Metrograph

Thursday, 28 May 2020

A narrative film distilling Bennani and Barki’s eight-episode online series 2 Lizards, a cockeyed comic response to life in New York City in pandemic times starring, yes, two animated anthropomorphized lizards. An aptly surreal reflection of a more than slightly surreal time. Preceded by Culturesport: Rotterdam 95, an animated science fiction web series by Bennani and Barki collaborators John Michael Boling and Jason Coombs, concerning an engineer who proposes to combat rising sea levels by harvesting the dreams of two gabber-loving kids from the titular Dutch city’s hardcore scene… though his true intentions, as it transpires, may lie elsewhere.

2 Lizards (Orian Barki, Meriem Bennani, 2020, 23 mins)

Culturesport: Rotterdam 1995 (John Michael Boling, 2019, 19 mins)

Q&A with filmmakers and artists Orian Barki, Meriem Bennani, John Michael Boling, and Jason Coombs on Saturday, June 27th

Wednesday, 24 April 1974

Hazan’s intimate and innovative film about English-born, often California-based artist David Hockney and his work honors its subject through creative risk-taking. The improvisatory narrative nonfiction hybrid features Hockney—a wary participant—as well as his circle of friends, and captures the agonized end of the lingering affair between Hockney and his muse, the American Peter Schlesinger. Both a time capsule of hedonistic gay life in the 1970s and an honest yet tender depiction of same-sex romance that dispenses with the then-current narratives of self-hatred and self-pity, the film also provides an invaluable view of art history in action and a record of artistic creation that is itself a work of art.

A Metrograph Pictures release.

Saturday, 18 April 1964

With this blackly comic, cynical, dust-choked movie, Leone and Di Leo—one of the film’s three uncredited writers— revolutionized the quintessentially American western genre from his native Italy, established “Man with No Name” star Clint Eastwood as a taciturn, sculptural screen icon, and launched a thousand knockoff Spaghetti Westerns. Inspired by Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled novel Red Harvest, Leone’s pitiless, operatic work has Eastwood arriving in the crime-ridden ‘burg of San Miguel, where he sets out to get rich setting two feuding gangs at each other’s throats. A work of bleak, brutal beauty, and a stern reminder to never, ever, under any circumstances, talk shit about Clint Eastwood’s mule.

Distributor: Park Circus

Friday, 28 May 1999

Rudolph’s adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s 1973 satirical novel Breakfast of Champions, about an upstanding Midwestern auto dealership proprietor slowly coming apart at the seams, received a rough reception on its initial limited release, but over time is increasingly recognized as a work of rare verve and daring, not slavishly transcribing from its source but matching it in madcap brio—thanks in no small part to star Bruce Willis’s screwball chops and the brisk cutting of editor Suzy Elmiger. “One of the best adaptations of a literary work… A mind-blowing vision of the New America — a commercial city off a highway exit — where the excess of mush, dumps, and mud is becoming vomit-inducing… The unusual avant-garde film made with every available means and Hollywood actors.” —Luc Moullet

Distributor: AGFA

Q&A with editor Suzy Elmiger moderated by Meg Reticker, ACE, on Saturday, June 27th

Monday, 06 October 2008

The cream of Hong Kong/Taiwanese screen acting, including Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, and Leslie Cheung, unite in this otherworldly, elliptical, impressionistic, and entirely intoxicating arthouse wuxia, shot on location—with great difficulty and, thanks to DP Christopher Doyle, boundless ingenuity—in the remote Gobi Desert. Prompted by a necessary undertaking to preserve the original 1994 film’s surviving elements, Ashes of Time Redux is not merely a restoration but a stunning re-orchestration of Wong’s sweeping epic, creating an even more intensified expression of the director’s singular sense of cinematic construction. On-set, Wong would reportedly needle Doyle by asking him, after a take: “Is that all you can do?” Asked about this years later, Doyle would respond: “[This] should be the mantra for all people in the arts.”

Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics

35mm print courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Friday, 03 March 1995

Linklater’s ongoing, decades-spanning story of a love affair through its many ups and downs begins here, with a chance encounter on a train between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, the American Jesse and the French Céline, who together will pass a day and night in Vienna full of spirited, sparkling conversation and a slowly dawning attraction, all depicted with an ambling, uninflected naturalism. A wistful, winning, and quietly impassioned portrait of young love as it begins to bloom.

Distributor: Warner Bros.

Wednesday, 28 May 2025

Multihyphenate artists Barki and Bennani’s playful animation/live-action hybrid film à clef offers up a delightfully idiosyncratic look at the travails of the queer expat artist. The title character here is imagined as an anthropomorphic jackal inhabiting a New York City filled with other like critters, a young filmmaker simultaneously dealing with creative crises, her rocky relationship with her mother back in Casablanca, and the pleasures and perils of sex in the city. Drawing on real phone calls and myriad other correspondences, with voice talent courtesy of the directing duo’s friends and family members, this lay-it-on-the-line autofiction is at once startlingly light on its feet and densely layered with insight, not least into the feelings that come of shakily straddling two cultures while belonging fully to neither.

Distributor: Film Movement

Q&A with filmmakers and artists Orian Barki, Meriem Bennani, John Michael Boling, and Jason Coombs, moderated by photographer Daniel Arnold on Friday, June 26th

Q&A with filmmakers and artists Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani on Saturday, June 27th and Sunday, June 28th

Tuesday, 08 May 1990

Widely regarded as the opening salvo of independent documentary in Mainland China, Wu’s Bumming in Beijing—a portrait of broke bohemian artists scraping by in the capital city, among them future blue-chip star Zhang Dali—was shot with equipment from China Central Television (CCTV) with an eye towards inclusion in the television series People of China, but its depiction of restless youth in the time before and immediately after the Tiananmen Square massacre, not to mention its blunt depiction of a mental breakdown, proved too controversial for the small screen. A film of incalculable import: in capturing the emergence of a Chinese avant-garde, Wu in effect created a Chinese school of cinema vérité.

Presented in its original extended version

Monday, 19 February 1962

One of Varda’s supreme works gives us two crucial hours—actually 90 minutes, though played as though in real time—in the life of a successful French pop singer of the yé-yé vintage, Corinne Marchand’s Cléo, as she waits to hear biopsy results from a doctor that may mean the end of not only her promising career, but also her life. Potentially glum subject matter is given a treatment that fairly crackles with vivacious cinematic energy, matched by a jazzy score courtesy Michel Legrand, who appears rehearsing with Marchand in a lengthy and lovely sequence.

Distributor: Janus Films

Tuesday, 01 May 1979

After receiving an anonymous call coming from the Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel, police inspector Peter Glebsky (Uldis Pūcītis) heads to the remote Alpine ski resort and, after an avalanche cuts it off from the world, finds himself having to contend with a highly unusual potpourri of guests and a series of inexplicable occurrences that defy his attempts at rational explanation. Based on a novel of the same name by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who together wrote the screenplay, Kromanov’s richly atmospheric amalgam of whodunit and science fiction is a film unlike any other, with good reason among the most treasured in the annals of Estonian cinema.

Distributor: AGFA

Newly restored in 4K by Deaf Crocodile in collaboration with the Estonian Film Institute and Film Archive.

Monday, 22 April 2019

Alone or in collaboration with one another or other like-minded collaborators, over the last several years directors Abrantes and Schmidt have created some of the most hysterically deranged short films out there, and their feature debut doesn’t disappoint in its heady blend of political satire and gender-bending sexual anarchy. Tabu’s Carloto Cotta gives the finest comic performance in recent memory as the dimwitted Portuguese soccer superstar of the title, a burlesqued version of Christiano Ronaldo, swept up in a complicated comic conundrum involving the refugee crisis, Secret Service skullduggery, mad science genetic modification, and a right-wing anti-EU conspiracy. Smart, sly, and sweet, and featuring the biggest stampede of fluffy puppies you’ve ever seen.

Distributor: Kino Lorber

Tuesday, 28 May 1991

Also known as Zentropa, by any name von Trier’s film is a technical tour de force, its use of superimpositions and rear projection in layered widescreen compositions and expressionistic set design making for an orgy of formal flair unlike most anything else in cinema. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, idealistic young German American Leo Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr), who’s taken a job in US-occupied Deutschland as a conductor for the Zentropa railway company, finds himself caught up with a mysterious woman (Barbara Sukowa), “Werwolf” terrorists not reconciled to the postwar order, and a struggle for the future of a war-torn nation.

Distributor: MUBI

Saturday, 27 September 1969

The surviving fragments of Gaius Petronius’s 1st century AD satire were adapted by Fellini into this appropriately disjointed, disorienting travelogue through an ancient Rome, extravagantly and outlandishly imagined—with significant inspiration drawn from the contemporary counterculture—on the vast soundstages of Cinecittà. Consumed by desire for young androgyne Gitone (Max Born), Encolpio (Martin Potter) is tossed about on the turbulent surface of a destabilized Roman society defined by wanton cruelty, garish display, pansexual licentiousness, unchecked gluttony, and general hedonism. A heaping helping of cinematic panem et circenses from the maestro, drawing provocative parallels between the Empire in decadent decline and contemporary consumerist Europe.

Distributor: Park Circus

Introduction by curator and scholar Marc Francis, author of Curating Deviance: Programming the Queer Film Canon, on Sunday, June 14th

Tuesday, 01 June 1965

Leone, Clint Eastwood, and composer Ennio Morricone’s second outing as a team finds Clint’s laconic, cold-blooded “Man with No Name” vying with fellow bounty hunter Col. Douglas Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef) to be the first to collect the price on the head of the demonic bandito El Indio (Gian Maria Volonté)—described by Spaghetti Western connoisseur Alex Cox as “the most diabolical Western villain of all time.” Combining sun-bleached exteriors shot in Almería and striking interiors, courtesy trained architect-turned-production designer Carlo Simi, filmed at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, For a Few Dollars More would become a worldwide box-office phenomenon, cementing Eastwood’s status as the rugged, unflinching face of a new, unsentimental breed of Western.

Distributor: Park Circus

Thursday, 28 September 2017

A relentless, breakneck, candy-colored chase through the heart of Queens and Nassau County, the Safdies’ long, dark night of the soul thriller follows ne’er-do-well punk grifter “Connie” Nikas (Robert Pattinson) as he scrambles to spring brother Nick (Benny Safdie) from the clink after a bank job gone awry, finding himself embroiled in one botched scheme after another in the course of a sleepless night that takes him to sugar mama Jennifer Jason Leigh, through an Adventureland dark ride, and to the limits of endurance. A mesmerizing, frantic performance by Pattinson, in a harrowing work of bridge-and-tunnel psychedelia.

Distributor: A24

Friday, 15 May 1959

Co-written with Iranian diplomat (and onetime Cahiers du cinéma contributor!) Fereydoun Hoveyda and luminously photographed by cinematographer Aldo Tonti, Rossellini’s pivotal India: Matri Bhumi is a work of poetic ethnofiction, a string of five vignettes that travel from the teeming streets of Mumbai to the rural villages of the Subcontinent, unified by their abiding interest in the confrontation between human beings and the natural world, and by the filmmaker’s enormous tenderness for his subjects. “I tried to express the soul, the light inside these people, their reality, which is a reality that is absolutely intimate, unique, and attached to an individual, with all the sense of his surroundings.” —Rossellini

"India: Matri Bhumi is a film in which the distinction between reality and fiction gradually loses significance. The people filmed do not seem like they are 'acting'; rather they simply inhabit the film. This merging, or hybridity of genres, produces something profoundly cinematic. With Rossellini, we feel a kind of cinema that is not trying to explain the world but to pass through it and allow itself to be transformed. Observation becomes imagination. The real continuously opens itself to the invisible. Cinema ceases to be representation of the world and becomes the creation of the world." —Gianfranco Rosi

Distributor: Janus Films

Monday, 28 May 1962

Tarkovsky’s magisterial feature debut, dubbed an exemplar of “socialist surrealism” by admirer Jean-Paul Sartre, follows a 12-year-old Russian boy orphaned during the German invasion of the USSR who, spurred by a passionate desire to avenge the death of his parents, embarks on a series of perilous missions taking him behind enemy lines. The hallucinatory quality of life in wartime has rarely been so vividly captured as it is by Tarkovsky in this transcendent work, a film of tour de force technical brio that moves freely between lyrical passages depicting its child soldier protagonist’s forever-lost family life and a present tense of unimaginable horror.

Distributor: Janus Films

35mm print courtesy of Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research

Monday, 13 February 1995

A cinematic Molotov cocktail that was the first onscreen description of life (and death) in Paris’s banlieue housing projects that many French filmgoers had ever seen, La Haine depicts three armed and angry slum kids—Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé, and Saïd Taghmaoui—who, following days of rioting after the police’s savage beating of a young man, hit the city streets like ticking time bombs. A breakneck Steadicam journey through the concrete jungles of the suburbs, given an almost lunar desolation by the film’s black-and-white photography, La Haine is a propulsive, volatile, and visceral landmark of ’90s French cinema.

Distributor: Janus Films

Wednesday, 22 February 1961

Variously pilloried and adulated in its time, and undeniably “one of the most influential movies ever made” [J. Hoberman, The Village Voice], Resnais’s coolly glittering, fascinating, frustrating film, made in collaboration with novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, lays its scene at a hotel located in a baroque château. A man and a woman (Giorgio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyrig) meet; he claims they had an affair a year ago; she has no memory of him; a third man (Sacha Pitoëff), who may or may not be the woman’s husband, intervenes only to further muddy the waters. A film of absolute ambiguity in both content and style, marked by abrupt shifts in timeframe and location, untrustworthy narration, and disconcerting editing patterns, and a work that has lured in generations of viewers hoping either to unlock its mysteries or simply relish in its solemn, seductive beauty.

Distributor: Rialto

Thursday, 28 May 1987

Bruce Springsteen was originally intended to star in Schrader’s blue-collar rock ’n’ roll melodrama, but after the Boss took off with its original title in his back pocket—“Born in the U.S.A.”—he presented the renamed Light of Day as a title track in exchange, and Joan Jett and Fox stepped in to portray working-class Cleveland siblings trying to keep their dreams of musical stardom alive between shifts at the steel mill. This least-seen of Schrader’s top-shelf works is a film with an unusual level of insight into the exigencies a gigging band surviving on a shoestring’s life on the road, featuring a rafter-rattling performance of Jett’s “This Means War,” a superb Gena Rowlands as Jett and Fox’s devout mother, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from a baby-faced Trent Reznor.

Distributor: Paramount

Wednesday, 26 August 1981

“I treated myself to a taxi. I rode home through the city streets. There wasn’t a street, there wasn’t a building that wasn’t connected to some memory in my mind.” Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, playing fictionalized versions of themselves, share a real-time conversation with the city outside looming over the pocket universe of My Dinner With André. Shawn’s journey from grubby downtown bohemia to the rarified environs of Café des Artistes (filmed at the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, Virgina) grounds this famously cerebral film in the reality of daily New York City life, adding a necessary dimension to the resentments and alienation that animate Shawn and Gregory’s conversation.

Distributor: Janus Films

Thursday, 16 February 1989

Tam, perhaps the Hong Kong New Wave’s most daring cine-modernist and a crucial influence on Wong Kar-wai, teams with DP Christopher Doyle for a high-style “heroic bloodshed” melodrama starring Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Kenny Bee, and Joey Wong as three friends bound together by ties both criminal and romantic. With shamelessly pulpy plotting, a synth-heavy score, luxuriously expressionistic imagery, and a climactic bloodbath for the ages, My Heart Is That Eternal Rose exists somewhere at the intersection between Wong’s cinema of longing and John Woo’s cinema of wrathful vengeance. One of the unheralded masterworks of Hong Kong filmmaking.

/br>A Kani Releasing release

Thursday, 29 October 1981

Easily the most harrowing divorce drama ever made, Zuławski’s one-of-a-kind genre pastiche has spy Sam Neill returning to his Berlin home from a mission abroad to discover that wife Isabelle Adjani wants suddenly to split up. Launching an investigation into the reasons for her ever-more-alarming behavior, he discovers a truth more sinister (and nauseating) than his wildest suspicions, as Zuławski’s highly-choreographed cinematic delirium and Andrzej Korzyński’s pulsating score push things light years past over-the-top. Adjani won a César for her performance, one of the most grueling ever caught on film, though later reflected that the palpable ordeal she put herself through on the movie was nearly enough to make her leave acting behind.

Distributor: Metrograph Pictures

Thursday, 19 February 1987

Meek white-collar worker Tony Leung Ka-fai looks like defenseless fresh meat when he goes into prison on a manslaughter charge, but he survives thanks to the protection of longtime inmate Chow Yun-fat. Their friendship becomes a bastion of finer feelings in the brutal lockup, a microcosm of mercenary Hong Kong society ruled by triad gangs and crooked guards, the worst of them Roy Cheung’s skull-cracking sadist, whose final confrontation with Chow is one of the most searing expressions of revolutionary rage in all of HK cinema.

35mm print courtesy of Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research

Distributror: AGFA

Sunday, 11 June 1950

Saturday Afternoon Cartoons is New York City’s prime theatrical showcase of early and classic animated cartoons, shown in vintage 16mm film prints from the personal archives of historian Tommy José Stathes. Beginning more than 25 years ago as a casual effort to find and see early cartoons that were unavailable on home video, Stathes’s collection has grown to become one of the largest of its kind. It includes many titles and ‘orphan films’ that are difficult to access or view elsewhere.

Stathes joins Metrograph in June with Dynamic Duos, a selection of vintage animated shorts featuring fun and sometimes dysfunctional character team-ups! Come enjoy an ex-flapper organizing a jazzed-up house party for her elderly friend; a cartoon cat helping a live-action girl run an egg farm; two birds invading a cranky old farmer’s homestead; a cat and mouse’s big clash at the circus; a couple of bachelors failing at a babysitting gig; and other amusing tales. Spanning the 1920s through the ’50s, this assortment showcases classic characters such as Porky Pig and Daffy Duck, Betty Boop and Grampy, Mutt and Jeff, the original Tom and Jerry (humans!); Herman and Katnip, Heckle and Jeckle, Alice and Julius, Tweety and Sylvester, and others.

Featuring introduction and Q&A with Stathes.

Monday, 28 February 2000

Taking its name from the polluted river that flows through Shanghai, director Lou’s hometown, the brooding Suzhou River uses the singular first-person perspective of its unseen videographer-narrator to explore the grubby underbelly of the city, observing the story of an unsuspecting motorcycle courier who finds himself snared in a kidnapping plot and murder rap. A seductive, intricately structured stylistic coup from the Sixth Generation filmmaker, drawing on influences from film noir to Vertigo (1958) while developing its own idiosyncratic and haunting visual vocabulary.

Distributor: Strand Releasing

Tuesday, 28 May 1985

Awkward Nebraska high schooler Scott Howard (Fox) is a flop on the basketball court and practically invisible to girls, but all of that changes when he discovers he’s inherited the curse—and the gift—of lycanthropy from his father, achieving local celebrity thanks to his slam-dunking werewolf alter ego. Taking in nearly 20 times its meager budget at the box office, it was Teen Wolf, alongside the same year’s Back to the Future, that established Fox as the bankable teen star of the moment: a tailor-made outfit for the actor’s self-effacing charm, a veritable runway showcase for the delirious excesses of ’80s fashion, and to our knowledge the only American studio production to feature a scene of lupine break-dancing.

Distributor: Park Circus

35mm print courtesy of the American Genre Film Archive

Tuesday, 08 January 1991

After breaking heads in his first outing as Skynet’s T-800, Schwarzenegger broke hearts as a kinder, gentler war machine, tasked with protecting teen John Connor (Edward Furlong) from the liquid metal T-1000 (Robert Patrick), sent back in time to eliminate the snot-nosed mallrat and with him any hope for the survival of humanity. Riveting from its opening nightmare vision of nuclear Armageddon, jam-packed with magisterial set pieces (the chase down the Bull Creek spillway; the destruction of Cyberdyne Systems headquarters…) and, of course, eminently quotable. If you don’t shed a single tear at Arnie’s parting thumb’s up, you may not be human yourself.

Distributor: Rialto Pictures

Sunday, 19 December 1971

Pasolini’s so-called “Trilogy of Life" films, adapted from canonical, world-historical story collections, represented a break from his experimental works of the late 1960s like Porcile and Teorema—films which he came to judge as existing too much in the realm of pure alienation and detachment. Determined to create a new popular cinema, he produced this bawdy, blissy, sun-kissed adaptation of Boccaccio’s 14th-century classic, its various chapters linked together by a framing device featuring Pasolini himself as a Giottolike painter. One of Pasolini’s lightest and most lovable films.

Distributor: Park Circus

Introduction by curator and scholar Marc Francis, author of Curating Deviance: Programming the Queer Film Canon, on Sunday, June 14th

Monday, 15 January 2001

In 1939, the final year of the Spanish Civil War, newly fatherless 10-year-old Carlos (Fernando Tielve) arrives at the Santa Lucia School, dedicated to the care of the orphaned children of Republican loyalists, its permanent staff comprised of stern headmistress Marisa Paredes, physician Federico Luppi, unhinged groundskeeper Eduardo Noriega… not to mention other lurking spectral presences. An unnerving, atmospheric, and emotionally potent work of Spanish Gothic horror. “Balances dread with tenderness, and refracts the terror and sadness of the time through the eyes of a young boy, who only half-understands what he is witnessing.” —The New York Times

Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics

Monday, 15 May 1972

Sent off at an away game after committing a foul, goalkeeper Josef Bloch (Arthur Brauss) wanders the streets of an unfamiliar and unfriendly town—and come the following day finds himself with blood on his hands, retreating to his hometown and the hospitality of an ex-girlfriend (Kai Fischer) to await the inevitable arrival of the police. Adapting Peter Handke’s novella of the same name for his feature debut, Wenders—working with cameraman Robby Müller and editor Peter Przygodda, crucial collaborators for years to come—drew inspiration from the chilly precision of Hitchcock’s cinema, producing in this downbeat Teutonic noir one of the seminal works of New German Cinema.

Distributor: Janus Films

Monday, 19 September 2016

Park’s twisty, kinky, divinely decadent period thriller, set in a Japanese-occupied 1930s Korea that’s imagined with baroque flourish by set designer Ryu Seong-hee, follows hired handmaiden Kim Tae-ri as she enters the service of shut-in heiress Kim Min-hee and her elderly, dictatorial uncle, while at the same time pursuing an underhanded agenda unknown to her new master and mistress—until, that is, the women concoct a plan of their own to take care of the men who have been manipulating and controlling them. An ingeniously structured work whose interlocking narratives and tricky perspectival shifts, handled with apparent ease, make for an acerbic, comic, and often sultry spin on the old-dark-house mystery, taut with thrilling turnabouts and and SM restraints.

Distributor: Amazon Studios

Sunday, 01 September 1991

Demme’s riveting, skin-crawly adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel of the same name earned a prestige rarely granted to horror movies thanks to, yes, its two undeniable powerhouse central performances—Anthony Hopkins as psychopath psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter and Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling, the FBI agent trainee who has to win Lecter’s trust and consult his blighted, brilliant mind in order to stop another serial killer at large—but also by virtue of its consummate technical virtuosity. The work of Craig McKay, which earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Editing, will be studied as long as suspense thrillers are made, his climactic parallel cutting of two FBI “raids” nothing short of masterful.

Distributor: Park Circus

Tuesday, 11 June 1974

The all-consuming monomania of footy fandom is at the center of Kiarostami’s first full-length feature, in which Qassem, a 12-year-old from the provincial city of Malayer, is determined to see the Iranian national team play a match some 150 miles away in Tehran, and will stop at nothing—including truancy, fraud, and petty larceny—in order to achieve his dream. “A quest film that’s also a study of youthful obsession, it’s filmed in edgy black and white with a quiet energy that matches its hero’s. The Traveler has an acridly ironic ending and one of the best performances by a child in Kiarostami’s early work.” —Godfrey Cheshire

Distributor: Janus Films

Saturday, 29 September 1990

Back in the days when the system would still occasionally let a visionary blockbuster slip through, gleefully perverse Dutchman Verhoeven teamed up with an Austrian-born weightlifter who was then the biggest action star in the world to make a big-budget adaptation of a mind-bending Philip K. Dick story. The result: painful nasal probes, Sharon Stone, cartoon bloodshed, three-breasted Martian sex workers, a litany of quotable lines, and a piece of cinema history.

Distributor: Rialto Pictures

Friday, 11 June 1982

Emotions boil over and thunder rolls during one oppressively humid summer night in Brussels in Akerman’s tender and melancholy film of brief encounters, furtive embraces, nocturnal despair, yearning vigils, and pregnant silences. A string of self-contained vignettes, precisely composed and parsimonious in use of dialogue, their abiding air of tension occasionally rent by cloudbursts of frenzied feeling, Toute une nuit may be regarded, like the filmmaker’s News from Home, as an inimitable twist on the “city symphony” genre, laying its scenes in the bars, cafes, and streets of Akerman’s hometown. “A comédie sentimentale treated as a choreographed dance.” —Cahiers du Cinéma

Distributor: Janus Films

Friday, 28 May 2004

In the weeks leading up to the fall of Saddam Hussein, the residents of a Kurdish refugee camp on the mountainous border between Turkey and Iraq await the arrival of US-led forces. A 13-year-old, known by his friends as “Satellite,” earns pocket money leading a small gang of orphaned kids in scrounging up undetonated landmines, and in his downtime finds himself pulled into the orbit of Agrin, a melancholy mother at 14, whose brother, Hengov, appears to have gained psychic abilities after being maimed by a mine, posing a threat to Satellite’s top-dog status among the camp youth. The scuffling of adolescents is contrasted to quarrels on a far larger scale, to devastating effect. “We are in the hands of a master… [Ghobadi’s] imagery is so boilingly alive that we come away from [Turtles Can Fly] feeling exhilarated.” —LA Weekly

Distributor: Le bureau

Thursday, 11 June 1992

The film that launched a DTV empire and one of the very finest starring vehicles for “The Muscles from Brussels,” Universal Soldier features Jean-Claude Van Damme as Luc Deveraux, a Vietnam War casualty who is resurrected decades after being KIA. Returning as a souped-up, genetically augmented cybersoldier courtesy a top secret military initiative, Luc is forced to go on the run, evading the agency that created him and his unhinged former sergeant (Dolph Lundgren), beneficiary of the same physical upgrades that Luc has received but scarcely more mentally stable than he ever was. A meaty slab of blunt force trauma action, and a lyrical ode to totally jacked, yoked-up dudes.

Distributor: Rialto Pictures

Wednesday, 30 October 1991

Having aspired in his youth to be a painter before settling for becoming merely one of the mightiest French cineastes of his generation, Pialat was perhaps uniquely qualified to give us a screen Van Gogh who felt genuinely new—as played by musician-turned-actor Jacques Dutronc less manic and combative than crabbed and resigned, not a wild-eyed ear-cutter but a man growing near to the exhaustion of passion. Pialat’s coup was to make a Van Gogh film that doesn’t assume its subject’s preeminence any more than did his age, a “biopic” that doubles as an entire portrait of an era, that of the Belle Epoque, in which the supporting players are every bit as interesting as the vaunted Great Man. “Astonishing, totally astonishing; far beyond the cinematic horizon covered up until now by our wretched gaze.” —Jean-Luc Godard

Distributor: Cohen Film Collection

Friday, 28 May 2021

World Cup fever and young love are in the air in the Georgian riverside city of Kutaisi; Lisa, a pharmacist, and Giorgi, a soccer player, smitten on first sight with one another, make plans for a date—plans that go awry when both awaken transformed beyond recognition, each unable to recognize the other. Fumbling towards reunion, the would-be couple’s eyes are opened to a whole new world where surprises lurk in every cafe, courtyard, and cinema in Koberidze’s standout second feature, an enchanting, inventive modern-day fairy tale that confirmed its writer-director as among the most distinctive voices in the burgeoning Georgian New Wave.

Distributor: MUBI

Sunday, 11 October 2009

Raised in colonial French Africa until the age of 13, Denis would return to the continent in her cinema time and again, making it the scene of some of her richest and most redolent works. Here, Isabelle Huppert plays the manager of a coffee plantation in an unnamed country on the verge of civil war, trying to hang on until harvest time as the auguries of impending chaos gather on every side, and soldiers—many of them children, hence the film’s dedication “Aux intrepides petites marmailles”—roam the landscape. “Simultaneously poetic, dramatic, and realistic… Altogether stunning.”—Los Angeles Times

Distributor: The Festival Agency