USA

With its low budget and lush black-and-white imagery, Gus Van Sant’s debut feature Mala Noche heralded an idiosyncratic, provocative new voice in American independent film. Set in Van Sant’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, the film evokes a world of transient workers, dead-end day-shifters, and bars and seedy apartments bathed in a profound nighttime, as it follows a romantic deadbeat with a wayward crush on a handsome Mexican immigrant. Mala Noche was an important prelude to the New Queer Cinema of the nineties and is a fascinating capsule from a time and place that continues to haunt its director’s work.Read More »

Documentary filmmaker Rodney Ascher tackles the question “are we living in a simulation?” with testimony, philosophical evidence and scientific explanation in his quest for the answer.Read More »

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Hunter, a newly pregnant housewife, finds herself increasingly compelled to consume dangerous objects. As her husband and his family tighten their control over her life, she must confront the dark secret behind her new obsession.Read More »

A superstar in the art world, but little known outside, why does Eva Hesse continue to excite passions? This brilliant, gifted and visionary woman of 1960s NY survives personal chaos while creating work that changes the profile of art history. Along with creating a significant and deeply influential body of work during her short life, her story overlaps some of 20th century’s most intriguing moments: Germany in the 1930’s, New York’s Jewish culture of immigration in the 1940’s and the art scene in Manhattan and Germany in the 1960’s. Hesse, one of the most important 20th century artists is finally revealed in this character-driven film, an emotionally gripping and inspiring journey with an artist of uncommon talent, a woman of extraordinary courage.Read More »

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Trevor Reznik is a lathe-operator who suffers from insomnia and hasn’t slept in a year. Slowly, he begins to doubt his sanity as increasingly bizarre things start happening at work and at home. Haunted by a deformed co-worker who no one seems to think exists, and an ongoing stream of indecipherable Post-It notes he keeps finding on his fridge, he attempts to investigate what appears to be a mysterious plot against him and, in the process, embroils two women in his madness.Read More »

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A man wanders out of the desert not knowing who he is. His brother finds him, and helps to pull his memory back of the life he led before he walked out on his family and disappeared four years earlier.Read More »

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Against the hard and gritty background of a mine workers’ strike in a New Mexican town – a background bristling with resentment against the working and living conditions imposed by the operators of the mine – a rugged and starkly poignant story of a Mexican-American miner and his wife is told in “Salt of the Earth,” a union-sponsored film drama, which opened last night at the Grande Theatre on East Eighty-sixth Street.Read More »

At first glance, line dancing might appear to be an incongruous activity for members of the queer community, given that it takes place in spaces thought to be less accepting. However, for those who attend the eponymous Stud Country, a weekly queer country-and-western line-dancing and two-step class in Los Angeles, it is a reclaiming of those spaces. Following the tradition of the longtime gay line-dancing club Oil Can Harry’s, which was open for 52 years and closed in 2021 due to the pandemic, Stud Country seeks to honor queer cowboy culture by subverting stereotypes and reveling in a shared joy of line dancing. But with the forthcoming demolition of their most recent venue, Club Bahia, the future of Stud Country becomes nebulous.Read More »

A young drug dealer sells his soul to the devil in order to become the #1 seller on the block.Read More »