The tale of an unhappy wife whose online search for someone to put her out of her misery results in a torturous love affair.
Legendary painter, graffiti artist, poet and musician Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) was only 19 years old when he played the lead in Downtown 81, a striking “lost” film that chronicles the explosive early-1980s Manhattan art and music scene. Completed and theatrically released two decades later, it’s the story of a charismatic artist who attempts to sell a painting amidst the rappers, ...
The story follows Bob Hughes (Dillon) and his "family" of drug addicts as they travel across the US Pacific Northwest in the early 1970s, supporting their habit by robbing pharmacies and hospitals. A highlight of the film is an appearance by the original "junkie" William S. Burroughs as Tom, a defrocked priest who lectures Bob on the dangers of temptation. ...
David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen follow up 2005's A History Of Violence with another joint effort in Eastern Promises. The film takes place in rainswept London, with Mortensen effortlessly inhabiting the role of a chauffeur (named Nikolai) for the Russian Mafia. The stoic Nikolai works for restaurant owner and powerful Mafia kingpin Semyon and his ...
Michelange Quay’s extraordinary first feature invites us to abandon the rules of traditional storytelling and embrace a poetic cinematic language uniquely his own, as was evident in his ferocious short The Gospel Of The Creole Pig (ND/NF 2004). This seductive and radical film begins with a breathtaking aerial traveling shot over a tropical island where nature’s bounty vies with images of ...
Our Take: Part ethnographic art film, part race-conscious critique, Quay’s dreamlike, allegorical journey into the spiritual heart of postcolonial Haiti is chock full of symbolic images and theatrically striking set pieces. Don’t try to “figure it out.” Just look—and think.
Set in 1984 in Sandusky, Ohio, this popular comedy follows the coming-out of a naive 17-year-old teenager at exactly the moment when gender-bending pop stars like Boy George of Culture Club and the Annie Lennox of Eurythmics were flaunting androgynous images. As the youth goes through his first rites of gay passage, after being callously used by the slightly older ...
Unlike other nostalgic baseball films, director John Sayles's EIGHT MEN OUT explores one of the darkest moments in the history of the sport--1919's infamous Black Sox scandal, when eight players on the heavily favored Chicago White Sox agreed to throw the World Series.
Sergei Eisenstein, long regarded as a pioneer of film art, changed cinematic strategies halfway through his career. Upon returning from Hollywood and Mexico in the late 1930s, he left behind the densely edited style of celebrated silents like Battleship Potemkin and October, turning instead to historical sources, contradictory audiovisuals, and theatrical sets for his grandiose yet subversive sound-era work. This ...
Gus Van Sant's drifty, eloquent, and effortlessly poignant Elephant is loosely based on the massacre at Columbine High School. (On April 20, 1999 in Littleton, Colorado two 17-year-old boys fired semiautomatic weapons on their high school classmates, killing 13, injuring 25, and then taking their own lives.) Van Sant's film is set in Portland, Oregon and uses non-actors ...
In his mesmerizing debut feature, twenty - four - year - old director Louis Malle brought together the beauty of Jeanne Moreau, the camerawork of Henri Decae, and a now legendary score by Miles Davis. A touchstone of the careers of both its star and director, Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l'echafaud) is a richly atmospheric thriller of murder ...
Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura) is in charge of an elite police squad in Rio De Janeiro, and he's facing a crisis: He must lead a life-threatening mission deep within the violent Turano slums at the same time he is about to become a father. After years on the force, he has reached his threshold and must get out, but in ...
Academy Award winners Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush join Academy Award® nominee Clive Owen in a gripping historical thriller full of suspense, intrigue and adventure! When Queen Elizabeth's reign is threatened by ruthless familial betrayal and Spain's invading army, she and her shrewd advisor must act to safeguard to the lives of her people.
Our Take: Cate Blanchett is enthralling whether she’s channeling Bob Dylan or putting on airs as a 16th-century English regent. Here, she reinvigorates her triumphant 1998 turn as the Virgin Queen, this time facing down a political conspiracy. Clive Owen pops up, too, as cocky explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, while the lamentably under-sung Samantha Morton breathes prideful fire into her imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots.>
Herzog's film is based upon the true and mysterious story of Kaspar Hauser, a young man who suddenly appeared in Nuremberg in 1828, barely able to speak or walk, and bearing a strange note; he later explained that he had been held captive in a dungeon of some sort for his entire life that he could remember, and only recently ...
A film director and a script writer (performed by Lars von Trier and Niels Vørsel themselves) write a screenplay, in which an epidemic spreads about the whole world. Like the protagonist they do not notice, that a real epidemic is developing around them.
From acclaimed writer Charlie Kaufman and visionary director Michel Gondry comes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. An all-star ensemble cast shines in this comical and poignant look at breakups, breakdowns and breakthroughs. Joel (Jim Carrey) is stunned to discover that his girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet), has had their tumultuous relationship erased from her mind. Out of desperation, he contacts ...
Our Take: Every time you watch this film, you will discover something new. Carrey and Winslet give incredibly natural performances, and the witty but emotional script shows that Charlie Kaufman does indeed have a heart.
Director Lars von Trier’s stunning noir phantasmagoria stars Jean-Marc Barr as Leo, an American taking a job as a sleeping car conductor in postwar Germany. Narrator Max Von Sydow navigates Leo through a series of gradually more nightmarish encounters with a rogue’s gallery of shady passengers, including railroad heiress Katharina (Barbara Sukowa), who may be involved with neo-Nazi saboteurs. Von ...
Featuring a cast composed entirely of little people (the first time that had been done since the 1938 western The Terror of Tiny Town), Even Dwarfs Started Small is a brutal, uncompromising allegory about the consequences of imprisonment and rebellion.
As Ann reflects on one beautiful and life-changing weekend with the one true love of her life, her daughters come to their own understanding about the power of the past and the unbreakable bonds between mothers and daughters, family, and the loves of their lives.
Our Take: Meryl Streep, Vanessa Redgrave, Claire Danes, and Glenn Close all put in good work in this classy weepie about a blue-blood family, sensitively adapted from Susan Minot’s novel by Michael Cunningham (The Hours). As Redgrave’s deathbed memories gently remind us, some of life’s mistakes aren’t worth regretting.
Explicit Ills. Young love, drugs and poverty collide in the city of Philadelphia creating a beautiful tale of hope and the power of coming together.
The disintegration of a marriage is dissected in John Cassavetes' searing Faces. Shot in high - contrast 16mm black and white, the film follows the futile attempts of captain of industry Richard (John Marley) and his wife, Maria (Lynn Carlin), to escape the anguish of their empty marriage in the arms of others. Featuring astonishingly powerful, nervy performances from Marley, ...
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