USA

An actor of the stage finds himself pursued by a lovestruck fan while trying to patch up a tempestuous relationship with his actress lover.Read More »

Synopsis
An incredible document of the LGBT film scene in the early 1980s (as well as artist Barbara Hammer’s off-the-charts charisma), AUDIENCE finds Hammer working in a more straightforward documentary mode than usual. Hammer interviews her largely lesbian audiences before and after screenings of her work, capturing their reactions to her radical, erotic, experimental films.Read More »

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“Wendigo” is a good movie with an ending that doesn’t work. While it was not working I felt a keen disappointment, because the rest of the movie works so well. The writer, director and editor is Larry Fessenden, whose “Habit” (1997) was about a New York college student who found solace, and too much more, in the arms of a vampire. Now Fessenden goes into the Catskills to tell a story that will be compared to “The Blair Witch Project” when it should be compared to “The Innocents.” The film builds considerable scariness, and does it in the details. Ordinary things happen in ominous ways. Kim and George (Patricia Clarkson and Jake Weber), a couple from New York, drive to the Catskills to spend a weekend in a friend’s cottage, bringing along their young son, Miles (Erik Per Sullivan). Even before they arrive, there’s trouble. They run into a deer on the road, and three hunters emerge from the woods and complain that the city people killed “their” deer–and worse, broke its antlers.Read More »

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Originally, it was to be a serious look at Westerners influenced by Eastern trends. As it developed, however it became much more humorous with characters in yoga positions with high heels and smoking cigarettes at the same time.Read More »

Messages, Messages (1968)

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A journey of the psyche into the world of the unconscious. Made when Wiese and Arnold were students at the San Francisco Art Institute, the surrealistic film is influenced by Dali, Bunuel and the German expressionists. The film was premiered at the St. Regis Hotel in New York by Salvador Dali and invited to Director’s Fortnight at Cannes.Read More »

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Diahann Carroll is radiant in an unforgettable, Oscar-nominated performance as Claudine, a strong-willed single mother, raising six kids in Harlem, whose budding relationship with a gregarious garbage collector (an equally fantastic James Earl Jones) is stressed by the difficulty of getting by in an oppressive system. As directed by the formerly blacklisted leftist filmmaker John Berry, this romantic comedy with a social conscience deftly balances warm humor with a serious look at the myriad issues—from cycles of poverty to the indignities of the welfare system—that shape its characters’ realities. The result is an empathetic chronicle of both Black working-class struggle and Black joy, a bittersweet, bighearted celebration of family and community set to a sunny soul soundtrack composed by Curtis Mayfield and performed by Gladys Knight & the Pips.Read More »

The story of the original Mercury 7 astronauts and their macho, seat-of-the-pants approach to the space program.Read More »

A Sundance Grand Jury prize-winner and a true conversation starter, Capturing the Friedmans travels into one apparently ordinary Long Island family’s heart of darkness. Arnold and Elaine Friedman had a normal life with their three sons until Arnold was arrested on multiple (and increasingly lurid) charges of child abuse. Because the Friedmans had documented their own lives with copious home movies, filmmaker Andrew Jarecki is able to sift through their material looking for clues. Yet what emerges is more surreal than fiction: the youngest Friedman son went to jail; the eldest became a birthday-party clown. In the end, we can’t be sure whether Arnold Friedman is a monstrous child molester or the victim of railroading. The portrait of a disconnected family is deeply disturbing, either way, and this film is further proof that a documentary can be just as spellbinding as anything a great storyteller dreams up.Read More »

In the Arizona desert, Professor Gerald Deemer is experimenting with growth hormones in the hopes of finding a way to increase the world’s food supply. His partner in the project was recently found dead in the desert, suffering from a disease that normally takes years to advance but in his case seems to have afflicted him in only a few days. The local doctor, Matt Hastings, is puzzled by the strange case and with Deemer’s recently arrived – and very pretty – assistant Stephanie Clayton tries to figure out what is going on. When cattle remains are found in the countryside, the evidence points to a giant tarantula as the culprit.Read More »