Whilst traveling across America living off the money from a large inheritance, ex-fireman Nashe has a chance meeting with Pozzi, a professional gambler and card shark. Nashe agrees to fund the penniless Pozzi in a game of poker against two eccentric millionaires, Flower and Stone, in an attempt to regain some of his spent fortune. His gamble has unforeseen and bizarre consequences for both himself and Pozzi. This film is an almost exact translation of the novel by Paul Auster. —Stewart Kristiansen
Philip Haas (born 1954) is an American artist, screenwriter and filmmaker, perhaps best known for his 1995 film Angels and Insects.
He began his career as a documentary film maker, lensing ten profiles of unusual artists through the 1980s with the theme “Magicians of the Earth.”Over the years he has tended to work closely with his wife, Belinda Haas, who shares credit as writer on several of his films. In 2000 they worked on a biographical film on the silent film star Louise Brooks. That project has yet to come to fruition.
His feature film Angels and Insects, set in Victorian England, was nominated for an Academy Award, The Blood Oranges which featured Sheryl Lee, an adaptation of the W. Somerset Maugham novel, Up at the Villa, and The Situation, a political thriller released in 2006. Other feature films include the highly regarded The Music of Chance (1993), and Up at the Villa, starring Sean Penn, Anne Bancroft and Kristin Scott Thomas.
In 2008 the Sonnabend… read more
Paul Auster, one of America’s most gifted living novelists, has always written works which could easily be translated to the silver screen. The New York Trilogy, for one, could easily find kinship… read review