In ‘[Rec]’ – as in the record button on a camera – the action is confined to a Spanish apartment block, and the nature of the threat is unknown. ‘[Rec]’ softens us up with a gentle prologue in which the crew of a late-night ‘reality TV’ show – invisible cameraman Pablo and presenter Angela (Manuela Velasco) – make a late-night visit to a fire station. Then comes a call about an old woman trapped in her apartment. The ensuing scenes have a nerve-shredding intensity. (dir. Jaume Balagueró & Paco Plaza, Spain, 2007, 78 min.)

Following the closing arguments in a murder trial, the members of the jury must deliberate, with a guilty verdict meaning death for the accused, an inner-city teen. As the dozen men try to reach a unanimous decision while sequestered in a room, one juror (Henry Fonda) casts considerable doubt on elements of the case. Released in 1957, when Technicolor and lush production values were common, 12 Angry Men was lean and mean. It is a masterpiece of stylized realism–where the top-notch photography and editing comment on the stripped-down plot. (dir. Sidney Lumet, U.S., 1957, 96 min.)

A hands-on frog-puppet-making workshop will follow The Frog Prince, featuring a live puppetry demonstration by Dov Manley of Up in Arms Puppets. The Frog Prince is a 1971 comedy television special directed by Jim Henson. This musical fantasy is a retelling of the Brothers Grimm's classic fairy tale of "The Frog Prince" featuring Kermit the Frog as the narrator, Kermit's nephew Robin as Sir Robin the Frog Prince, and Sweetums. It marked the debut of both Robin and Sweetums in The Muppets. (dir. Jim Henson, U.S., 1971, 51 min.)

Presented in person by the legendary record producer Joe Boyd who co-directed this little-seen rockumentary. The film contains concert footage of Hendrix from 1967 to 1970, including the Monterey Pop Festival, the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, Woodstock, and a Berkeley concert. The on-stage and behind the scenes footage is interspersed with first-hand recollections, from Pete Townshend, Mick Jagger, Little Richard, Lou Reed, Buddy Miles and more. (dir. Joe Boyd, John Head, Gary Weiss, 1973, 98 min.)

The Anvil Orchestra returns, accompanying Hitchcock’s silent version of one of the greatest British films. It concerns a young woman who kills a man in self-defense, then is blackmailed by a witness. Made during the transition to the sound era, it was commissioned as both a silent and as a part talkie. Blackmail displays many of the stylistic elements and themes with which Hitchcock would come to be associated. The film is accompanied live by the Anvil Orchestra – Roger Miller and Terry Donahue, who for 30+ years, have been playing percussion-driven original scores to silent classics utilizing unusual sound sources as well as accordion, musical saw, electronics, and orchestral keyboards. (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, U.K., 1929, 76 min.)

In tribute to lead singer David Johansen who died on Feb. 28, we present this little-seen tribute to his legendary band who gave rock music a jolt in the early ‘70s when it was in danger of losing its danger. Described as “a cross between the Rolling Stones and Alice Cooper,” the Dolls were a New York City sensation almost immediately, inheriting the Velvet Underground’s role at Max’s Kansas City. Photographer Bob Gruen and wife Nadya started videotaping them early on, capturing their raw, garage edge and their provocative stage personas which mixed camp, drag and androgyny. (dir. Bob Gruen, U.S., 2005, 95 min.)

Adrian (writer/director/producer and star Adrian Tofei) is an aspiring filmmaker in a tiny Romanian village who dreams of making a film with Anne Hathaway. His idea is to make a proof-of-concept film to send to the star, which will convince her of his genius. However, he can barely hold a camera. (dir. Adrian Tofei, Rumania, 2015, 87 min.)

Father-Daughter duo, Ridley and Elliot, hit a unicorn with their car and bring it to the wilderness retreat of a mega-wealthy pharmaceutical CEO.

“Disney’s Snow White,” a live-action musical reimagining of the classic 1937 film, opens exclusively in theaters March 21, 2025. Starring Rachel Zegler (“West Side Story”) in the title role and Gal Gadot (“Wonder Woman”) as her Stepmother, the Evil Queen, the magical music adventure journeys back to the timeless story with beloved characters Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, and Sneezy.

Eclipsed by its contemporary, the satirical Dr Strangelove, Fail Safe opts for a deadly serious mix of cold-war melodrama and rampant psychosis. Fail Safe imagines a no-win situation that corners President Fonda, a sturdy, dependable American president. Director Sidney Lumet sensibly avoids pyrotechnics in favour of tightening the psychological screws. Expressionistic camerawork, intense long takes alternating with sharp montages, and even the most painful of freeze frames: what Strangelove was to black humor, this is to gut-wrenching suspense.

This criminally unsung Canadian singer and guitarist – who lived a while in Woodstock – fought for her right to play the slide guitar, a male-dominated instrument. Arriving in Greenwich Village with no prospects, she found herself opening for Odetta, Richie Havens, and Mississippi John Hurt – and eventually playing with Jimi Hendrix.

For years, it was one of pop music’s most persistent mysteries: Whatever happened to Q Lazzarus? And who was she in the first place? Most listeners who had heard of the genre-bending artist, born Diane Luckey, likely encountered her song “Goodbye Horses” in The Silence of the Lambs as a creepy new wave track, featuring minor-key, sci-fi synths and androgynous vocals. The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus is built out of about 100 hours of footage Eva Aridjis Fuentes shot after meeting her in a taxi. It also includes archival material from Luckey’s would-be heyday, including nearly two dozen unreleased recordings from the approximately 10 years she made music. (dir. Eva Aridjis Fuentes, U.S., 2025, 90 min.)

Inspired by Hitchcock’s transitional Blackmail (April 18, Orpheum) we continue a 1929 series with some of the earliest talkies. The first real talkie, The Jazz Singer, had just been released in 1927. It starred the famous Jewish entertainer Al Jolson, who appeared in blackface. Hallelujah took things one step further: It featured a cast that was entirely African American. Hallelujah was the brainchild of one of 1920s Hollywood’s best-known directors, King Vidor who filmed in the heart of the Jim Crow South. While it received an Academy Award nomination, it was never released in many parts of the country, a casualty of segregation. King Vidor even revolutionized the way sound was recorded and edited into this film, establishing a new industry standard.(dir. King Vidor, U.S., 1929, 109 min.)

In the mid-‘70s, filmmaker James Szalapski documented the then-nascent country music movement that would become known as “outlaw country.” Inspired by newly-long-haired Willie Nelson’s embrace of hippie attitudes and audiences, a younger generation of artists including Townes Van Zandt, David Allan Coe, Steve Earle and Guy Clark popularized and developed the outlaw sound. It borrowed from rock, folk and bluegrass, with an edge that was missing from mainstream Nashville country. This newly-restored documentary includes rarely-captured performances as the mavericks helped change the course of country music history. (dir. James Szalapski, U.S., 1976, 92 min.)

The Smiths’ biographer Tony Fletcher returns to the Orpheum to host a retrospective muli- media presentation of the band’s seminal second album. Released in early 1985, and aided by the inclusion of the classic “How Soon Is Now?” Meat is Murder established the Manchester, UK group with a young American audience taken by their resolutely independent and confrontational image. Fronted by the unlikely icon of Stephen Morrissey, who co-wrote the Smiths’ songs with guitarist Johnny Marr, The Smiths are remembered as a generational phenomenon, whose U.S. popularity defied their Englishness. For his A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths (2012), Fletcher interviewed dozens of figures in and around the Smiths. As with his previous Orpheum presentations on R.E.M. and Keith Moon, Fletcher will use his biography as a jumping off point to discuss the band’s enduring legacy of present rare film and concert clips, and offer live performances of Smiths material featuring local musical luminaries. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A.. Books will be on sale.

The four members of the Palmer family go for a swim, but only daughter Alice never makes it back to shore. This taut ghost shocker plays like a polished doc, weaving interviews with found footage as the family, exploring the strange circumstances of the drowning and the even stranger glimpses of her in videos and photos taken after her death, creating a creeping sense of supernatural dread. (dir. Joel Anderson, Australia, 2008, 81 min.)

The teasingly entwined ambiguities of love and death continue to fascinate Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake), who returns with a sharp, sinister, yet slyly funny thriller. Set in an autumnal, woodsy village in his native region of Occitanie, his latest follows the meandering exploits of Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), an out-of-work baker who has drifted back to his hometown after the death of his beloved former boss, a bakery owner. Staying long after the funeral, the seemingly benign Jérémie begins to casually insinuate himself into his mentor’s family, including his kind-hearted widow (Catherine Frot) and venomously angry son (Jean-Baptiste Durand), while making an increasingly surprising—and ultimately beneficial—friendship with an oddly cheerful local priest (Jacques Develay). In Guiraudie’s quietly carnal world, violence and eroticism explode with little anticipation, and criminal behavior can seem like a natural extension of physical desire. The French director is at the top of his game in Misericordia, again upending all genre expectations.

Phillip Lopate fell hard for the movies as an adolescent. As he matured into an acclaimed critic and essayist, his infatuation deepened into a lifelong passion. My Affair with Art House Cinema presents Lopate’s selected essays and reviews from the last quarter century, inviting readers to experience films he found exhilarating, tantalizing, and beguiling—and sometimes disappointing or frustrating—through his keen eyes. With this live program at Upstate’s Mark screening room, Lopate pays tribute to some of his favorites, interspersing clips from films by Kenji Mizoguchi, Ernst Lubitsch, Yasujiro Ozu, Carl Theodor Dreyer and John Cassavettes. Lopate is a passionate advocate for not only particular films and directors but also the joys and value of a filmgoing culture.

Alex Halpern’s feature-length documentary unfolds through the stories and recollections of his 102-year-old grandmother Mary Mirabito, an outspoken and fiercely independent woman. In a revealing and often hilarious portrait, Mary dispenses homespun wisdom while divulging family secrets and rivalries. Nine Good Teeth reveals many of the common truths hidden away in all our families, as well as the unexpected - late night visits from Jack Kerouac, illicit love affairs and the occasional murder.’ Presented by Celebrate Aging.(dir. Alex Halpern, U.S., 2002, 75 mins.)

Shot over five years, this doc is an intimate chronicle of life as residents of a Palestinian community in the West Bank struggle to stay put in their homes. For lawyer and activist Basel Adra, who grew up watching his activist parents fight to protect their land, nothing much has changed as he steps into his elders’ shoes. As his community is bulldozed before his eyes, Adra is helpless to do anything but keep his camera on: “I have nothing else, only my phone,” he despairs. (dir. Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Palestine-Norway, 2024, 95m)

The film follows paranormal researcher Masafumi Kobayashi, who embarks on a hellish odyssey while investigating an odd woman, her mysterious son, and some strange deaths. Along the way, we get a taste of Japanese variety shows, classic talking heads, and recovered footage from Kobayashi’s own files. (dir. Kōji Shiraishi, Japan, 2005, 115 min.)

In the English port city of Hull, a group of self-taught misfits banded together in 1970 as COUM Transmissions and began staging happenings. Led by Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti, COUM’s transgressive performance art dealt openly with sex, violence, and pornography – and in Tutti’s words, “rebuilt the notion of what music could be”. This is the first documentary about the legendary collective, made with original interviews and rare archival material. COUM gave rise to the confrontational noise band Throbbing Gristle who built their own instruments, ran their own independent record label, and invented an entirely new genre of electronic music called industrial. They were notoriously dubbed “the wreckers of civilization” by scandalized lawmakers. (dir. Dan Fox & Marcus Werner Held, U.S./U.K., 2020, 80 min.)

“It’s a reminder that the fourth (and fifth and sixth) wall can be smashed, and that the rock doc can be reinvented.” (Indiewire) What if the indie-rock band Pavement was the most important band of all time? Alex Ross Perry, with the help of ace editor Robert Greene, chases this question in four ways: staging an off-Broadway jukebox musical, a fake “Bohemian Rhapsody”-style biopic, a museum exhibition that brims with mostly unimportant memorabilia, and an actual documentary. An irreverent gesture undercuts every sincere moment, not unlike the band.(dir. Alex Ross Perry, U.S., 2024, 128 min.),

4K restoration. Hayao Miyazaki was already a cultural hero in Japan when this animated mythic adventure raised him to a status approaching living national treasure. In it, a prince becomes involved in the struggle between Mononoke –a girl raised by the wolves, who distrusts all humans – and the encroachment of mechanization. Miyazaki insists that there are things to be said for both the Iron Age settlers and the animals and their deities: rather than a Lord of the Rings-style showdown between good and evil, this argues for peaceful co-existence. Superbly imagined and visually sumptuous, its voice cast includes Gillian Anderson, Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Minnie Driver and Billy Bob Thornton. (dir. Hayao Mizazaki, Japan, 1998, 134 min.)

In this queer rom-com based on the 1993 film, Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone) are a loving couple desperate to have a child. Their friend Chris (Bowen Yang) refuses to commit to his boyfriend because of their traditional Korean family. (dir. Andrew Ahn, U.S., 2025, 103 min.)