Another batch of of cinema approaches the store. Since it’s a long weekend gonna post the list early so it gives you guys a few days to think it over. Let’s dive in shall we…
Mike Enslin (John Cusack) is a successful author who enjoys worldwide acclaim debunking supernatural phenomena — before he checks into the Dolphin Hotel, that is. Ignoring the warnings of the hotel manager (Samuel L. Jackson), he learns the meaning of real terror when he spends the night in a reputedly haunted room.
Collection of 6 short horror films directed by some of Spain’s best genre directors: Álex de la Iglesia (Perdita Durango), Narciso Ibáñez Serrador (Who Can Kill A Child), Paco Plaza & Jaume Balagueró (REC). 2006.
The ultimate cinematic head trip of the 1980s, British renegade Ken Russell’s first Hollywood film—adapted by the legendary screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky from his own novel—is part hallucinogenic freak-out, part gonzo creature feature, part transcendent love story, all played at a fever pitch. When researcher Eddie Jessup (William Hurt) begins using himself as a test subject for his mind-expanding psychological experiments, it sends him on an increasingly dangerous, substance-fueled odyssey from humankind’s primordial past to the outer limits of consciousness. It’s all visualized by Russell in a psychedelic supernova of out-there imagery that encompasses everything from the pagan to the cosmic sublime, culminating in a brain-wave-blasting battle between the mind and the heart.
A hijacked Boeing 747 crashes into the ocean, trapping passengers and crew beneath the sea. Jack Lemmon, Lee Grant, Christopher Lee, Jerry Jameson, 1977
Recently discovered & restored years after its completion, Lincoln Maazel stars as an elderly man who finds himself disoriented & isolated as the pains, tragedies, & humiliations of aging in America are manifested through roller coasters & chaotic crowds.
In Vietnam in 1970, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) takes a perilous and increasingly hallucinatory journey upriver to find and terminate Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a once-promising officer who has reportedly gone completely mad. In the company of a Navy patrol boat filled with street-smart kids, a surfing-obsessed Air Cavalry officer (Robert Duvall), and a crazed freelance photographer (Dennis Hopper), Willard travels further and further into the heart of darkness.
Auntie Lee and her quartet of voluptuous “nieces” are known for making the tastiest meat pies around, all from Auntie’s top secret recipe which calls for a most unusual type of meat: human. In order to acquire the juiciest flesh, the girls employ their lusty charms; luring unsuspecting male strangers into a carnal – and deadly – trap, in which they’re chopped, quartered, and minced. Everything is going just peachy for Auntie’s little family, despite the occasional misbehavings of Larry, their “simple” helper, but when the girls lure a freaked out rock group over to have for dinner, things run the risk of getting out of control. And what about the perpetually snooping Police Chief Koal?
It’s Time to Feed the Baby! It is a voracious parasite from the dawn of creation, surviving centuries in search of the one thing it needs: to be born of a human. But when this cunning creature slithers inside a sexy circus performer (voluptuous French starlet Emmanuelle Escourrou, Lady Blood), it demands gallons of fresh blood to grow stronger. Now this reluctantly expectant mommy and her chatty mutant fetus are off on a cross-country killing spree, where pre-natal care means violent carnage and the ultimate mother’s milk is Baby Blood! Also known as The Evil Within, this French shocker is now presented totally uncut and uncensored with all its infamous womb-raiding, gore-spewing and flesh-baring beautifully restored in HD! Co-written and directed by Alain Robak (Adrénaline).
Beau is the mild-mannered and paranoid son of businesswoman Mona Wassermann. However, things change when his mother passes away and he embarks on a surreal journey home to attend her funeral.
Body Puzzle is a thrillingly macabre slasher movie from giallo master Lamberto Bava (Demons). It tells the tragic story of mourning widow Tracy (Joanna Pacula, Gorky Park). Not only has her pianist husband Abe died in an auto accident, but someone keeps breaking into her house and leaving severed body parts lying around. The investigating police officer, Michael (Tomas Arana), strikes up a highly inappropriate romance with her to keep Tracy’s mind off the rapidly accumulating trophies.
In a near-future New York, feminist collectives wage guerrilla war against state surveillance and oppression. Lizzie Borden, 1983
A blistering rallying cry issued loud, clear, and unapologetically queer, Lizzie Borden’s explosive postpunk provocation is a DIY fantasia of female rebellion set in America ten years after a revolution that supposedly transformed the country into a democratic socialist utopia. In reality, racism, sexism, and economic inequality are as virulent as ever, and a band of radicals—led by Black, lesbian, and working-class women—join forces to fight back. Told through a furiously fractured, kinetically edited flurry of television news broadcasts, pirate radio transmissions, agitprop, and protests shot guerrilla-style on the streets of New York City, Born in Flames is a shock wave of feminist futurism that’s both an essential document of its time and radically ahead of it.
Amiable British comedy about 19th-century corpse stealers / retailers Burke and Hare. Simon Pegg, Simon Pegg, Tim Curry, John Landis, 2011.
A filmmaker discovers a box of video tapes depicting a disturbing student film project about an urban legend known as Peeping Tom. As he sets out to prove the footage is real, he falls into obsession, along with the film crew following him.
This wacky send-up of James Bond films stars David Niven as the iconic debonair spy, now retired and living a peaceful existence. Bond is called back into duty when the mysterious organization SMERSH begins assassinating British secret agents. Ridiculous circumstances lead to the involvement of a colorful cast of characters, including the villainous Le Chiffre (Orson Welles), seasoned gambler Evelyn Tremble (Peter Sellers) and Bond’s bumbling nephew, Jimmy Bond (Woody Allen).
One of the most gorgeously photographed horror films of all-time this gripping, edge-of-the-seat film follows a social who enters the mind of a comatose serial killer. Jennifer Lopez, Vince Vaughn, Vincent D’Onofrio, Tarsem Singh, 2000.
All Seven Child’s Play flicks together!
When the pacifist lawyer for an Indigenous tribe fails to protect their land against the racist owner of a lumber mill, both white men will be forced by a rogue Native man (Academy Award® nominee Graham Greene of DANCES WITH WOLVES) into a wilderness nightmare of violence, vengeance and supernatural horror.
Matchless intrigue soars out of the sky at supersonic speed in this incredible tale of airborne suspense derived from Arthur Hailey’s all-time bestseller. Susan Blakely headlines the star-studded, tension-packed international drama as a jet-setting TV reporter who puts everyone on board a Moscow-bound Concorde in jeopardy when she becomes the target of her former lover, traitorous arms smuggler Robert Wagner. The lives of Alain Delon, Sylvia Kristel, Eddie Albert, Bibi Andersson, Charo, John Davidson, Martha Raye, Cicely Tyson, David Warner, Mercedes McCambridge and the mighty George Kennedy hang in the balance amid flying missiles and exploding bombs in this enthralling globe-trotting adventure helmed by director David Lowell Rich
From Henry Selick, the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach, comes a visually stunning stop-motion feature! Coraline Jones is bored in her new home until she finds a secret door that leads into a world that’s just like her own … but better! But when this fantastical adventure turns dangerous and her other mother tries to keep her forever, Coraline must count on her resourcefulness and bravery to get home.
After a bank robbery, four criminals escape to Mexico, but a storm causes an accident which takes down the plane where several die in the crash. The criminals take it into their own hands to continue when one survivor is attacked and eaten by a crocodile. The criminals kill it, but from then on the mother Crocodile is on a killing spree with a goal to kill each survivor. But that is not the only worry, because they’re trapped within it’s world, and if it doesn’t kill them, the criminals will.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s arresting international breakthrough established him as one of the leaders of an emerging new wave of Japanese horror while pushing the genre into uncharted realms of philosophical and existential exploration. A string of shocking, seemingly unmotivated murders—each committed by a different person yet all bearing the same grisly hallmarks—leads Detective Takabe (Koji Yakusho) into a labyrinthine investigation to discover what connects them, and into a disturbing game of cat and mouse with an enigmatic amnesiac (Masato Hagiwara) who may be evil incarnate. Awash in hushed, hypnotic dread, Cure is a tour de force of psychological tension and a hallucinatory journey into the darkest recesses of the human mind.
In the year 2000, America is a totalitarian regime on the brink of collapse. The most popular sport in this dystopia is the Transcontinental Road Race, where teams earn points for logging the fastest time and for mowing over the most innocent pedestrians in the process. This year’s competitors include Frankenstein (David Carradine), who is rumored to be more machine than man, and the tough-as-nails “Machine Gun” Joe Viterbo (Sylvester Stallone). Some have a plan to stop the race.
Survivors of a tragic shipping collision are rescued by a mysterious black ship which appears out of the fog; little do they realise that the ship is a Nazi torture ship which has sailed the seas for years, luring unsuspecting sailors.
One of the peaks of subversive Mexican director Arturo Ripstein’s cinema of outsiders, this deliriously perverse portrait of obsessive love dares audiences to see the humanity in the most sordid of antiheroes. A lonely-hearts advertisement leads lusty nurse Coral (Regina Orozco) to Nicolás (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a con man with whom she forges an increasingly intense, twisted bond as they crisscross 1940s Mexico, robbing and murdering the women he seduces. Blending sweeping melodrama with macabre humor and eruptions of berserk violence, Ripstein transforms one of the most infamous true-crime stories of the twentieth century into a haunting vision of how love can give way to madness.
Director Jim Jarmusch followed up his brilliant breakout Stranger Than Paradise with another, equally beloved portrait of loners and misfits in America. When fate lands three hapless men—an unemployed disc jockey (Tom Waits), a small-time pimp (John Lurie), and a strong-willed Italian tourist (Roberto Benigni)—in a Louisiana prison, a singular adventure begins. Described by Jarmusch as a “neo-Beat noir comedy,” Down by Law is part nightmare and part fairy tale, featuring sterling performances and crisp black-and-white photography by esteemed cinematographer Robby Müller.
All the old school Draculas together!
Gus Van Sant’s dreamy, drifty, deadpan second feature—an addiction drama based on James Fogle’s autobiographical novel—captures the zonked-out textures and almost surreal absurdity of a life lived fix to fix. Swinging between dope-fueled disconnection and edgy paranoia, Matt Dillon plays the leader of a ragtag crew (also featuring Kelly Lynch, Heather Graham, and James Le Gros) that robs pharmacies for pills, coasting across the 1970s Pacific Northwest while trying to outrun sobriety and fate. With a brilliant supporting turn from counterculture high priest William S. Burroughs and a lyrical feeling for the streetscapes of Van Sant’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, Drugstore Cowboy cemented the director’s status as a preeminent poet of outsiderhood.
In May of 2020, a standoff between a small-town sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and mayor (Pedro Pascal) sparks a powder keg as neighbour is pitted against neighbour in Eddington, New Mexico.
In this horror-comedy homage to giallos, a film editor gets embroiled in a string of murders. Paz de la Huerta, Laurence R. Harvey, Udo Kier, Adam Brooks, 2014.
A woman embarks on a surreal desert journey with her cousins in this hypnotic Argentinian existential Western epic. Viggo Mortensen, Chiara Mastroianni, Lisandro Alonso, 2023
When a meteor crashes on Earth, it brings with it single-celled organisms which evolve rapidly. Later, four professionals stumble upon these aliens and must stop their growth to avoid an invasion.
A scientist on an air base in Canada experiments with the materialisation of thought waves, but things get wildly out of control when his own dark thoughts take the form of floating killer brains.
A thrilling tale of friendship and survival that took indie animation to ecstatic new heights of ambition and imagination, this Academy Award–winning international sensation follows a courageous cat after its home is devastated by a great flood. As the cat teams up with a capybara, a lemur, a bird, and a dog to navigate a boat in search of dry land, the crew must rely on trust, courage, and their wits to survive the perils of a newly aquatic planet. Working with a small team using open-source software, visionary DIY animator Gints Zilbalodis conjures a sublime sensory odyssey and a profound meditation on the fragility of the environment and the spirit of community.
An intoxicating, time-bending experience bathed in the golden glow of oil lamps and wreathed in an opium haze, this gorgeous period reverie by Hou Hsiao-hsien traces the romantic intrigue, jealousies, and tensions swirling around four late-nineteenth-century Shanghai “flower houses,” where the courtesans live confined to a gilded cage, ensconced in opulent splendor but forced to work to buy back their freedom. Among the regular clients is the taciturn Master Wang (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), whose relationship with his longtime mistress (Michiko Hada) is roiled by a perceived act of betrayal. Composed in a languorous procession of entrancing long takes, Flowers of Shanghai evokes a vanished world of decadence and cruelty, an insular universe where much of the dramatic action remains tantalizingly offscreen—even as its emotional fallout registers with quiet devastation.
A lonely cringe-inducing suburban dad’s awkward obsession with his charismatic neighbour spirals into a darkly comedic and unsettling bromance. Tim Robinson, Paul Rudd, Kate Mara, Andrew DeYoung, 2024
In the heat of the summer. A lonesome house in the countryside between woods and corn fields. Nine-year-old twin brothers are waiting for their mother. When she comes home, bandaged after cosmetic surgery, nothing is like before. The children start to doubt that this woman is actually their mother. It emerges an existential struggle for identity and fundamental trust.
In the early Spanish colonial age, the leader of a satanic sect was condemned to eternal damnation by a priest, and was left to rot with an axe forever embedded in his chest. Now, in modern day, a group of teenage, treasure seeking, grave robbers accidentally uncover his hidden tomb, dislodging the axe in the process. But what they don’t realize is that they’ve unwittingly re-woken the diabolical killer, who promptly sets out to complete his unholy mission of spawning the son of Satan, while brutally butchering anyone who happens to get in the way…
Take the conventions of the American teen movie, transpose them to Los Angeles’s freaky fringes, anchor them in an unapologetic vision of sexual fluidity, and top it all off with heavy doses of Gen X disillusionment, gonzo violence, and hallucinogenic surrealism, and you’ll end up with something like these audacious transgressions from New Queer Cinema renegade Gregg Araki. Gleefully mixing slacker irony with raw sincerity, Godardian cool with punk scuzz, the savagely subversive, hormone-fueled films that make up the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy pushed 1990s indie cinema into bold new aesthetic realms, while giving blistering expression to adolescent rage and libidinal desire.
Martha Beck (Klute’s Shirley Stoler) is sullen, overweight, and lonely. Desperate for affection, she joins Aunt Carrie’s Friendship Club and strikes up a correspondence with Ray Fernandez (The French Connection’s Tony Lo Bianco), a charismatic smooth talker who could be the man of her dreams-or a degenerate con artist. Based on a shocking true story and filmed in documentary-style black and white by the confident and inspired first-time filmmaker Leonard Kastle, The Honeymoon Killers is a stark portrayal of the desperate lengths to which a lonely heart will go to find true love.
Four losers at a ski resort hot tub wake up in 1986, facing outrageous hair, retro tunes, and awkward choices as they scramble to alter their futures—or not. John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, Clark Duke, Steve Pink, 2010
The textbook example of Nazisploitation, and a cornerstone of the 1970s sexploitation cinema, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS dramatizes the atrocities performed by a sadistic commandant (Dyanne Thorne) at a German concentration camp. Ilsa uses male prisoners as sexual playthings and women as subjects of medical torture, then brutally executes all who fail to satisfy her unholy desires. Despite being condemned by film critic Gene Siskel as “the most degenerate picture I have seen…a textbook for rapists and mutilation freaks,” Don Edmonds’s orgy of violence became a runaway success, immortalizing Thorne as a grindhouse goddess and inspiring three sequels and a host of imitations, none of which could rival the shocking depravity of the original. Audio Commentary by Actress Dyanne Thorne, Director Don Edmonds, and Producer David F. Friedman, Moderated by Humorist Martin Lewis | NEW Audio Commentary by Film Historians Kat Ellinger and Evgueni Mlodik | She Wolf of the SS: Interview With Don Edmonds, by Elijah Drenner | Theatrical Trailer | Stills Gallery
The Hong Kong crime drama was jolted to new life with the release of the Infernal Affairs trilogy, a bracing, explosively stylish critical and commercial triumph that introduced a dazzling level of narrative and thematic complexity to the genre with its gripping saga of two rival moles—played by superstars Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Andy Lau Tak-wah—who navigate slippery moral choices as they move between the intersecting territories of Hong Kong’s police force and its criminal underworld. Set during the uncertainty of the city-state’s handover from Britain to China and steeped in Buddhist philosophy, these ingeniously crafted tales of self-deception and betrayal mirror Hong Kong’s own fractured identity and the psychic schisms of life in a postcolonial purgatory.
After an accident that left murderer Jack Frost dead in genetic material, the vengeful killer returns as a murderous snowman to exact his revenge on the man who sent him to be executed.
The secret of Jason’s evil is revealed. It is up to the last remaining descendant of the Voorhees family to stop Jason before he becomes immortal and unstoppable. This is the final (?) battle to end Jason’s reign of terror forever.
Jason Voorhees is cryogenically frozen at the beginning of the 21st century, and is discovered in the 25th century and taken to space. He gets thawed, and begins stalking and killing the crew of the spaceship that’s transporting him.
Starring Wesley Snipes. Friends and family of a married black architect react in different ways to his affair with an Italian secretary. Spike Lee (1991)
The most astounding and uncompromising film of the year, Miguel Angel Vivas KIDNAPPED is a masterpiece of tension and all-too-realistic violence. Jaime and Marta, along with their teenage daughter Isa, move into a gorgeous new home with the hopes of beginning a beautiful new phase of their life together. It’s the dream of every hard-working family: a comfortable life in a place of their own. But the dream is shattered when a gang of masked men break in and take the entire family hostage, demanding Jaime hand over everything he has in the bank or watch his wife and daughter die. And so begins an unimaginable ordeal for Jaime and his family. Winner of Best Picture and Best Director honors at Fantastic Fest 2010, KIDNAPPED has been declared impeccably crafted, flawlessly performed (Todd Brown, TwitchFilm.com) and a new genre classic. (John Fallon, Arrow In The Head).
Hugh Grant stars in Ken Russell’s delirious horror comedy where a Scottish archaeologist uncovers an ancient worm cult, but has he just released the monster himself? Ken Russell (1988)
Meet America’s Foremost Drive-in Film Expert, who has been slingin’ B-movie bullstuff longer than a possum’s been playin’ dead. With a brain chock full of useful (ish) film trivia, this good ol’ boy serves up schlock and cult flicks with more laughs than a drunk skunk at a tailgater.
A recently institutionalized woman has bizarre experiences after moving into a supposedly haunted country farmhouse and fears she may be losing her sanity once again. John D. Hancock (1971)
When Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) left home, she thought that her childhood fears were behind her. As a young girl growing up, she was never really sure of what was real when the lights went out at night. Now, her little brother Martin (Gabriel Bateman) is experiencing the same unexplained and terrifying events that jeopardized her safety and sanity. Holding a mysterious attachment to their mother (Maria Bello), a supernatural entity has returned with a vengeance to torment the entire family.
Based on the best-selling manga series, the six intensely kinetic Lone Wolf and Cub films elevated chanbara to bloody, new heights. The shogun’s executioner, Itto Ogami (Tomisaburo Wakayama), takes to wandering the countryside as an assassin-along with his infant son Daigoro (Akihiro Tomikawa) and an infinitely weaponized perambulator-helping those he encounters while seeking vengeance for his murdered wife. Delivering stylish thrills and a body count that defies belief, Lone Wolf and Cub is beloved for its brilliantly choreographed and unbelievably violent action sequences as well as for its tender depiction of the bonds between parent and child.
Theresa Dunn’s mild demeanor and job as an inner-city school teacher for deaf children masks her rebellious nightlife of frequenting dance clubs and dive bars, searching for easy men and one-night stands. At odds with her older sister Katherine, whose seemingly idyllic life is itself a cover for infidelity and heartbreak, Theresa finds joy in her self-styled form of liberation, in part to overcompensate for the trauma of a disfiguring scar from childhood scoliosis and her repressive Catholic upbringing. When two wildly different men, the square but grounded James and fun but unhinged Tony, enter her life, Theresa is forced to confront her demons as never before, forcing her on a path of increased self-destruction.
From director Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs) comes this bone-chilling adaptation of the classic 1959 novel and 1962 film of the same name. Years after his squad was ambushed during the Gulf War, Major Ben Marco (Denzel Washington, Man on Fire) finds himself haunted by terrible nightmares. He begins to doubt that his fellow squad-mate Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber, Spotlight), now a vice-presidential candidate, is the hero he remembers him being. As Marco’s fears deepen, Shaw’s political power grows, and, when Marco finds a mysterious implant embedded in his back, the bizarre memory of what really happened begins to return. An all-star cast featuring Jeffrey Wright (The Batman), Jon Voight (Runaway Train), Anthony Macke (The Hurt Locker) and screen legend Meryl Streep mesmerizing in the role originated by Angela Lansbury) highlights this edge-of-your-seat mindbender of a movie.
A popular and talented jazz trumpeter who makes questionable decisions in his professional and romantic lives finds that his life is about to come to a turning point. Denzel Washington, Wesley Snipes, 1990.
A movie that starts out with the “Man in the Mirror” music video, it then changes to a montage of video clips of Michael’s career. Next comes a parody of his Bad video by children, and then Michael is chased by fans in a fantasy sequence. 2 more videos are shown, and then a movie in which Michael plays a hero with magical powers. In it he is chased by drug dealer Mr. Big and saves three children. Videos included in the movie are “Smooth Criminal” and “Come Together”. …Moonwalker (1988) ( Michael Jackson: Moonwalker )
River Phoenix (Stand by Me) and Keanu Reeves (The Matrix) star in this haunting tale from Gus Van Sant (Mala Noche), 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.
Arthur Penn’s haunting neonoir reimagines the hard-boiled detective film for the disillusioned, paranoid 1970s. In one of his greatest performances, Gene Hackman oozes world-weary cynicism as a private investigator whose search for an actress’s missing daughter (Melanie Griffith) leads him from the Hollywood Hills to the Florida Keys, where he is pulled into a sordid family drama and a sinister conspiracy he can hardly grasp. Bolstered by Alan Sharp’s genre-scrambling script and Dede Allen’s elliptical editing, the daringly labyrinthine Night Moves is a defining work of post-Watergate cinema—a silent scream of existential dread and moral decay whose legend has only grown with time.
A deceptively simple tale of a group of strangers trapped in a farmhouse who find themselves fending off a horde of flesh-eating ghouls, Romero’s claustrophobic vision of a late-1960s America literally tearing itself apart rewrote the rules of the horror genre, combined gruesome gore with acute social commentary, and quietly broke ground by casting a black actor (Duane Jones) in its lead role.
Stalwart “noir” directors and casts highlight these hard to find features: Address Unknown (1944), Escape in the Fog (1945), The Guilt of Janet Ames (1947), The Black Book (The Reign of Terror) (1949), Escape in the Fog (1945), Johnny Allegro (1949), 711 Ocean Drive (1950), The Killer That Stalked New York (1950), Assignment Paris (1952), The Miami Story (1954) in their original aspect ratios
9 film noirs: BAIT (1954) THE CROOKED WEB (1955) THE NIGHT HOLDS TERROR (1955) FOOTSTEPS IN THE FOG (1955) CELL 2455, DEATH ROW (1955), 5 AGAINST THE HOUSE (1955) NEW ORLEANS UNCENSORED (1955) SPIN A DARK WEB (1955) RUMBLE ON THE DOCKS (1956)
Icelandic thriller about a lawyer who finds herself caught in a international conspiracy when an old German WWII airplane, discovered on Iceland’s largest glacier. Iain Glen, Óskar Thór Axelsson, 2023.
Tom and Ajani are closeted sweethearts who yearn for life outside of their small-minded, rural community. Their solution is Amsterdam, where the queer scene is thriving and their dream of becoming filmmakers can become a reality. Quickly the city’s nightlife offers the pair some thrills: cheeky games of Never Have I Ever, limo rides across the city, and eye-opening trips to the bathhouse. But the challenges quickly follow, pushing them to separately question: “Who am I, and where do I fit in?”
Where does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade? This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City’s African American and Latinx Harlem drag-ball scene. Made over seven years, Paris Is Burning offers an intimate portrait of rival fashion “houses,” from fierce contests for trophies to house mothers offering sustenance in a world rampant with homophobia, transphobia, racism, AIDS, and poverty. Featuring legendary voguers, drag queens, and trans women—including Willi Ninja, Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, and Venus Xtravaganza—Paris Is Burning brings it, celebrating the joy of movement, the force of eloquence, and the draw of community.
New German Cinema pioneer Wim Wenders brings his keen eye for landscape to the American Southwest in Paris, Texas, a profoundly moving character study written by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Sam Shepard. Paris, Texas follows the mysterious, nearly mute drifter Travis (a magnificent Harry Dean Stanton, whose face is a landscape all its own) as he tries to reconnect with his young son, living with his brother (Dean Stockwell) in Los Angeles, and his missing wife (Nastassja Kinski). From this simple setup, Wenders and Shepard produce a powerful statement on codes of masculinity and the myth of the American family, as well as an exquisite visual exploration of a vast, crumbling world of canyons and neon.
Three women navigate war, theatre, and rebellion in 1920s China in Tsui Hark’s genre-defying visually inventive epic blending action-comedy, political intrigue and slapstick. Brigitte Lin, Chow Yun-fat, Tsui Hark, 1986
When flesh-eating piranhas are accidentally released into a summer resort’s rivers, the guests become their next meal. Directed by Joe Dante and written by John Sayles. Barbara Steele, Kevin McCarthy, 1978.
A man sells a nefarious-looking puppet at a small-town convention for some quick cash. Terror soon strikes when an ancient evil animates the other puppets and sends them on a bloody killing spree.
On one chaotic night at a bustling 1939 Chicago radio station, a hapless writer must clear his name as a killer strikes amid live broadcasts and madcap mayhem. Mary Stuart Masterson, Brian Benben, Michael Lerner, Mel Smith, 1994
In the early ’80s, Independent-International co-founder/president Samuel M. Sherman took an unfinished zombie movie by Brett Piper and began tinkering. He shot additional scenes featuring nuclear terrorists, a mad doctor, a kid who converts a LaserDisc player into a ray gun and then added an unstoppable earworm of an opening credits song to create a drive-in epic unlike any other.
After college, Lelaina (Winona Ryder) films a documentary about herself and friends as they flounder in their attempts to forge relationships and begin careers. Vickie (Janeane Garofalo) works retail, has an endless string of one-night stands and awaits the results of her HIV test. Sammy (Steve Zahn) tries to come out to his parents. Lelaina gets involved with yuppie Michael (Ben Stiller) while maintaining a love-hate relationship with Troy (Ethan Hawke), who’s undergoing an existential crisis.
In the wake of her grandmother’s funeral, hotel manager Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) is waiting to fly back home when she meets charming Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy) at check-in. She thinks it luck that they’re seated together on the plane, but soon learns otherwise. Jackson hopes to assassinate the head of Homeland Security, but to do so, he needs Lisa to reassign the official’s room number at her hotel. As insurance, Jackson has kidnapped Lisa’s father (Brian Cox).
Ready for a devil of a good time? Linda Blair will scare you silly when she’s Repossessed! Blair stars in this uproariously spooky spoof with Leslie Nielsen, the deadpan comedy hero who provided loop-de-loops of laughter in Airplane! and rapid-fire hilarity in The Naked Gun. The fun begins when grown-up Blair starts spewing curses and pea soup. This is a job for ex-exorcist Nielsen! So he gears up to battle the spirit world—and finds he must also outwit a pair of phony TV evangelists (including Ned Beatty), trying to cash in on the exorcism biz. Get Repossessed. The supernatural hijinks will have your head spinning with laughter! NEW Audio Commentary by Director Bob Logan | Theatrical Trailer
Imaginatively evoking the inner landscape of human beings longing to connect, to love and feel loved, the film is a parable of happiness gloriously found and tragically lost. “Requiem for a Dream” tells parallel stories that are linked by the relationship between the lonely, widowed Sara Goldfarb and her sweet but aimless son, Harry. The plump Sara, galvanized by the prospect of appearing on a TV game show, has started on a dangerous diet regimen to beautify herself for a national audience.
Tensions rise when a stripper and religious protester are trapped together in a peep show booth and must come together to survive the apocalypse in 1980’s Chicago. Caito Aase, Shaina Schrooten, Bishop Stevens, Luke Boyce, 2022.
A neo-Nazi gang wages violent battles with Melbourne’s Vietnamese community until betrayal and obsession splinter their ranks. Russell Crowe, Daniel Pollock, Jacqueline McKenzie, Geoffrey Wright, 1992
In this advanced society, most homes have robots that perform everyday menial duties. Every so often, one malfunctions, and Sgt. Jack Ramsay (Tom Selleck), an expert in rogue machines, must deal with it. When he and his new partner, Karen Thompson (Cynthia Rhodes), investigate a robot-involved homicide, they discover strange computer chips. Rather than a malfunction, someone is programming the robots to kill. The police must find whoever is behind the murder before more harm is done.
Iconic head exploding sci-fi horror where a race of humans with telekinetic abilities must track down a rogue Scanner of unparalleled power waging a bloody war against the normals. David Cronenberg (1981)
A plumber and his germophobic son are forced to get their hands dirty to save the residents of an apartment building, when a genetically engineered, blood-thirsty creature escapes into the plumbing system.
About to be electrocuted for a catalog of heinous crimes, the unrepentant Horace Pinker (Mitch Pileggi) transforms into a terrifying energy source. Only young athlete Jonathan Parker (Peter Berg), with an uncanny connection to Pinker through bizarre dreams, can fight the powerful demon. The two dive in and out of television programs, chasing each other from channel to channel through stunning scenes of disaster, game shows and old reruns. A blend of dazzling special effects, jolting humor and an electrifying soundtrack, Shocker is an ironic tale of terror and madness in the video age.
Nomi (Elizabeth Berkley) arrives in Las Vegas with only a suitcase and a dream of becoming a top showgirl. She quickly befriends Molly (Gina Ravera), who works at the high-profile Stardust Hotel, and lands a job at a seedy strip club. A chance meeting with Cristal (Gina Gershon), the Stardust’s marquee dancer, and her powerful boyfriend, Zack (Kyle MacLachlan), brings Nomi one step closer to realizing her dream. But, as she ascends to the top, Nomi begins to wonder if it’s all worth it.
With the lacerating love story Sid & Nancy, Alex Cox reimagines the crash-and-burn affair between punk’s most notorious self-destructive poster children: Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen-brought to visceral life by brilliant performances from Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb. Cox turns his anarchic filmmaking style on the explosive energy of the London punk scene and the degenerate streets of seventies New York, making for an eviscerating depiction of excess and addiction. Through the lens of cinematographer Roger Deakins, the imagery goes from swooning to grimy, and the film’s bleakness is balanced with surreal humor and genuine tenderness, making for an affecting, music-fueled vision of doomed love.
Jerry Blake (Terry O’Quinn) is a family man, but he happens to have a series of families, with each one on the receiving end of his murderous ways. When Jerry sets his sights on a lovely widow named Susan (Shelley Hack) and her headstrong daughter, Stephanie (Jill Schoelen), it appears that his brutal pattern of killings will continue. However, Stephanie begins to suspect that there’s something wrong with the seemingly well-adjusted Jerry, and a violent confrontation is inevitable.
A private detective investigates a new consumer taste treat that’s absolutely delicious and just possibly lethal.
Trelkovsky, freshly arrived in Paris, is in desperate need of a place to live. After inquiring at a large apartment complex run by the brooding Monsieur Zy, he’s offered the room of Simone Choule, a resident who recently attempted suicide by throwing herself out of the window. Undeterred by this macabre event, Trelkovsky is happy to move in. Shortly thereafter, he meets Stella, Simone’s friend, and does his best to comfort and befriend her. Quickly integrating into Stella’s bohemian social scene, Trelkovsky hopes that his life is finally turning a corner; that is, until his new neighbors begin acting strangely, making wild accusations against him, and displaying increasingly sinister and violent behaviors. As the weeks go on, Trelkovsky begins to suspect that something is very wrong in the stuffy old building and that Simone’s fatal plunge might not have been her own doing…
Violent, confrontational, and shockingly realistic, director Tobe Hooper’s THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE terrified audiences in a way never thought possible when it was unleashed on a politically and socially tumultuous America in 1974. Facing a storm of controversy, censorship, and outcry throughout its troubled release, this masterpiece of horror has stood the test of time to become a landmark motion picture and cultural milestone.
Now, for the first time, Dark Sky Films proudly presents its director-approved 4K restoration of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE on UHD, bringing all the scares and the screams into terrifying focus and clarity, making for an immersive viewing experience you won’t forget. Whether first-time viewer or long-term fan, this is THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE as you’ve never seen or heard it before.
The contemporary American auteur Michael Mann’s bold artistic sensibility was already fully formed when he burst out of the gate with Thief, his debut feature. James Caan (The Godfather) stars, in one of his most riveting performances, as a no-nonsense ex-con safecracker planning to leave the criminal world behind after one final diamond heist-but he discovers that escape is not as simple as he’d hoped. Finding hypnotic beauty in neon and rain-slick streets, sparks and steel, Thief effortlessly established the moody stylishness and tactile approach to action that would also define such later iconic entertainments from Mann as Miami Vice, Manhunter, and Heat.
The world is a carnival of criminality, corruption, and psychosexual strangeness in the twisted pre-Code shockers of Tod Browning. Early Hollywood’s edgiest auteur, Browning drew on his experiences as a circus performer to create subversive pulp entertainments set amid the world of traveling sideshows, which, with their air of the exotic and the disreputable, provided a pungent backdrop for his sordid tales of outcasts, cons, villains, and vagabonds. Bringing together two of his defining works (The Unknown and Freaks) and a long-unavailable rarity (The Mystic), this cabinet of pre-Code curiosities reveals a master of the morbid whose ability to unsettle is matched only by his daring compassion for society’s most downtrodden.
Monte Hellman’s masterpiece! A nearly dialogue-free existential road-race drama. James Taylor, Dennis Wilson, Warren Oates, Laurie Bird.
After finishing up the school term in a remote outback town, teacher John Grant (Gary Bond) looks forward to spending his holiday with his girlfriend in Sydney. But John gets waylaid in a mining town where a gambling spree leaves him completely broke. He quickly falls in with the hard-drinking locals, who constantly ply him with alcohol and force him to participate in a gruesome kangaroo hunt. Disgusted, John tries to hitchhike out of town and, when that fails, begins to contemplate suicide.
WAXWORKS (1988)
A mysterious man brings a waxworks museum to town and invites some teens to a special midnight showing, but that’s when the scenes come alive and suck their victims in.
STARS: Zach Galligan, Deborah Foreman, Jennifer Bassey
WAXWORKS II (1992)
The couple who survive the first Waxworks are followed by a murderous curse, and only by travelling through time can they hope to defeat the evil threatening to consume them.
STARS: Zach Galligan, Monika Schnarre, Martin Kemp
When a young girl mysteriously vanishes, Police Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) travels to a remote Scottish island to investigate. But the seemingly quiet community is not as it appears, as the detective uncovers a secretive pagan society led by the strange Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee). While the townsfolk tempt and threaten him with bizarre rituals and wanton lust, Howie must race to discover the truth behind the girl’s disappearance before his clash with Lord Summerisle builds to a terrifying conclusion – one that has cemented this cult shocker as a modern horror masterpiece.
Edgar Wright Goodness!
And there we go guys. Movies should be here Thursday as always. Cheers!
