A paranoid man embarks on an epic odyssey to get home to his mother in this bold and ingeniously depraved new film from writer/director Ari Aster. "Beau Is Afraid, an enveloping fantasy laced with mommy issues, is about being doomed from birth. It's Aster’s funniest movie yet."—RogerEbert.com "Perhaps the best comparison is to the Swedish comedies of Roy Andersson. It’s not that the laughter is set against the despair. It is the despair itself that is so funny – so absurd, so pointless, so pathetic...nobody can doubt [Aster's] commitment to the bit. This is a vast, generous, properly hilarious entertainment that will spawn debate for years to come. You may well hate it."—The Irish Times "Beau has been engineered to make indifference an impossibility. It’s a movie whose flaws are not only at least as interesting as its strengths, but may actually be the better reason to see it...Aster serves his neuroses straight up, and the result is a paradox: a film that’s suggestive or derivative of a dozen other titles yet unfolds as an original vision. It’s a movie that we haven’t seen before."—The Ringer Open caption screenings: Saturday 6/10 at 3:30pm, Thursday 6/15 at 6pm, Tuesday 6/20 at 6pm, Saturday 6/24 at 3:30pm.

High school senior Megan is an all-American girl who loves cheerleading and dates a football player. Her suburban existence is turned upside-down when her family suspects her to be a lesbian. They send her to a ‘rehabilitation camp’ where she comes to question her own sexuality for the first time. "But I’m a Cheerleader has endured among the LGBT community due its fervent rejection of heteronormativity and its celebration of queerness at each stage of production – in the storyline, the aesthetic, the cast and the crew."—Little White Lies

Director Toshio Matsumoto’s shattering, kaleidoscopic masterpiece is one of the most subversive and intoxicating films of the late 1960s: a headlong dive into a dazzling, unseen Tokyo night-world of drag queen bars and fabulous divas, fueled by booze, drugs, fuzz guitars, performance art and black mascara. No less than Stanley Kubrick cited the film as a direct influence on his own dystopian classic A Clockwork Orange. An unknown club dancer at the time, transgender actor Peter (from Kurosawa’s Ran) gives an astonishing Edie Sedgwick/Warhol superstar-like performance as hot young thing Eddie, hostess at Bar Genet — where she’s ignited a violent love-triangle with reigning drag queen Leda (Osamu Ogasawara) for the attentions of club owner Gonda (played by Kurosawa regular Yoshio Tsuchiya, from Seven Samuri and Yojimbo). One of Japan’s leading experimental filmmakers, Matsumoto bends and distorts time here like Resnais in Last Year at Marienbad, freely mixing documentary interviews, Brechtian film-within-a-film asides, Oedipal premonitions of disaster, his own avant-garde shorts, and even on-screen cartoon balloons, into a dizzying whirl of image + sound. Whether laughing with drunken businessmen, eating ice cream with her girlfriends, or fighting in the streets with a local girl gang, Peter’s ravishing Eddie is something to behold. “She has bad manners, all she knows is coquetry,” complains her rival Leda – but in fact, Eddie’s bad manners are simply being too gorgeous for this world. A key work of the Japanese New Wave and of queer cinema, Funeral Parade has been restored in 4K from the original 35mm camera negative and sound elements. “Few movies are as redolent of their times as Funeral Parade of Roses, a 1969 exemplar of Japanese countercultural ferment…its charms have scarcely wilted.”—J. Hoberman, The New York Times In Japanese with English subtitles.

With this trailblazing musical, writer-director-star John Cameron Mitchell and composer-lyricist Stephen Trask brought their signature creation from stage to screen for a movie as unclassifiable as its protagonist. Raised a boy in East Berlin, Hedwig (Mitchell) undergoes a traumatic personal transformation in order to emigrate to the U.S., where she reinvents herself as an “internationally ignored” but divinely talented rock diva, characterized by Mitchell as inhabiting a “beautiful gender of one.” The film tells Hedwig’s story through her music, an eclectic assortment of original punk anthems and power ballads by Trask, matching them with a freewheeling cinematic mosaic of music-video fantasies, animated interludes, and moments of bracing emotional realism. A hard-charging song cycle and a tender character study, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a tribute to the transcendent power of rock and roll. Winner—Best Director, Audience Award at Sundance

Joyland explores the many sides of love and desire in a patriarchal society. Gentle and timid, Haider (Ali Junejo) lives with his wife Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq), his father, and his elder brother’s family in Lahore, Pakistan. Following a long spell of unemployment, Haider finally lands a job at a Bollywood-style burlesque, telling his family he is a theater manager, when in actuality, he is a backup dancer. The unusual position shakes up the steadfast traditional dynamics of his household and enables Haider to break out of his shell. As he acclimates to the new job, Haider becomes infatuated with the strong-willed trans woman Biba (Alina Khan) who runs the show—an unforeseen partnership that opens his eyes and ultimately his worldview, in ways both unexpected and intimate. 2023 Film Independent Spirit Awards Winner—Best International Film Winner—Queer Palm at Cannes Winner—Jury Prize at Cannes (Un Certain Regard) Winner—Best Directors to Watch at Palm Spring Int'l Film Festival "Sadiq is not lecturing us or trading in types; he is taking us by sensory surprise, and the tale that he tells is funny, forward, and sometimes woundingly sad...everyone here has a purpose, and a claim upon our attention. Nobody is banished from the dance."—Anthony Lane, The New Yorker "Richly detailed and superbly acted across the board, the film cast a scathing eye over the rigid social constraints that ensnare anyone who fails to conform."—Wendy Ide, The Observer "A movie about people who find their inner lives and sense of themselves don’t match up to what is expected of them..Joyland is such a delicate, intelligent and emotionally rich film. What a debut."—The Guardian In Urdu, Punjabi with English subtitles

A timeless story of human connection and self-discovery, Moonlight chronicles the life of a young black man from childhood to adulthood as he struggles to find his place in the world while growing up in a rough neighborhood of Miami. 2017 Academy Awards Winner—Best Picture, Supporting Actor(Mahershala Ali), and Best Adapted Screenplay "Both a disarmingly, at times almost unbearably personal film and an urgent social document, a hard look at American reality and a poem written in light, music and vivid human faces."—NYTimes Critic's Pick

River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves star in this haunting tale from Gus Van Sant about two young street hustlers: Mike Waters, a sensitive narcoleptic who dreams of the mother who abandoned him, and Scott Favor, the wayward son of the mayor of Portland and the object of Mike’s desire. Navigating a volatile world of junkies, thieves, and johns, Mike takes Scott on a quest along the grungy streets and open highways of the Pacific Northwest, in search of an elusive place called home. Visually dazzling and thematically groundbreaking, My Own Private Idaho is a deeply moving look at unrequited love and life on society’s margins. Winner—Best Actor at Venice Independent Spirit Awards Winner—Best Male Lead, Screenplay, and Music "A queer masterpiece...an essential meditation on desire between men, made at a time when Hollywood and its neighboring industries didn’t quite know what to do with that desire."—The Ringer

A wickedly dark comedy follows dominatrix, Rebecca (Emmy Award® nominee Margaret Qualley), and her wealthy client, Hal (Christopher Abbott), as they engage in a high stakes role playing game for power and control. In the wake of inheriting his father's hotel chain, Hal attempts to end his long and secret relationship with Rebecca. A battle of wills ensues over the course of one incredibly fraught night, with both Rebecca and Hal struggling to keep the upper hand as the power dynamics swing wildly back and forth. "Abbott and Qualley possess an easy chemistry that fluctuates between desire, desperation and despisal...keep[s] the viewer guessing."—Little White Lies "A terrific two-hander...that dares us to guess where it’s headed."—The Playlist

A sculptor (Michelle Williams) preparing to open a new show must balance her creative life with the daily dramas of family and friends, in Kelly Reichardt’s vibrant and captivatingly funny portrait of art & craft. "It’s a quiet, candid, sharply conceived and imaginatively realized masterwork, [a] film of such bold and decisive originality."—The New Yorker "Owes much to Reichardt and Williams’s beautifully synced collaboration. This is the fourth movie that they’ve done together, and it’s a joy to witness how perfectly aligned their work has become. Together, Reichardt and Williams — with little dialogue and boundless generosity — lucidly articulate everything that Lizzy will never say and need not say, opening a window on the world and turning this wondrous, determined, gloriously grumpy woman into a sublime work of art."—Manohla Dargis, NYTimes Critic's Pick "Showing Up is more than worth surrendering to. It’s one of Reichardt’s best...[it] celebrates the art world far more than it makes fun of it, but it’s emphatic about something that shouldn’t need affirmation: Fame and money certainly have bearing, but to be an artist, all you actually need to do is make art."—Alison Willmore, NYMag

Signe and Thomas are in an unhealthy, competitive relationship that takes a vicious turn when Thomas suddenly breaks through as a contemporary artist. In response, Signe makes a desperate attempt to regain her status by creating a new persona hell-bent on attracting attention and sympathy. "A beautifully whip-smart black comedy that shines a damning light on society's intensifying self-obsessions...[A] pointed look at modern fame, scam culture, and the self-destructive contemporary fixation with going viral."—TimeOut "Razor’s-edge satire...outlandishly perverse, yet steeped in recognizable modern neuroses."—Los Angeles Times "A pointed portrait of a toxic relationship and a razor-sharp evisceration of those warped by a victim mentality. It’s the latest from the producers of “The Worst Person In The World” and to be honest, this film might be more deserving of the title."—The Playlist In Norwegian and Swedish with English subtitles.

In the early 1970s, Rainer Werner Fassbinder discovered the American melodramas of Douglas Sirk and was inspired by them to begin working in a new, more intensely emotional register. One of the first and best-loved films of this period in his career is THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT, which balances a realistic depiction of tormented romance with staging that remains true to the director’s roots in experimental theater. This unforgettable, unforgiving dissection of the imbalanced relationship between a haughty fashion designer (Margit Carstensen) and a beautiful but icy ingenue (Hanna Schygulla)—based, in a sly gender reversal, on the writer-director’s own desperate obsession with a young actor—is a true Fassbinder affair, featuring exquisitely claustrophobic cinematography by Michael Ballhaus and full-throttle performances by an all-female cast. "A warped depiction of perfect love."—Chicago Reader In German with English subtitles.