USA

When Fred Staples is recruited onto the board of a high-powered New York corporation, he finds his ethics and ambition at odds.Read More »

One of Will’s most complex films in terms of its visual choreography and editing.
Abstract visual poem celebrating the freedom of bodies moving through water. A filmmaker unconcerned with plot films the practice of an olympic swimming team and creates a visually stunning work.Read More »

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Inspired by the first-person documentaries of Ross McElwee, DEAR JESSE is gay filmmaker Tim Kirkman’s filmed “letter” to the notoriously anti-gay Senator Jesse Helms. Shot during the 1996 senatorial campaign, the film features interviews with opponents and supporters, as well as writers Allan Gurganus and Lee Smith. The film also features a brief interview with Matthew Shepard, the young man whose murder in Laramie, Wyoming, called attention to antigay violence.Read More »

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For over 100 years, Hollywood cinema has crafted the ultimate “villain”-the Indian, as they were labeled in early Westerns. Confined almost exclusively to this genre, the Western became a vehicle for American racism, obscuring the genocide upon which the United States was built. For more than four decades, these films glorified “Manifest Destiny” and the conquest of so-called “wild” lands, with little regard for those who stood in the way. It wasn’t until the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s that a shift occurred. A new wave of films, such as Little Big Man and Soldier Blue, emerged, offering more authentic portrayals of Native Americans and acknowledging the horrific massacres they endured.Read More »

Vincente Minnelli’s second musical for MGM, released seven months after his feature debut Cabin in the Sky. The stars of the film are popular radio and film comedian Red Skelton and dance legend Eleanor Powell, but as in the earlier film, many notable jazz musicians are featured as well, this time performing as themselves: Lena Horne returns in a smaller role and is joined by Hazel Scott, Helen O’Connell, Bob Eberly, and Jimmy Dorsey and his orchestra.Read More »

A pair of literary sleuths unearth the amorous secret of two Victorian poets only to find themselves falling under a passionate spell.

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Possession is a 2002 British-American romantic mystery drama film written and directed by Neil LaBute and starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart. It is based on the 1990 novel of the same name by British author A. S. Byatt, who won the Booker Prize for it the year it was published.Read More »

Terrorists break into an operating room and take the surgical team hostage in this gripping suspense thriller based on the best-selling novel by Gerald Green (The Last Angry Man) and starring Bradford Dillman, Loretta Swit, Cameron Mitchell, Vic Morrow and Carl Weathers. As Dr. Eric Lake (Dillman) and his staff perform open-heart surgery on billionaire Walker Bench, terrorist John Trask (Stephen Davies) and his men enter the room and hold the physicians at gunpoint. Demanding $10 million in cash, Trask will kill Bench and Lake unless the ransom is paid in two hours. As the billionaire’s company scrambles to raise the money and a rescue attempt goes fatally awry, the authorities and doctors realize there are terrorists planted among the hospital staff and no one knows whom they can trust.Read More »

Arbor Vitae is a gesture towards a cinema of pure being. Its atmosphere is haunted by the period in which it was shot, the year of 1999. Although the cuts are open and numerous in their intent, the underlying motivation is the delicate reveal of the transparency of presence, our tender mystery midst the elaborate unfolding of the tree of life.Read More »

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From his first film depicting his boyhood life in the Canary Islands, Richard “Ricky” Leacock has been obsessed with capturing on film the feeling of “being there.” This curiosity led him to technological innovations and breakthrough films that fueled the emerging “direct cinema” movement. In 1948, he shot Louisiana Story with Robert and Frances Flaherty and he has worked with other cinéma vérité pioneers like Robert Drew and D. A. Pennebaker on films like Primary, Happy Mother’s Day, and Monterey Pop.Read More »