Little Feet
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Determined to set their pet goldfish free, Lana and Nico embark on a magical urban odyssey from their Los Angeles home to the ocean. Their adventure, seen through the eyes of the brother/sister team, is filled with an array of wild and sometimes frightening encounters! Little Feet is a the return of director Alexandre Rockwell to his black and white 16mm roots that won him a Grand Jury Prize at The Sundance Film Festival with In The Soup. Little Feet’s cinematography shows the poetic side of Los Angeles one rarely sees and stands as an homage of sorts to the very first films shot in the city.
Giuseppe Makes a Movie
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While the rest of America slept, DIY filmmaker/musician Giuseppe Andrews (a one-time teen actor in Independence Day and Detroit Rock City) has made over 30 experimental features with titles like Doily’s Summer of Freak Occurrences, Trailer Town and Utopia Blues. Set in some demented alternate universe (i.e. Ventura, California), they are populated by real-life alcoholics and drug addicts, trash-talking senior citizens and trailer park residents dressed in cow outfits and costume-shop wigs, acting out booze-fueled vignettes of severe psychosis filtered through Giuseppe’s John Waters-meets-Harmony Korine-meets-Werner Herzog sensibility.
Director Adam Rifkin (Look, The Dark Backward) creates a wildly surreal, outrageously funny and strangely touching portrait of a truly Outsider Artist inhabiting a world few of us even know exists, as he follows Giuseppe and his seriously impaired troupe on the production of his latest 2-day opus, Garbanzo Gas, starring Vietnam Ron as a Cow given a weekend reprieve from the slaughterhouse at the local motel. Beyond the sun-stroked Theater of the Absurd madness of Giuseppe’s vision, there is a remarkable and endearing sense of family among the director, his amiably bonkers dad Ed, patient girlfriend Mary, Sir Bigfoot George and the rest of his surreal Trailer Park rep company. As skate-punk Spit sagely observes about Giuseppe’s movies: “They’re just like, nothing really makes any sense, and I don’t know, that’s kinda how reality is, and nobody really cares to accept that.”
The stranger-than-fiction documentary explores the Giuseppe universe, showing how the self-taught filmmaker captures an unexpected level of humanism and creates a family unit for a group of people who need one.
An Official Selection of Hot Docs 2014, Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF) and the Rooftop Films Summer Series.
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
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Master filmmaker Sidney Lumet (The Verdict, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico) delivers "one of his greatest achievements" (Roger Ebert) with this riveting and compelling suspense thriller. Oscar®-winner* Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote) is Andy, an overextended payroll executive who lures his younger brother, Hank (Ethan Hawke, Training Day), into a larcenous scheme: the pair will rob a suburban mom-and-pop jewelry store that appears to be the quintessential easy target. The problem is, the store owners are Andy and Hank's real mom and pop, and when the seemingly perfect crime goes awry, the damage sends them hurtling toward a shattering clash that may obliterate their already precarious lives.
River of Grass
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Kelly Reichardt’s darkly funny debut feature, brought the writer/director back to the setting of her adolescence, the suburban landscape of southern Florida, where she grew up with her detective father and narcotics agent mother. Shot on 16mm, the story follows the misadventures of disaffected house-wife "Cozy", played by Lisa Bowman, and the aimless layabout "Lee", played by up and comer Larry Fessenden, who also acted as a producer and the film's editor. Described by Reichardt as "a road movie without the road, a love story without the love, and a crime story without the crime," River of Grass introduces viewers to a director already in command of her craft and defining her signature style.
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.
VHYes
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A bizarre retro comedy shot entirely on VHS, VHYes takes us back to a simpler time, when twelve year-old Ralph mistakenly records home videos and his favorite late night shows over his parents’ wedding tape. The result is a nostalgic wave of home shopping clips, censored pornography, and nefarious true-crime tales that threaten to unkindly rewind Ralph’s reality.
A Man Imagined
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Pushing at the limits of non-fiction cinema, A Man Imagined is a bracingly intimate and hallucinatory portrait of a man with schizophrenia surviving amidst urban detritus and decay. Made in close collaboration with 67-year-old Lloyd, this immersive documentary fable follows the jagged path of a decades-long street survivor, across harsh winters and blistering summers, as he sells discarded items to motorists, sleeps in junkyards and lapses into near-psychedelic reveries.
Sator
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Secluded in a desolate forest home to little more than the decaying remnants of the past, a broken family is further torn apart by a mysterious death. Adam, guided by a pervasive sense of dread, hunts for answers only to learn that they are not alone; an insidious presence by the name of Sator has been observing his family, subtly influencing all of them for years in an attempt to claim them.
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.
Stinking Heaven
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"Compelling. Furiously combative." - Variety Married couple Jim and Lucy run a commune in the early 90's for sober living out of their suburban New Jersey home. The motley members eat, bathe and work together selling homemade "health tea" out of their van. Although there's constant bickering and plenty of fires to be put out, Jim and Lucy have managed to establish a haven for these outcasts. But the harmony is interrupted when Ann (Hannah Gross), a recovering addict and the ex-lover of one housemate, arrives. Director Nathan Silver shot this feature on a Ikegami HL-79E, a TV broadcast staple from the 1980s.
In The Soup
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Broke and desperate filmmaker Adolpho Rollo (Steve Buscemi) is a Manhattan wannabe in love with the mysterious woman next door, Angelica Peña (Jennifer Beals). He puts out an ad offering to sell his 'fabulous' movie script for $500, and gets a response from Joe (Seymour Cassel), who gives him a thousand and says he'll raise the 250,000 to make the picture. The problem is, Joe is a semi-connected wiseguy with a hemophiliac brother Skippy (Will Patton) and a habit of committing oddball crimes.
The Tale of King Crab
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Luciano is a wandering outcast in a remote, late 19th-century Italian village. His life becomes undone by alcohol, forbidden love, and a bitter conflict with the prince of the region over the right of passage through an ancient gateway. When the quarrel escalates, Luciano is exiled to the distant Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego where, with the help of ruthless gold-diggers, he searches for a mythical treasure, paving his way toward redemption. However, in these barren lands, only greed and insanity can prevail.
The Linguini Incident
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NIGHT FLIGHT PLUS STREAMING PREMIERE: Rosanna Arquette and David Bowie star in this romantic caper from director Richard Shepard! Lucy (Rosanna Arquette, Pulp Fiction) is an underpaid waitress at "Dali", a terminally hip New York City restaurant, who's seriously in need of cash. Dali's new, mysterious, charming (and very in debt) bartender, Monte (David Bowie, The Hunger) needs to marry someone, anyone, by the end of the week... or else. Together they join forces-- along with Lucy's lingerie designing best friend, Viv (Eszter Balint, Stranger Than Paradise) -- to rob the popular eatery and solve their financial woes. However these three are far from master criminals and they soon learn that in robberies, as in love, things never go as planned.
Rat Pack Rat
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A Sammy Davis, Jr. impersonator, hired to visit with a loyal Rat Pack fan, finds himself delivering last rites at the boy's bedside.
Radio On
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Christopher Petit's debut feature Radio On is the rare road movie from England. Since its 1979 release, it's become a cult classic. Robert (David Beames), the film's enigmatic protagonist, embarks on a road trip from London to Bristol, to investigate the recent death of his brother. A remarkable collection of art rock, punk and new wave--David Bowie, Devo, Kraftwerk, Robert Fripp, Ian Dury and more--soundtracks Robert's journey. The austere urban and rural landscapes he drives through are beautifully and strikingly rendered in black and white by cinematographer Martin Shäfer (who had been Wim Wenders' camera operator). As Robert drives westward, the radio newscasts he hears and the strangers he meets address the dire sociopolitical and economic state of "Winter of Discontent"-era Britain.
The Book of Birdie
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Birdie is a fragile and introverted teenager with a dark imagination. At an imposing, nearly-empty convent perched on the edge of a frozen lake, Birdie is unceremoniously placed into the care of the nuns where she develops unusual obsessions that will mark her as either a saint or a heretic.
Inspector Ike
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Inspector Ike, New York City’s greatest police detective, finds himself in a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse after the conniving understudy of an avant-garde theater group knocks off the star actor. A “lost TV movie” from the 1970’s, INSPECTOR IKE mixes visual gags, slapstick, gross food, and heartfelt emotion. Think COLUMBO meets THE NAKED GUN, featuring a rogue's gallery of NYC's best comedians.
Funny Ha Ha
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Marnie is 23, and drifts through "Funny Ha Ha," Andrew Bujalski's critically acclaimed debut feature, in search of romance and employment. The film's conversations sound improvised and the narrative rhythms appear loose and ambling as it paints a deft group portrait of recent college graduates-Marnie’s friends, co-workers and would-be lovers. But this scruffiness is a bit deceptive, as the film has both a subtle, delicate shape and a point. By the end of the film, Bujalski proves to be one of America’s most acute and intelligent young dramatists, utilizing 16mm film to probe and reveal the curious facts and stubborn puzzles of contemporary life.
Knocking
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After suffering a traumatic incident, Molly (Cecilia Milocco) moves into a new apartment to begin her path to recovery, but it’s not long after her arrival that a series of persistent knocks and screams begin to wake her up at night. Molly’s new life begins to unravel as the screams intensify and no one else in the building believes or is willing to help her.
NFTV 3
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