Arthouse

Su Friedrich continues her ongoing quest to film the battleground of family life. Her mother plays the lead, kicking and protesting against being taken to an “independent living” facility. Friedrich and her two siblings fill out the supporting roles—cajoling, comforting, and freaking out.

One of the great and most personal experimental filmmakers, we are proud that Su Friedrich is premiering her latest work here. It is a portrait of the artist’s relationship with her aging mother—making it a follow-up to The Ties That Bind—a wry, turbulent documentary of the complexities of family.Read More »

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Three emotionally abused people from the fringes of society get locked in a convoluted love triangle. Yuu, a Catholic boy searching for true love ends up taking erotic photographs of women in public until he discovers Yoko, whom he sees as his Virgin Mary. Yoko, an antifamily, misandristic girl finds that her foster mother will be marrying Yuu’s father. Koike, an “original sinner”, coordinates a plan to convert Yuu’s family to her cult. Under her careful direction, their lives come crashing together in one fateful street fight.Read More »

Following the suicide of his beloved brother and deaths of even the most distant acquaintances, Abel Rosenberg attempts to discover the truth while facing depression, alcoholism, and anti-semitism.

Vincent Canby wrote:

BERLIN, NOV. 3-11, is a city without sunlight. Mostly it rains. It snows occasionally but it’s the kind of snow that is already gray by the time it reaches the cobblestones. Everything is damp, chilled. No winter coats anywhere. People cling to one another for warmth, but there is none. In effect, life is over in Ingmar Bergman’s new film, “The Serpent’s Egg.” What we witness are involuntary twitches, the glazing of eyeballs—the onset of rigor mortis.Read More »

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Détective is one of Godard’s most engaging films, even though it has not been one of his most celebrated. Wheeler Winston Dixon described it as a “straightforward commercial venture,” the film Godard made “precisely in order to direct Je vous salue, Marie (1985).” But dismissing it in this way fails to recognize that, even in a film where Godard is forced to compromise, there is still much to be recommended. While Détective does tell a story of sorts, it is more than a mere narrative film. It still has many of the striking sound/image experiments and investigations into the forms, textures and affects of the plastic and temporal arts that we have come to expect from a Godard film. It also has a playful comic energy. In fact, as Dave Kehr notes, Détective has “all the lightness and zip of Godard’s sixties features.” Read More »

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This is Albert Lamorisse’s last film. At the last stages of finishing the shooting in Iran, his helicopter crashed in the mountains of northern Iran, and the extremely talented and poetic filmmaker got killed immediately. Lamorisse, “Under the auspices of Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Art, produced the poetic film “Lovers’ Wind” (1969). Eighty-five percent of this dramatically visual film is shot from a helicopter, providing a kaleidoscopic view of the vast expanses, natural beauty, historical monuments, cities and villages of Iran. The “narrators” of the film are the various winds (the warm, crimson, evil and lovers’ winds), which according to folklore, inhabit Iran. They sweep the viewers from place to place across the Iranian landscape, introducing the incredible variety of life and scenery in Iran. Read More »

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Commissioned to create a bust of Napoleon’s great-grand-niece Marie Bonaparte, the sculptor Brâncusi instead delivered a bronze phallus. Thus begins a lively historical tour covering the early days of modernism, the emergence of psychoanalysis, and the nascent study of female sexuality.
– KATHLEEN MCINNISRead More »

The first film by Sankofa Film and Video, THE PASSION OF REMEMBRANCE has gained classic status as a representation of the totality and diversity of Black experience. Within a dramatic framework the film gives a mosaic impression of the different dimensions of Black experience lived and imagined by a generation of filmmakers in the UK. As beautiful as it is eloquent, THE PASSION OF REMEMBRANCE is critical viewing for those interested in race, gender, history and cinema studies.

“Really radical filmmaking…the filmmakers intend to raise the intelligence and consciousness of their audience.” Armond White – Film CommentRead More »

Stephen Holden, The New York Times wrote:
Aaron Katz’s film “Quiet City” is punctuated with images of New York at twilight that cast a mood of reflective melancholy reminiscent of the loneliness at the heart of Edward Hopper paintings. Silhouettes of television aerials against a glowing orange and purple sky; yellow traffic lights on a nearly deserted avenue; a silvery subway train in the middle distance slipping through the dusky, blue-gray light; an industrial landscape at sunset: These and other beautiful images, photographed by Andrew Reed, resonate with the characters’ lives. “Quiet City” belongs to the movie genre labeled mumblecore, so named partly because the young, nerdy characters in these films rarely address any subject outside their immediate social sphere. If they don’t actually mumble their words, the tone of their conversations is restricted to various shades of chat, much of which seems trivial. Tender and sad, “Quiet City” is a fully realized work of mumblecore poetry.Read More »

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Somewhere along a desolate highway in Western Montana where the scorched grass burns brown and cotton-ball clouds dissolve into an endless ocean of white, a decrepit old pick-up truck speeds along. The driver, a shifty, uneasy man named Tom Bates fidgets and cackles a rapid, kookaburra laugh. “I mean, what you ever get the feeling that everything was just, just going by you like WHOOSH — just going by, it’s all, all too fast. You can’t, can’t see anything,” he philosophizes to a lanky hitch-hiking hippie sitting in the passenger seat. “I guess, well I guess what I got to do is sort through some of this shit, y’know, just get some of this shit outta my life,” he continues as his passenger sits in solemn silence.Read More »