The movie that inspired Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, Chris Marker’s La jetée is a landmark of science-fiction filmmaking, a 28-minute masterpiece told almost entirely in still frames.

Set in a post-apocalyptic near-future, it tells the story of an unnamed man whose vivid childhood recollections make him the perfect guinea pig for an experiment in time travel. After a lengthy and nightmarish period of conditioning, he is sent into the past, where he falls in love with a woman whom he once saw on a pier. At the experiment’s conclusion, he is visited by an advanced race, who offer him the opportunity to journey into their future world, but he instead requests that they send him permanently into the past, where he can remain with the woman of his dreams. A singular experience.Read More »

Diligent City Market official Michael Lynn resists overtures by well-to-do gangster Kenneth Craige to fix produce and dairy prices during wartime. Lynn seems unable to stop the resulting sabotage and violence on the part of the mob to bring the farmers and wholesalers into line and so is fired by city attorney Jeffrey Moore. After Lynn’s assistant Bram Hart is murdered for going to the authorities, Lynn takes responsibility for his daughter and feigns co-operation with Craige in order to discover the real boss of the criminal enterprise. Lynn unmasks Moore as the corrupt head, and the conspiracy is exposed and foiled.Read More »

Voluptuous Tanya (Eliska) and bull-dyke hottie Deane (Odette) are forced to retrieve a briefcase full of money for criminal kingpin Duvelle after they both separately fall into debt to him. The reluctant team of sexy crooks murder the pencil-neck accountant and yank the loot. Once in hand, they take the haul back to Deane’s crib where they get, um, acquainted with one another via a black strap-on and a bed full of cash. But there is no honor among these thieves and they turn on each other and try to get off with the money by themselves. One of them gets an upper hand and wants the other to sleep with the fishes which leads to an ironic and surprising ending.Read More »

Synopsis: After nearly a decade as American Vogue‘s most subversive fashion photographer, William Klein made this wild, pseudovérité incursion into the world of Parisian haute couture. Elegant, scathing humor ties together the various strands of this alternately glamorous and grotesque portrait of American in Paris Polly Maggoo (Dorothy MacGowan), an Alice in Wonderland supermodel who becomes the pinup plaything of media hounds and the fragmented fantasy of haunted Prince Igor (Sami Frey). Klein’s first fiction film is a daring deflation of cultural pretensions and institutions, dressed up in brilliant black and white.Read More »

El Dorado is the fifth film directed by Marcel L’Herbier for Gaumont’s prestige collection ‘Pax’ which was characterised by high production quality. Its most striking aspect is the invention of new elements of the cinematographic language. L’Herbier uses distortions of the images to convey different messages or impressions: the faces of drinkers become distorted as they become drunk, Sibilla’s face becomes blurred as she thinks about her sick child, or photographs of the Alhambra are distorted to express the artistic vision of the painter intending to represent them.Read More »

Raising Bertie is a longitudinal documentary feature following three young African American boys over the course of six years as they grow into adulthood in Bertie County, a rural African American-led community in Eastern North Carolina. Through the intimate portrayal of these boys, this powerful vérité film offers a rare in-depth look at the issues facing America’s rural youth and the complex relationships between generational poverty, educational equity, and race. The evocative result is an experience that encourages us to recognize the value and complexity in lives all too often ignored.
—Kartemquin FilmsRead More »

Atamanov’s sublime and terrifyingly beautiful masterpiece, based on a Hans Christian Andersen story, follows a resourceful young girl, Gerda (voiced by Yanina Zheymo), as she embarks on an epic journey to save her friend Kay (Anna Komolova) from the frozen embraces of the magnificent Snow Queen (Mariya Babanova.) “Had I not one day seen ‘The Snow Queen’ during a film screening hosted by the company labor union, I honestly doubt that I would have continued working as an animator.” – Hayao MiyazakiRead More »

“Ginza’s Story” is based on Yujiro’s hit song about the hopes and dreams of Japan’s young people.Read More »

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Beyrouth el lika is a film with a very tiny budget, the kind of films where the director cannot take as many takes as he wants (sometimes even one take only) and where there is not much time for filming. The result is a film that have some actors forgetting their lines and acting badly. But if we forget these flaws, we can appreciate a very original film about a relationship between a muslim man and a christian girl, the title ironicly prepare us for a meeting that’ll never happen. The mid section of the film is composed of 2 long monologues were the main characters record their thoughts on a tape to give them to one another, this section is the most interresting part of the film and is very well directed but it is so so overlong and talky that it weaken the film’s impact. Overall it’s an interresting and original vision of the way people used to live and survive in war time that manage to not fail at any moment in the cliche.Read More »