USA

A love story in the city of dreams . . . Blonde Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) has only just arrived in Hollywood to become a movie star when she meets an enigmatic brunette with amnesia (Laura Harring). Meanwhile, as the two set off to solve the second woman’s identity, filmmaker Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) runs into ominous trouble while casting his latest project. David Lynch’s seductive and scary vision of Los Angeles’s dream factory is one of the true masterpieces of the new millennium, a tale of love, jealousy, and revenge like no other.Read More »

Wealthy industrialist Robert Talbot arrives early for his annual vacation at his luxurious Italian villa to find three problems lying in wait for him. Firstly, his long-time girlfriend Lisa Fellini has given up waiting for him to pop the question and has decided to marry another man. Secondly, the major domo of his villa, Maurice Clavell, has turned the estate into a posh hotel to make some easy money while the boss isn’t around. And, finally, the current guests of the “hotel” are a group of young American girls trying to fend off a gang of oversexed boys, led by Tony, who are ‘laying siege’ at the outer walls of the villa. Talbot, to his own surprise, finds himself becoming an overprotective chaperone. —Alfred Jingle, imdbRead More »

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In 1929, Steiner made his first film, H2O, a poetic evocation of water that captured the abstract patterns generated by waves. Although it was not the only film of its kind at the time – Joris Ivens made REGEN that same year, and Henwar Rodekiewicz worked on his similar film PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG MAN (1931) through this whole period – it made a significant impression in its day and since has become recognized as a classic: H2O was added to the National Film Registry in December 2005. Among Steiner’s other early films, SURF AND SEAWEED (1931) expands on the concept of H2O as Steiner turns his camera to the shoreline; MECHANICAL PRINCIPLES (1930) was an abstraction based on gears and machinery.Read More »

From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
This deceptively humorous cinema verite study of a travelling evangelist emerges as a ruthless expose of an aspect of America’s national psyche, with implications far beyond its immediate subject matter. Marjoe began by performing marriage ceremonies at the age of four (seen in marvelous newsreels of the time) and graduated to fame on the “Holy Roller” Pentecostal circuit, throwing women into convulsions, performing miracles, providing sex substitutes and mass therapy to the countless victimized poor and ignorant who flock to his meetings with their offerings. While the sequences of a prancing Mick Jagger imitation (complete with rock rhythms and brimstone) and of his huge and suffering audience in themselves constitute an impressive achievement of non-fiction cinema, simultaneous private interviews reveal the fiery evangelist to be a cynical atheist and hedonist, with contempt for his “work” and at best an ambiguous solicitude for his flock.Read More »

Kumiko, a Tokyo office worker and a frustrated lady with her mundane life, becomes obsessed that a satchel of money buried and lost in a fictional film, Fargo, stating that a fixating a scene where stolen cash is buried in North Dakota. She mistakes that fictional movie as a real one with a documentary. With a crudely drawn treasure map and limited preparation, she escapes her structured life in Tokyo and she travels to America to find it. She embarks on a foolhardy quest across the tundra of Minnesota in search of her mythical fortune.Read More »

A short made by Joseph Cornell in the late 1930s– An ode to imagination, travel and literature. In true Cornellian fashion, the film borrows footage from, among other films, a Burton Holmes travelogue; Sightseeing tours of Dutch Marken and agrarian Asia therefore become the dream of a boy at a bookstall.Read More »

When a plane crashes on a mountaintop Chris wants to plunder the wreckage. His older brother Zachary has given up mountain guide work but goes along rather than letting his brother risk it alone. The only survivor is a Hindu girl who Chris wants to kill. Zachary fights him off. While Chris steals from the dead passengers, Zachary prepares a sled to take the girl down the mountain.Read More »

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One need only look at the phenomenal The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra to see that even in the cinema’s youth filmmakers were not limited by their budgets, but by their imaginations.

Made in 1928, it had a budget of $96 (adjusted for inflation, that’s $1191.33). Sources say that the money was divvied up as such: Film Negative, $25 ($310.24), Store Props, $3 ($27.23), Development and Printing, $55 ($682.54), Transportation, etc, $14 ($173.74). The sets were made of toys and cardboard buildings that were projected like shadows.Read More »

During the early 1990s, San Francisco was the epicenter of body modification and gender nonconformity, with transgender pioneers like Patrick Califia and Tala Brandeis fighting for visibility, alongside the voice of a bold S/M community. Michelle Handelman’s provocative and pioneering documentary BloodSisters captures these queer outlaws in their zeitgeist moment, shot on digital video with an unfiltered rawness that mirrors the activism of the era. From pushy bottoms to macho femmes, BloodSisters immerses the viewer in the San Francisco leather dyke scene, shattering assumptions about gender and lesbian sexuality, while broadening the discussion about personal expressions of eroticism and their political implications. In the 1990s, BloodSisters was attacked in congress by the American Family Association for its depictions of radical lesbian sexuality. Twenty-five years later, the film has become recognized as a treasured historical document of a movement that tore down barriers of sex, gender, and activism.Read More »