During the 1982 invasion of Lebanon at a private school on the outskirts of Beirut, 11-year-old Wissam tries to tell a classmate about his crush on her, while his teachers on different sides of the political divide, try to mask their fears.
Alma’s Rainbow is a coming-of-age comedy-drama about three Black women living in Brooklyn. Ayoka Chenzira’s feature film explores the life of teenager Rainbow Gold (Victoria Gabrielle Platt) who is entering womanhood and navigating conversations and experiences around standards of beauty, self-image, and the rights Black women have over their bodies. Rainbow attends a strict parochial school, studies dance, and is just becoming aware of boys. She lives with her strait-laced mother Alma Gold (Kim Weston-Moran), who runs a hair salon in the parlor of their home. When Alma’s free-spirited sister Ruby (Mizan Kirby) arrives from Paris after a 10-year absence, the sisters clash over what constitutes the “proper” direction Rainbow’s life should take. Alma has fooled herself into believing she has no need of male companionship and advises her daughter to follow her example. Ruby encourages both her niece and her sister to embrace life – and love – fully and joyfully. Alma’s Rainbow highlights a multi-layered Black women’s world where the characters live, love, and wrestle with what it means to exert and exercise their agency.
How selective is our memory? Do we remember what we have experienced or what we have chosen to remember? Can we forget the things that hurt us? In the end, are we simply just the sum of all those things we don't forget? Apples, an allegorical and somehow funny story, is in its core an effort to explore the way our memory functions and how this affects our being.
A dramatized account of a great Russian naval mutiny and a resulting street demonstration which brought on a police massacre.
Juliette Binoche is Sara, a woman whose life spirals out of control when she becomes involved in a passionate love triangle. From acclaimed writer-director Claire Denis.
Rfor gritty violent content, drug use and language
Haunted by the patients he failed to save, an extremely burned-out Manhattan ambulance paramedic fights to maintain his sanity over three fraught and turbulent nights.
The late Peruvian-born Dutch documentarian Heddy Honigmann made fascinating films about interesting and unusual subjects. One of her best works is this profile of Paris’ Père-Lachaise Cemetery, the final resting place of artists ranging from Chopin and Proust to Édith Piaf, Maria Callas, and Jim Morrison. But the movie doesn’t just document gravesites; it also captures living fans who visit these shrines and continue to find inspiration in the work of long-gone greats.
Tens of thousands of dogs are transported every year from areas with high euthanasia rates to parts of the country with fewer unwanted dogs and a surplus of adopters. Knowing the happy ending for these lucky dogs is only the beginning of the story, FREE PUPPIES. takes a closer look at where they come from. By following dog rescuers throughout rural counties in the Georgia-Alabama-Tennessee tristate area, we see the challenges that lead to dog overpopulation in the first place and the work being done in these communities to overcome them.
An epic journey forty years in the making, GRATITUDE REVEALED from acclaimed filmmaker, Louie Schwartzberg, the director of cult hit Fantastic Fungi, takes us on a transformational, cinematic experience of how to live a more meaningful life full of Gratitude through his intimate conversations with everyday people, thought leaders, and personalities revealing Gratitude is a proven pathway back from the disconnection we feel in our lives; disconnection from ourselves, our planet, and each other.
Voted one of the 10 best films of all time in the 1972 and 1982 Sight & Sound polls, Antonioni’s breakthrough movie remains his most celebrated and influential work—re-defining cinematic concepts of time and space and creating a new language of cinema. Monica Vitti stars in this tale in which some wealthy, carefree young Italian socialites yacht to a barren Sicilian island. There a woman from their party mysteriously disappears. Her fiancé and best friend search for her, becoming lovers in the process.
Yves Montand, Ingrid Thulin, and Geneviève Bujold star in this major film by the director of Last Year at Marienbad. Written by Jorge Semprún (Z), the movie is a psychological thriller in which a weary, aging Spanish revolutionary living in Paris three decades after the Spanish Civil War becomes involved in an extremist plot to overthrow Franco and his rightwing government.
for some thematic elements and brief language.
From the extraordinary mind of Palme D’or winning director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and starring Academy Award winner Tilda Swinton, comes a bewildering drama about a Scottish woman, who, after hearing a loud ‘bang’ at daybreak, begins experiencing a mysterious sensory syndrome while traversing the jungles of Colombia.
Antoinette, a schoolteacher, is looking forward to her long planned summer holiday with her married lover Vladimir, the father of one of her pupils. When she learns that Vladimir has to cancel because his wife organized a surprise hiking vacation, Antoinette decides to follow their tracks, accompanied by a protective donkey named Patrick.
A filmmaker attempts to sell a surreal script he has written, which comes to life as he pitches it.
It was recently discovered that, for six decades since its original release, Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal chiller about strange doings at the Bates Motel had been seen in theaters, on TV, and on home video in a version slightly edited for content. This newly remastered edition restores all the cuts (so to speak). The result is Hitchcock’s original version of his slasher masterpiece. Janet Leigh, Tony Perkins, Vera Miles, and Martin Balsam star.
Painter Julian Stanczak (1928-2017), who taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art for over three decades, was a pioneering abstract artist whose 1964 exhibition “Optical Paintings” at NYC’s Martha Jackson Gallery prompted Time magazine to coin the term “Op Art.” Born in Poland shortly before WWII, Stanczak lived an eventful, peripatetic life that saw him relocating from Poland to Siberia, Iran, Uganda, and the UK before finally settling in the U.S. in 1950. While in a Soviet gulag, he lost the use of his right arm, forcing him to learn to paint (and do everything else) with his left one. This new Polish documentary, eight years in the making, draws upon archival photographs and film clips, and previously unseen interviews with the artist, to recount Stanczak’s remarkable life and his triumph over adversity. The movie also shows Stanczak at work and explores his fascination with color. Filmmaker Tomasz Magierski and Stanczak’s widow, Barbara (a prominent sculptor who also taught at CIA for over 30 years), will answer audience questions after the screening. U.S. premiere!
Henpecked Egbert Sousé has comic adventures as a substitute film director and unlikely bank guard.
Ingmar Bergman stalwarts Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom, Gunnar Björnstrand, and Erland Josephson star in Mai Zetterling’s feminist classic. In it, three actresses starring in a production of Aristophenes’ Lysistrata find the play’s message of female empowerment and liberation seeping into their own offstage lives and relationships.
Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane topped the decennial Sight & Sound “greatest films” poll for 50 years—from 1962 until 2012. In two of those polls (1972, 1982) it was joined in the top 10 by Welles’ second feature The Magnificent Ambersons, which some find superior to Kane. This is remarkable because Ambersons was mutilated by the studio, with more than an hour of footage cut (all of it remains lost) and Welles’ ending altered and re-shot. Nevertheless, what remains is sublime—a lyrical and poignant chronicle of the decline of a wealthy Indianapolis family at the beginning of the 20th century, during the rise of the automobile. Based on Booth Tarkington’s novel, the movie stars Tim Holt, Joseph Cotten, Anne Baxter, and Agnes Moorehead, with music by Bernard Herrmann.
TBC
A decade after The Story of Film: An Odyssey, an expansive and influential inquiry into the state of moviemaking in the 20th century, filmmaker Mark Cousins returns with an epic and hopeful tale of cinematic innovation from around the globe. In The Story of Film: A New Generation, Cousins turns his sharp, meticulously honed gaze on world cinema from 2010 to 2021, using a surprising range of works — including Joker, Frozen, and Cemetery of Splendor — as launchpads to explore recurring themes and emerging motifs, from the evolution of film language to technology’s role in moviemaking today, to shifting identities in 21st-century world cinema. Touching on everything from Parasite and The Farewell to Black Panther and Lover’s Rock, Cousins shows that under-represented communities are where some of the most innovative filmmaking is taking place, with a particular emphasis on Asian and Middle Eastern works, as well as boundary-pushing documentaries and films that see gender in new ways. And as the recent pandemic recedes, Cousins ponders what comes next in the streaming age: how have we changed as cinephiles, and how will moviegoing continue to transform in the digital century, to our collective joy and wonder.
This influential artist film was “shot by a film crew in a single room over several days. The camera observes real-life Tavistock group-therapy participants as they work toward the abstract ‘task’ of articulating the conscious and unconscious relationships between the people in the room. As they negotiate their individual positions and try to name complex gender, class, and racial dynamics, they are guided and sometimes thwarted by a set of professional yet inscrutable therapist-consultants. The film’s climax raises questions about the power of artmaking to challenge and cross boundaries and to intervene unexpectedly in social structures” (FRONT Int’l).
Juliette Binoche plays a woman who retreats from the world when her composer husband and young child are killed in a car crash. The first of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s three films inspired by the principles symbolized in the tricolor French flag is an elegant, haunting take on “liberty.” Emmanuelle Riva co-stars.
Rfor a brief but strong sex scene
Part-time model Valentine meets a retired judge who lives in her neighborhood after she runs over his dog. At first the judge gifts Valentine with the dog, but her possessive boyfriend won't allow her to keep it. When she returns with the dog to the judge's house, she discovers him listening in on his neighbors' phone conversations. At first Valentine is outraged, but her debates with the judge over his behavior soon leads them to form a strange bond.
In this amusing and unsettling black comedy that ponders France’s bedrock principle of “equality,” a Polish hairdresser loses everything when his French wife (Julie Delpy) divorces him. He retreats to Warsaw vowing revenge.
A major rediscovery: a third narrative feature written and directed by a maverick American filmmaker whose other two movies—the low-key Black love story Nothing but a Man (1964) and the Jewish gangster comedy The Plot Against Harry (1971)—are widely regarded as masterpieces. Brooke Adams (Days of Heaven) and Trish Van Devere (The Changeling) star in this rapturously-reviewed, multifaceted melodrama that was originally shown under the title Haunted on PBS’ American Playhouse in 1984. The film tells of a troubled, recently-divorced woman who returns to her unhappy childhood home in Rhode Island. There she becomes involved in the messy lives of an even unhappier neighboring family.