2001-2010

Quote:
On the Oregon Trail in 1845, three couples travel in covered wagons with slippery guide Stephen Meek (an unrecognizable Bruce Greenwood), but days pass, and water remains elusive. Emily (Michelle Williams, who anchored Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy) laments that “he’s gotten in over his head.” Meek insists that relief lies around the next ridge, but that’s never the case, until an alkaline lake appears. Unfortunately, it’s unsuitable for drinking, so they push on. Always attuned to the rhythms of nature, Reichardt has produced a meditative take on the genre that feels more enigmatic than most–with the possible exception of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man–even if the period details always look right. With her focus on faded calico dresses and vast aquamarine skies, Meek’s Cutoff offers a beautiful vision of harsh times.Read More »

PLOT: The second part of Aki Kaurismaki “Finland” trilogy, the film follows a man who arrives in Helsinki and gets beaten up so severely he develops amnesia. Unable to remember his name or anything from his past life, he cannot get a job or an apartment, so he starts living on the outskirts of the city and slowly starts putting his life back on track.Read More »

Description
This anthology of eroticism from the 1920’s features a collection of vignettes that were shown in the projection rooms of famous Parisian bordellos such as the Chabanais, the Panier Fleuri, the Sphinx and the Temple of Venus.

If you’re familiar with Cult Epics’ Vintage Erotica series, you get an idea of what it’s all about. However, contrary to what we could see in the middle of the century—see anno 1950—where the films were making a slight effort at developing exposition, here the settings are as basic as possible, usually limited to a bed where one to three protagonists are experimenting with various positions and toys. This is as pornographic as smut can be and the faded black and white look gives it a creepier look, at the exception of one segment where the contrast is so high it becomes almost—unintentionally—artistic.Read More »

Tehran is a large village near the city of Rey, full of gardens and fruit trees.  Its inhabitants live in anthill-like underground holes.  The village’s several districts are constantly at war.  Tehranis’ main occupations are theft and crime, though the king pretends they are subject to him.  They grow excellent fruits, notably an excellent pomegranate, which is found only in Tehran.
– Asar-o-Lblab, 1241 A.D
Tehran Has No More Pomegranates! is a postmodern documentary that is as witty and engaging as it is informative.  The style of the film is fun and very visual, with the director, Massoud Bakhshi, using incredible archival footage, an original visual approach and terrific soundtrack that takes us through 150 years of Tehran’s history. Onscreen, Bakhshi may fail to complete his film, but he succeeds in both documenting Tehran’s history and entertaining us with its poignant contradictions.Read More »

Cult Epics presents all nineteen shorts contained in this collection in their original aspect ratios. The shorts where originally filmed on 8mm, 9.5mm and 16mm film stock. The quality of each short varies with nicks, scratches, fading and various other print damage cropping up through out. The quality of these shorts is about on par with most silent films from this era that have been released on DVD. What I find most amazing of all is that these shorts have even survived through the years as these films range from seventy five to eighty five years old so print damage is expected. These shorts are without any spoken dialog. Each one is accompanied by music which sounds clean and free of any major sound defects. The French titles cards for these silent shorts have not been translated so no subtitles have been included for this release. Read More »

Sam, a Hong Kong cop, has busted crime lord Night. Ann, Sam’s girlfriend, is the prosecuting witness. Night is jailed for five years. On a trip to Paris, Ann is killed by an assassin. Sam quits the force and two years later, runs a bar on Lamma Island with his uncles. One day, a Japanese tourist who looks exactly like Ann arrives. Sam and the lady soon fall in love. However, that love is shortened when she holds a dark past and after a successful appeal, Night is back and out for revenge.Read More »

Quote:
After a bull is killed in a bullfight, its body parts are transported across Spain, France, Italy and Belgium. The bull’s parts fall into the wide variety of people, including: an Italian actress selling the bones in a supermarket promotion, a Spanish woman who dines on its steaks, a little girl in France who imagines a world where animals are much larger than humans, and a taxidermist whose wife is simultaneously giving birth to quintuplets.Read More »

Quote:
A remarkable expression of the post-documentary moment that seems to be defining a new major stage in contemporary world cinema…The film skillfully defies any neo-realist appearances by using its extreme restraint of story, sound, and dialogue not to create a contemplative minimalism but rather to sustain a steadily increasing yet ambiguous tension. The Anchorage unfolds a series of pointed yet irresolvable appeals to specific genre expectations—of the horror film, the melodrama, the Bergmanian art film—investing objects and the film’s few characters with a mysterious aura.Read More »

A mirror joins two worlds, modern-day Bangkok and Bangkok under Rama IV, together. Maneechan, a diplomat investigating recently uncovered documents in France concerning ancient Thailand, learns the story behind them first-hand as she travels back in time through the mirror.Read More »