2000s

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Claire (Nymark), an unmarried pregnant teenager, finds an odd relation in Madame Mélikian (Ascaride), an older woman grieving over the death of her son.Read More »

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In this comic political farce, the protagonist thinks her home in Lisbon on Washington Street is really The White House! Surrounded by female supporters, she proclaims’I am the President of the U.S.A., I can do whatever I want.’ She locks her mother in the basement and on her birthday, throws a huge party in honor of her re-election, while making plans to control the entire world. …The Woman Who Believed She Was President of the United States ( A Mulher que Acreditava Ser Presidente Dos EUA )Read More »

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Disc two travels back in time for two late-Twenties American shorts before heading off to France for three late-Forties/early-Fifties films, including the epic Lettrism manifesto, Jean Isidore Isou’s Venom and Eternity (also known by the far better title Treatise on Slime and Eternity, 1951). From the former group only James Watson and Melville Webber’s expressionist adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) is of any note, while two of the three later films, Jean Mitry’s Pacific 231 (1949) and Dimitri Kirsanoff’s Arriere Saison (1950), serviceably employ techniques that had reached their fulfillment thirty years prior. Venom and Eternity is supposed to be the cherry on the cake—a rarely seen controversial feature with 34 minutes of restored footage.Read More »

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In the latter half of the 20th Century, Raymond Rohauer was one of the nation s foremost proponents of experimental cinema. This two-disc collection continues Kino s tribute to the Rohauer Collection, including the early works of Stan Brakhage and influential films by Willard Maas, Gregory Markopoulos, Marie Menken, Dimitri Kirsanoff, Jean Mitry, Sidney Peterson and others.Read More »

Plot Outline: No artist in the second half of the 20th century was more famous – or, perhaps, more famously misunderstood – than Andy Warhol. This two-part film, directed by Ric Burns, explores Warhol’s astonishing artistic output – from the late 1940s to his untimely death in 1987 – paintings, drawings and photographs, films and television, books, magazines and musical performances. Set within the turbulent, changing context of his life and times, this portrait is the first to move deeply into the immense archives at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the city of his humble origins. Obsessed with fame and a desire to transcend those origins, Warhol uniquely grasped the realities of modern society – the function of celebrity and of the mass media – and became the high priest of one of the most radical experiments in American culture, permanently penetrating and redefining the barrier between art and commerce.Read More »

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Spiritual disciplines span the spectrum from quiet personal self-reflection to physically militant offensives against the ego that tyrannizes us all. Writer/Director Bertrand Bonello’s latest film On War deals with the latter.

On War is a film about purging—the purging of self, of attachment to the world, and of attachment to assumptions about one’s self in the world. As the characters in the film suggest, it is only through this purging that a person may fully release into the immediacy of joy and pleasure. And it is joy and pleasure, things real and authentic, that our protagonist Bertrand (Mathieu Amalric) is searching for.Read More »

Nineteen people of varying age, race and sex gather in tight physical proximity, as a compact human mob, when without warning a gushing onslaught of water from both sides of the screen knocks them into one another and down to the ground.Read More »

The current wave of kidnappings in Latin America inspired this tense suspense drama. Martin (Jean Paul Leroux) and Carla (Mía Maestro) are a wealthy young couple who, after a night of club hopping, head back to their car to go home. However, three kidnappers — Bubu (Pedro Perez), Niga (Carlos Madera), and Trece (Carlos Julio Molina) — are waiting for them; seeing how free they are with their money, the men figure that Martin and Carla should fetch a decent ransom for their release. The kidnappers demand 20,000 dollars to set Martin and Carla free, and Carla’s father (Rubén Blades) struggles to raise the cash, with the criminals insisting upon payment in a mere two hours.Read More »

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Roy Stuart’s Glimpse 12 plunges the viewer into a universe of games, serious games like life and death games that evoke the relationship between the sexes and the passion often deviating into madness – Between men and women, it has not always been that peaceful. It’s a long saga of power struggles, power play, alienation …where assault, rape and humiliation were always at hand. What are the rules ? How can the sexes manage to get along?Read More »