Tell Me a Riddle
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Academy Award© winning actor/director Lee Grant's directorial debut feature was the first major American feature to be written, produced, and directed entirely by women. An adaptation of Tillie Olsen's award winning novella by Mulholland Drive producer Joyce Eliason. Starring Oscar© winners Lila Kedrova and Melvyn Douglas alongside Brooke Adams, this official selection of the 1981 Cannes Directors Fortnight, follows the lives of senior couple Eva and David, their shared past as revolutionaries, and their cross country journey together when illness strikes Eva, and her husband decides to keep it a secret.
Night Flight - Short Cuts: "Religion"
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This Night Flight episode focuses on religion in music, from the satanic accusations against Ozzy Osbourne to the Christian rock band Stryper. Also featuring videos from The Saints and XTC.
Aria
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Labelled the "MTV of Opera," this kaleidoscope of work features the music of some of the greatest composers of all time visually interpreted by ten of the most innovative filmmakers in cinema. In 1987, producer Don Boyd brought together 10 of the world's most revered directors, including Nicolas Roeg, Robert Altman, Jean Luc Goddard, and Julien Temple, in order to pay homage to the opera. Each director was asked to create a short inspired by the emotions and intensity of their chosen aria. True to form, the result is a bizarre, moving, and spellbinding.  "With all of these wonderful visuals," Roger Ebert said, "it's sort of the first music video of opera."
Night Flight - Short Cuts: "Politics '88"
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A politically charged mini-ep of Night Flight, featuring polemics from artists such as Billy Bragg and X as well as spoken word from William S. Burroughs.
Little Sister
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October, 2008. Young nun Colleen (Addison Timlin) is avoiding all contact from her family, until an email from her mother (Ally Sheedy) announces, Your brother is home. On returning to her childhood home in Asheville, NC, she finds her old room exactly how she left it: painted black and covered in goth/metal posters. Her parents are happy enough to see her, but unease and awkwardness abounds. Her brother is living as a recluse in the guesthouse since returning home from the Iraq war. During Colleen's visit, tensions rise and fall with a little help from Halloween, pot cupcakes, and GWAR. Little Sister is a sad comedy about family, a schmaltz-free, pathos-drenched, feel-good movie for the little goth girl inside us all.
Night Flight - Short Cuts: "Fishbone and Jane's Addiction"
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Night Flight brings an exclusive interview with ska punk band Fishbone and a special report on Jane's Addiction, featuring live footage and backstage interviews. Finally, a hand-drawn animated short called "Twist an' Shout!".
Night Flight - Laurie Anderson Video Profile
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Classic Night Flight profile of avant-garde experimentalist Laurie Anderson. Featuring an incredibly candid interview with Anderson about her background and work.
The Love Witch
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Elaine, a beautiful young witch, is determined to find a man to love her. In her gothic Victorian apartment she makes spells and potions, and then picks up men and seduces them. However, her spells work too well, leaving her with a string of hapless victims. When she finally meets the man of her dreams, her desperation to be loved will drive her to the brink of insanity and murder. With a visual style that pays tribute to Technicolor thrillers of the ‘60s, THE LOVE WITCH explores female fantasy and the repercussions of pathological narcissism.
Night Flight - Short Cuts: "Animation"
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Night Flight takes you to the dazzling animation of contemporary music videos, from Herbie Hancock's computer-assisted imagery to the kaleidoscopic videos of Adrian Belew and the Tom Tom Club.
Hellaware
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Hellaware gently satirizes the world of high-brow art through the eyes of a wannabe photographer who becomes consumed by the bright lights of mainstream success. Jaded by the “incestuous, New York, socialite shit” that sells at prominent art galleries, Nate (Keith Poulson) embarks on a quest for a more authentic brand of contemporary art. When a coked-up YouTube search leads to a music video from Delawarean Goth rappers Young Torture Killers, an Insane Clown Posse knock-off, Nate knows he’s found his subjects. He soon drags his friend-with-benefits Bernadette (Sophia Takal) to rural Delaware to shoot the group playing in their parents’ basement. To “immerse himself” in the group’s culture and add an extra layer of realism to his work, Nate befriends the rappers and makes return trips to get to know them. But as his relationship with the group develops, he becomes increasingly aware that, while you can take the boy out of the art world, you can’t take the art world out of the boy.
Night Flight - Short Cuts: "Underground comix"
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Night Flight's Short Cuts jets off the the world of underground comix, featuring alternative luminaries such as Robert Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, and Victor Moscoso discussing their craft.
Private Property
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Long-lost film noir gem written & directed by The Outer Limits creator Leslie Stevens. Two homicidal Southern California drifters (played to creepy perfection by Warren Oates and Corey Allen) wander off the beach and into the seemingly-perfect Beverly Hills home of unhappy housewife Kate Manx. Lensed in stunning B&W by master cameraman Ted McCord (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), Private Property is both an eerie, Jim Thompson-esque thriller and a savage critique of the hollowness of the Playboy-era American Dream. Warren Oates delivers his first great screen performance here as one of the drifters, years before he emerged in The Wild Bunch and Two-Lane Blacktop as one of the finest character actors of his generation; his bizarre, voyeuristic Lennie-and-George relationship with the underrated Corey Allen (James Dean’s hot rod rival in Rebel Without a Cause) is fueled by a barely-suppressed homoerotic tension. The back-story to the film is almost as strange: director Stevens (a protégé of Orson Welles) and lead actress Manx were married at the time, and the film was shot in their own Beverly Hills home. Several years later, Manx tragically committed suicide and her fragile spirit seems to hang over the film. A major rediscovery for noir and crime fans, Private Property was completely lost until UCLA Film & TV Archive located the only known 35mm elements, which have been restored in 4k for this re-release.
Night Flight - Short Cuts: "Downtown"
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Today Night Flight focuses on New York's downtown and the music that it spawned, including videos from Blondie and Sonic Youth, as well as a special on the downtown Club Kids.
Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession
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An American psychiatrist (Art Garfunkel) working in Vienna is drawn to a beautiful but self-destructive married woman (Theresa Russell), but their torrid affair threatens to destroy them body and soul in this erotically charged tale also starring Harvey Keitel and Denholm Elliott. Described by its own distributors as "a sick film made by sick people for sick people," Director Nicholas Roeg's dark, time-hopping psychological drama arrives on Night Flight Plus.
Night Flight - Short Cuts: "Food"
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This quick batch of music videos focuses on food, from Weird Al's love of Rocky Road ice cream to the Fat Boys. Also featuring an exclusive interview with the Fat Boys by TV 20000 host Joie Gallo!
Funeral Parade of Roses
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Director Toshio Matsumoto’s shattering, kaleidoscopic masterpiece is one of the most subversive and intoxicating films of the late 1960s: a headlong dive into a dazzling, unseen Tokyo night-world of drag queen bars and fabulous divas, fueled by booze, drugs, fuzz guitars, performance art and black mascara. No less than Stanley Kubrick cited the film as a direct influence on his own dystopian classic A Clockwork Orange. An unknown club dancer at the time, transgender actor Peter (from Kurosawa’s Ran) gives an astonishing Edie Sedgwick/Warhol superstar-like performance as hot young thing Eddie, hostess at Bar Genet — where she’s ignited a violent love-triangle with reigning drag queen Leda (Osamu Ogasawara) for the attentions of club owner Gonda (played by Kurosawa regular Yoshio Tsuchiya, from Seven Samuri and Yojimbo). One of Japan’s leading experimental filmmakers, Matsumoto bends and distorts time here like Resnais in Last Year at Marienbad, freely mixing documentary interviews, Brechtian film-within-a-film asides, Oedipal premonitions of disaster, his own avant-garde shorts, and even on-screen cartoon balloons, into a dizzying whirl of image + sound. Whether laughing with drunken businessmen, eating ice cream with her girlfriends, or fighting in the streets with a local girl gang, Peter’s ravishing Eddie is something to behold. “She has bad manners, all she knows is coquetry,” complains her rival Leda – but in fact, Eddie’s bad manners are simply being too gorgeous for this world. A key work of the Japanese New Wave and of queer cinema, Funeral Parade has been restored in 4K from the original 35mm camera negative and sound elements.
Night Flight - Short Cuts: "Wes Craven and Troma"
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The gross-out impresarios at Troma discuss combining horror and comedy for their distinctive style of filmmaking, while Wes Craven is interviewed on his enormous success with Nightmare on Elm Street as well as his upcoming projects.
Lux Æterna
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Warning: This film contains extended sequences of flashing lights that may impact people with photosensitive epilepsy. Viewer discretion is advised. New French Extremity auteur Gaspar Noé’s Lux Æterna (2019) is a hypnotic, nerve-frying descent into meta-filmmaking chaos. As Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg prepare for a shoot, they discuss filmmaking war stories, witches, and burnings at the stake. What begins as a behind-the-scenes interlude quickly unravels into full-blown psychosis in Noé’s acclaimed Cannes Film Festival premiere.
Night Flight - Short Cuts: "Bauhaus"
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A special on legendary rock band Bauhaus, dubbed the "originators of Goth Rock," featuring interviews with members, videos from later spin-off band Love and Rockets, as well as the solo career of frontman Peter Murphy.
Happer's Comet
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Following his acclaimed debut Ham on Rye, Tyler Taormina’s hypnotic follow-up is a midnight mosaic that reveals a suburban town steeped in alienation. It’s the middle of the night, but things are far from quiet; as the camera peers into the late-night happenings of various residents, we witness a number of them quietly escape into the dark... on rollerblades. Drawing on 1960’s European art cinema and 1990’s kid’s TV in equal measure, Happer's Comet presents striking individual vignettes that unfurl like a collective dream. Mesmerizing and meditative, the film solidifies Taormina’s gift for transforming everyday banality into uncanny cinema.
Night Flight - Short Cuts: "John Carpenter"
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A look into the films and music of John Carpenter, including an exclusive interview where he discusses his influences for films such as The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China, as well as his pioneering work on his own film scores.
Cane River
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Written, produced, and directed by Emmy Award-winning documentarian, Horace B. Jenkins, and crafted by an entirely African American cast and crew, CANE RIVER is a racially-charged love story in Natchitoches Parish, a “free community of color” in Louisiana. A budding, forbidden romance lays bare the tensions between two black communities, both descended from slaves but of disparate opportunity—the light-skinned, property-owning Creoles and the darker-skinned, more disenfranchised families of the area. This lyrical, visionary film disappeared for decades after Jenkins died suddenly following the film’s completion, robbing generations of a talented, vibrant new voice in American cinema. Available now for the first time in nearly forty years as a brand-new, state-of-the-art restoration.
Night Flight - Short Cuts: "Horror Shorts"
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A series of gruesome and gory horror shorts, including Alex Winter and Tom Stern's wacky "Aisles of Doom," and the hilarious zombie parody "Dawn of the Night of the Dead: The Musical."
Animals
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ANIMALS tells the story of a young couple that exist somewhere between homelessness and the fantasy life they imagine for themselves. Though they masterfully con and steal in an attempt to stay one step ahead of their addiction, they are ultimately forced to face the reality of their situation.
Night Flight - Short Cuts: "Weird Al"
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In this bite-sized Night Flight special on Weird Al Yankovic, Al parodies Devo, Michael Jackson and Madonna. Also featuring an interview with the man himself, discussing his relationship to the artists he parodies.
The Bear
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Notable for its stunning cinematography, minimal dialogue, and outstanding animal performances, director Jean-Jacques Annaud's (Quest For Fire, The Name of the Rose) astonishing tale of wilderness survival has thrilled and charmed audiences and critics all over the world. Set in 19th-century British Columbia, The Bear follows the story of a young cub and an adult grizzly as they join forces to survive the perils inherent in their mountain habitat. With each passing obstacle, the two bears further develop a friendship that can only make them stronger – but will it be enough for them to overcome their most deadly enemy?
Night Flight - Short Cuts: "The Sunset Strip"
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Take a ride down the glory days of the Sunset Strip, featuring some of the hardest-rocking and hardest-partying bands of the era including Poison, Great White and Kik Tracee, as well as legendary venues such as the Rainbow.
Drowning By Numbers
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Peter Greenaway – “one of the most distinctive, provocative talents of his generation” (The Guardian) – shocked/delighted international audiences with this slyly deranged black comedy classic: Oscar® nominee Dame Joan Plowright (Enchanted April), four-time BAFTA Award nominee Juliet Stevenson (Truly Madly Deeply) and two-time Golden Globe nominee Joely Richardson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) star as three generations of women who murder their husbands in an unsettling salvo of sumptuous visuals, macabre capers and numerical mischief. Bernard Hill (The Lord of the Rings) co-stars in this “fascinating brain buster of very bad manners” (Entertainment Weekly), now featuring a new 4K scan from the original negative personally supervised by Greenaway.

NFTV 3

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