Based on a true story. A girl born in the “theatrical trunk” grows up under the lights of her parents’ Peking Opera Company. This complete immersion into theatrical life naturally leads her to the stage. She is trained by her father to play traditional roles. Her dream was to be the first woman to play the more significant male roles. This was completely against tradition. She suffers discrimination and humiliation, but in the end turns adversity into admiration when she becomes the first woman to play a great mythical hero in Peking Opera, defying all tradition and destroying all precedents. Breathtaking performances and cinematographic artistry create a powerful and visually stunning tale. No less could be expected from the masterful hand of the brilliant female director, Huang Shuqin.Read More »

It’s 1834. Texas is being strangled by the tyrannical military rule of General Santa Anna (J. Carrol Naish, Canadian Pacific), Mexico’s power-mad president. When frontier hero Jim Bowie (Sterling Hayden, Naked Alibi) returns to his besieged homeland, he finds the embittered Texans plotting rebellion against his old friend Santa Anna. When Santa Anna’s cruel grip tightens around his fellow Texans, Bowie soon realizes he must side against the Mexican despot. Commanding a ragtag regiment of frontier fighters, Bowie prepares to make a final stand at the famed Fort Alamo against superior forces. Though they are all doomed to die, the outnumbered Texan defenders fight heroically for freedom in one of the fiercest and bloodiest battles in American history.Read More »

IMDB says:
In 1948, Albert Gemmeker, former commander of Dutch concentration camp Westerbork, engages in a war of words with an enigmatic interrogator accusing him of unspeakable crimes.Read More »

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DJ Sabu’s overactive libido leads him into teenaged pregnancy. His mythic quest for two thousand boys ends with Happy, a paranoid UFO-ologist to whom aliens promise to appear (as his love child). Spanky is an evil hairdresser trying to foil Sabu’s mission, he is the self-proclaimed ‘biggest bitch in the world.’ The action unfolds at a series of raves on old garbage hill in an industrial Antonioni landscape peopled with characters right out of vintage John Waters.Read More »

From the Introduction
Every age is said to have its genius. The 18th century is often called the age of philosophy. The 19th century is the age of the novel. But our own age is undoubtedly an age of the image.

Other periods had images, of course, but, in the last 100 years or so, we made more images than ever before, and they have changed not just what we see, but how we see.

This was an era that rewrote the rules of image making. Beaming pictures into our homes, manipulating them, making the impossible visible and, in the digital age, revealing them in eye-opening detail.Read More »

Dedicated to Bruce Baillie and Hollis Frampton.Read More »

“McCarthy,” a new two-hour documentary chronicling the remarkable rise and precipitous fall of Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator whose zealous anti-communist crusade would test the limits of American decency and democracy, premieres Monday, January 6, 2020, 9:00-11:00 p.m. ET on American Experience on PBS.Read More »

“Machine Gun or Typewriter? is at once a landscape essay film, a fractious collage piece and an abstract confessional, restlessly serving the film noir narrative trope of a missing woman. Wilkerson plays the radio man, seen only behind a pop screen and a Sennheiser mic, who tells stories about falling in and out of love with his partner, another would-be political reactionary. Each anecdote is tethered to a place, both physically — mapped out with pins and string on the man’s wall — and figuratively: the man’s fury at the injustices perpetrated at these landmarks wrests attention away from the woman who has gone missing. There’s a perverse solace he finds in re-visiting narratives of systemic racism, class divide and police brutality.” Conor Bateman, 4:3Read More »

Emily is the subject of a perverse obsession by a gay neighbor, Andrea, who not only is in lust with her but hires a rapist in order to get audio tapes of her moaning. Andrea turns peeping tom and watches Emily with a telescope as she begins a love affair with Detective CorteseRead More »