for once his addendum seems less harshly skewed, even if our lead character’s illusion of hope is just as cursory. A thrillingly good equal to its sister films, Seidl tantalizes here by subverting our expectations based on his previous work, giving us a modestly sweet afterglow after we’ve gnawed our way through the sour and sublime.

While her mom is off in Kenya exploring sex tourism and her aunt Anna Maria suffers through a summer rendezvous with religion, thirteen year old Melanie (Melanie Lenz), known as Millie to her friends,...

Paradise: Hope (Paradies: Hoffnung) Strand Releasing Reviewed for Shockya by Harvey Karten. Data-based on RottenTomatoes.com Grade: B Director: Ulrich Seidl Screenwriter: Ulrich Seidl, Veronika Franz Cast: Melanie Lenz, Verena Lehbauer, Joseph Lorenz Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 11/ Opens: December 17, 2013 in NY It’s great to be a teen. It’s miserable to be a teen. Kids between the ages of 13 and 19 have more energy than they will likely have when they get older, but their brains are not fully developed and, as neurologists tell us, people are not capable of making entirely ethical choices until that development comes at about the age of twenty-five. “Paradise: Hope,” the [ Read More ]

The post Paradise: Hope Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

Ahead of its Dec. 17 limited release, Strand Releasing has posted the trailer for "Paradise: Hope," Ulrich Seidl's third and final installment in his "Paradise" trilogy, which kicked off last year with the Cannes-competing "Paradise: Love" followed by "Paradise: Faith." This third film, which Indiewire's Eric Kohn called the most "warm-hearted" of the bunch, centers on an overweight teen (Melanie Lenz), as she endures the rigorous curriculum of a diet camp and falls in love with her much older doctor (Joseph Lorenz). Watch the trailer below:...

Three features about three women from one family make up the remarkable Paradise Trilogy, a triptych of award-winning European arthouse dramas from the celebrated (if controversial) Austrian director Ulrich Seidl (Import/Export). To celebrate the DVD release of this critically acclaimed series, we have Three copies of Seidl's beautifully packaged Paradise Trilogy box set to give away to a our world cinema-loving army of readers, courtesy of our friends at esteemed independent UK distributor Soda Pictures. This is an exclusive competition for our Facebook and Twitter fans, so if you haven't already, 'Like' us at facebook.com/CineVueUK or follow us @CineVue before answering the question below.

The first in the trio, Paradise: Love centres on a middle-aged woman, Teresa (Margarete Tiesel), who travels to Kenya on a sex-tourism journey. Her trip has one goal: carnal satisfaction. Paradise: Faith follows devout Catholic Anna Maria (Maria Hofstätter) and her draconian spiritual journey,...

Paradise: Hope

Written by Ulrich Seidl and Veronika Franz

Directed by Ulrich Seidl

Austria/France/Germany, 2013

Until Paradise: Love premiered at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, Austrian director Ulrich Seidl was a relatively unknown figure in the film world. Since then, he has released two more Paradise films to make up a trilogy with Love: Faith and this year’s Hope. With the release of the three films, Seidl has quickly propelled himself into art cinema stardom, earning comparisons to venerable filmmakers like his fellow Austrian Michael Haneke.

The films tell the story of three individual women from the same family. In Love, 50-year old Teresa travels to Kenya as a sex tourist. In Faith, Anna Maria’s Catholic faith and steadfastness is tested by various people around her. Finally, in Hope, we follow Anna Maria’s daughter Melanie (Melanie Lenz) as she goes to spend her summer at a diet camp.

★★☆☆☆ Bringing Austrian director Ulrich Seidl's painfully naturalistic Paradise trilogy to a somewhat dismal dénouement, Paradise: Hope (Paradies: Hoffnung, 2013) sees Melanie (Melanie Lenz) - daughter of Love lead Teresa - packed off to fat camp to shed some excess pounds. Drawn in to a troubling relationship with the camp's director, Seidl once again throws caution to the wind and clinically presents another social scenario where misery and heartache seem the only possible outcomes. Far weaker than the two previous chapters, Hope gropes hopelessly for provocation, but instead finds only tedious, highfalutin banality.

With her mother off holidaying as a sex tourist on the Kenyan coast, Melanie leaves the deeply religious environs of her missionary auntie Anna Marie's house (see Paradise: Faith) for a teenage diet camp situated on the outskirts of an unnamed Austrian town. Placed in a room with three other like-minded girls of a similar age, Melanie...

Only God Forgives | The Heat | Paradise: Hope | The Conjuring | Red 2 | My Father And The Man In Black | From Up On Poppy Hill | The Smurfs 2 | Heaven's Gate

Only God Forgives (18)

(Nicolas Winding Refn, 2013, Fra/Thai/Us/Swe) Ryan Gosling, Kristin Scott Thomas, Vithaya Pansringarm, Tom Burke. 90 mins

The Drive dream team are back together in Bangkok, but those hoping for a cute Gosling droolathon will be disappointed. This is more a cinematic slab of red meat: lean, raw, bloody and blunt, but with much to savour. Executed with great formal rigour, it's a stylised revenge story centred on Gosling's almost mute gangster, his terrifying mother (Scott Thomas) and an even more terrifying Thai cop (Pansringarm).

The Heat (15)

(Paul Feig, 2013, Us) Sandra Bullock, Melissa McCarthy, Demián Bichir. 117 mins

Buddy sparks inevitably fly when Bullock's uptight FBI agent is partnered with McCarthy's foul-mouthed Boston cop, in a comedy that serves up plenty of female-oriented crudity,...

If you’ve come this far into the Ulrich Seidl Paradise trilogy, you’ll be aware that this final instalment is going to make for intense, difficult viewing – and no surprises, it does just that. Continuing with this theme, Paradise: Hope is yet another of the three pictures to implement a somewhat ironic tone to what is a supposedly joyous word, as conversely, the thing this film is lacking in most heavily, is hope itself.

Tying in to both of the first two titles, when our protagonist from the first picture ‘Love’ travels to Kenya on holiday, she leaves behind her overweight teenage daughter Melanie (Melanie Lenz), who is taken to an Austrian fat camp by our lead role in the second feature ‘Faith’. Once she arrives, she is put through a series of vigorous fitness regimes, where she spends her days attempting to get into shape. While she candidly discusses sex with her roommates,...

Paradise: Hope

Director: Ulrich Seidl

Writer(s): Seidl & Veronika Franz

Producers: Seidl, Christine Ruppert, Philippe Bober

U.S. Distributor: Strand Releasing

Cast: Melanie Lenz, Verena Lehbauer, Joseph Lorenz, Michael Thomas, Vivian Bartsch

We’re waiting for a full retrospective on the director – we’ve only seen a small sampling of his work with Dog Days and Import/Export but we get a true sense of Ulrich Seidl’s works as a docu filmmaker. Our Nicholas Bell was thoroughly impressed (review) by Paradise: Faith, while I found Paradise: Love (the first part of the trilogy) suffered from its lengthy run-time but it was certainly candid and unforgettable sampling of ugly tourism.

Gist: Hope, the third film in the Paradise Trilogy, tells the story of the 13-year-old Melanie. While her mother (Teresa) travels to Kenya, Melanie spends her holiday in the Austrian countryside at a strict diet camp for overweight teenagers.