Plot Synopsis: Though he doesn’t speak his first line of dialogue until the film’s final ten minutes, Peter Lorre spiritually dominates the fascinating RKO melodrama Stranger on the Third Floor. The plotline is carried by John McGuire, playing Ward, a newspaper reporter whose courtroom testimony sends the hapless Briggs (Elisha Cook Jr). to the death house. Ward is certain that he saw Briggs leaving the scene of a murder, but as the days pass, he is tortured by guilt and doubt — especially during the film’s surrealistic knockout of a nightmare sequence. When another murder is committed, Ward finds himself as much a victim of circumstantial evidence as the unfortunate Briggs. The reporter’s girlfriend (Margaret Tallichet) tries to clear Ward….and that’s when she first makes the acquaintance of Lorre, who is heard ordering a pound of raw meat! Stranger on the Third Floor was a “film noir” long prior to the genesis of that cinematic movement. Long ignored or trivialized by film historians, this 7-reel quickie has in recent years graduated to classic status.
— Hal Erickson, AMGRead More »

Eilis Lacey followed her sister, Rose’s, plan to leave Ireland and find a better future and job in the US. She departs terribly, enduring seasickness and a terrible relationship with her cabin mates. A kind traveler gives her advice to live in Brooklyn, where many Irish immigrants live. Eilis settles in Brooklyn and becomes close to Father Flood, a Catholic priest. She gets a job in a department store and falls in love with an Italian boy named Tony. News from home sends Eilis back to Ireland, away from Tony.Read More »

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Director Paul Verhoeven returns to the camera for this unique comedy drama surrounding a birthday party that goes horribly wrong for the host. The film was written via crowd-sourcing (close to 400 writing credits in all), with Verhoeven and his writing team of Kim van Kooten and Robert Alberdingk Thijmeach cherry picking the best parts of the scripts that were submitted after each segment of the film was shot and screened.Read More »

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In the 1970s, a 12-year-old boy Esko lives in Tornio, northern Finland, a town bordering Sweden across the river. Esko befriends a Swedish boy, Pate, and learns to share his obsession for Harry Houdini, the legendary escape artist. While standing handcuffed on the railway bridge, contemplating a stunt jump into the icy river, he reminisces the dramatic events of the summer before. For the viewer, his problems are presented with warm humour: gang fights, feeling guilty for lying, Father losing his job, Mother losing her nerves, not to mention Grandfather having lost his willingness to speak since a traumatic war experience 30 years earlier.Read More »

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Valeria is 17 and pregnant. She lives in Puerto Vallarta with Clara, her half sister. Valeria has not wanted her long-absent mother, April, to find out about her pregnancy, but due to the economic strain and the overwhelming responsibility of having a baby in the house, Clara decides to call their mother. April arrives, willing to her daughters, but we soon understand why Valeria had wanted her to stay away.Read More »

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The parts of the Planet we call Mexico and the United States share the greatest region with socio-economic-political differences. That makes it a bridge for thousands of migrants who expose themselves to every danger as they travel through the continent on a train called “The Beast.” That’s where they meet the Patronas, a group of women from the part of the Planet we call Mexico who, every day since 1995, make food and toss it to the helpless as the train rushes by. Read More »

Juli (Ilona Schuetz) is a 17-year-old student who takes a summer job in a local chemical factory.
She is befriended by Piri (Adit Soos), a girl with an unsavory reputation who has worked there
before. The two friends are ogled by male workers who have overactive libidos and imaginations.
Juli spurns the advances of a deluded Romeo while Piri continues to work and endure open hostility
from the older female workers while her slothful parents sink deeper into alcoholism. The title
is taken from a popular Hungarian song.Read More »

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The 24 avant garde shorts of the 1920s and ’30s chosen for this Kino set from the collection of curator Raymond Rohauer span the gamut of movements and styles—dada, surrealism, city symphony, environmental terrarium, direct exposure. The diversity already makes the proposition of plowing through the pair of discs from start to finish not only daunting but perhaps ill-advised. Especially when lurking among the unassailable landmarks of silent avant garde cinema like Joris Ivens’s Regen (an evocative socio-environmental replication of the civic reaction to a rainy downpour on city streets) and Fernand Léger’s Ballet Méchanique (a rhythmic Parisian melange that’s kaleidoscopic in both its prismatic cinematography and its undulating circles of repetition) are at least two (possibly three) works that aim to take the piss out of the concept of non-narrative art cinema. The Hearts of Age, Orson Welles’s fraternal collaboration with William Vance (made when Welles was a mere 19 years of age), is a backyard farce that Welles later admitted to Peter Bogdanovich was made in benign mockery of the Buñuel/Dali collaborations that were inescapable in the day, though it scarcely owes any tangible debt to the style of Un Chien Andalou.Read More »

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The 24 avant garde shorts of the 1920s and ’30s chosen for this Kino set from the collection of curator Raymond Rohauer span the gamut of movements and styles—dada, surrealism, city symphony, environmental terrarium, direct exposure. The diversity already makes the proposition of plowing through the pair of discs from start to finish not only daunting but perhaps ill-advised. Especially when lurking among the unassailable landmarks of silent avant garde cinema like Joris Ivens’s Regen (an evocative socio-environmental replication of the civic reaction to a rainy downpour on city streets) and Fernand Léger’s Ballet Méchanique (a rhythmic Parisian melange that’s kaleidoscopic in both its prismatic cinematography and its undulating circles of repetition) are at least two (possibly three) works that aim to take the piss out of the concept of non-narrative art cinema. The Hearts of Age, Orson Welles’s fraternal collaboration with William Vance (made when Welles was a mere 19 years of age), is a backyard farce that Welles later admitted to Peter Bogdanovich was made in benign mockery of the Buñuel/Dali collaborations that were inescapable in the day, though it scarcely owes any tangible debt to the style of Un Chien Andalou.Read More »