Calvaire
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In director Fabrice du Welz's Calvaire, a traveling entertainer is on his way home for Christmas when his van breaks down in the middle of a village, where he quickly falls victim to a dangerously unhinged innkeeper determined to keep him captive. This dark, unsettling film from the New French Extremity movement is available for the first in the US in high definition from a brand new restoration via Yellow Veil films. "A dark absurdist descent into hell," says Guillermo Del Toro.
Nosferatu the Vampyre
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It is 1850 in the beautiful, perfectly-kept town of Wismar. Jonathan Harker is about to leave on a long journey over the Carpathian Mountains to finalize real estate arrangements with a wealthy nobleman. His wife, Lucy begs him not to go and is troubled by a strong premonition of danger.
Despite her warnings, Jonathan arrives four weeks later at a large, gloomy castle. Out of the mist appears a pale, wraith-like figure with a shaven head and deep-sunken eyes who identifies himself as Count Dracula. The events that transpire slowly convince Harker that he is in the presence of a vampyre. What he doesn't know is the magnitude of danger he, his wife and his town are about to experience.
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.
Fitzcarraldo
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Iquitos is a town isolated in the middle of the jungle in Peru. At the turn of the century, one resident of the small town, “Fitzcarraldo” as the natives call him, has his dream of bringing together Enrico Caruso and Sarah Bernhardt for one great celebration of Grand Opera. To finance this fantastic dream, Fitzcarraldo decides to exploit a vast area of rubber trees growing beyond the impassable Ucayala Falls. To circumvent this barrier, he literally has his huge steamboat lifted over a mountain from one branch of the river to the other. With the aid of a tribe of Indians bewitched by the voice of the greatest singer of all time, Enrico Caruso, Fitzcarraldo fights fever, mosquitos and suffocating heat to achieve the impossible....
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.
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.
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.
The Stronger
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Academy Award© winning actor/director Lee Grant's directorial debut short was this acclaimed adaptation of August Strindberg's "The Stronger." Starring Susan Strasberg and Dolores Dorn, Grant transformed the premises of the AFI into a lush 19th century society hotel with cinematography by Andrew Davies and editing by Hal Ashby
Santa Sangre
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It has been hailed as "extraordinary" (The Guardian), "visionary and haunting" (Rolling Stone) and "a grand work of art, full of symbols and imagery that reach beyond language to something primal and original" (AV Club). Now forget everything you have ever seen as the modern masterpiece from director Alejandro Jodorowsky returns like never before. It is unlike any film you have ever experienced...or ever will. Axel Jodorowsky, Blanca Guerra and Guy Stockwell star in this epic odyssey of ecstasy and anguish, belief and blasphemy, beauty and madness, now featuring a new scan from the original negative supervised by the director himself.
Putney Swope
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A hallmark of 1960s radicalism and one of the first major underground films, Robert Downey Sr.'s seminal Putney Swope remains a classic of social satire. After the CEO croaks during a boardroom meeting at a Madison Avenue ad agency, members trying to sabotage each other's chance of winning the top spot each vote for the token black guy, thereby electing Putney Swope. Swope swoops into action, firing them all and replacing them with armed radicals, soul brothers, and sexy red-hot mamas. Re-naming the agency "Truth and Soul," Putney sets about revolutionizing the corporate world of advertising, banning the marketing of products such as cigarettes, alcohol and violent toys. The agency produces raucous, kooky TV spots - offensive, humorous, and, at first, wildly successful. But can "Truth and Soul" last, not only in advertising but within Putney himself?
Someone To Love
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Orson Welles gives his final onscreen performance in this Un Certain Regard Cannes Official Selection from independent legend Henry Jaglom. A film director's puzzled search for romance and his attempt to find out why life hasn't worked out quite like anyone expected it to features a starry cast including Sally Kellerman, Oja Kodar, and Andrea Marcovicci. 1987.
The Juniper Tree
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Set in medieval Iceland, The Juniper Tree follows Margit (Björk in a riveting performance) and her older sister Katla (Bryndis Petra Bragadottir) as they flee for safety after their mother is burned to death for witchcraft. Finding shelter and protection with Johan (Valdimar Orn Fygenring), and his resentful young son, Jonas (Geirlaug Sunna Pormar), the sisters help form an impromptu family unit that’s soon strained by Katla’s burgeoning sorcery. Photographed entirely on location in the stunning landscapes of Iceland in spectacular black-and-white by Randy Sellars, The Juniper Tree is a deeply atmospheric film, evocative of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath and Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, and filled with indelible waking dream sequences (courtesy of legendary experimental filmmaker Pat O’Neill). A potent allegory for misogyny and its attendant tragedies, The Juniper Tree is a major rediscovery for art house audiences.
Black Tight Killers
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After wooing stewardess Yoriko (Chieko Matsubara, Tokyo Drifter), war photographer Hondo (Akira Kobayashi, Battles Without Honor and Humanity) sees her kidnapped by a team of deadly female assassins who use vinyl records as weapons. Investigating her whereabouts, Hondo uncovers a conspiracy to steal a buried stash of WWII-era gold. Soon he must dodge go-go dancing ninjas and chewing-gum bullets to save Yoriko, whose family secret is tied to the hidden treasure. Every bit as stylish and inventive as the wildest works by his mentor Seijun Suzuki, Yasuharu Hasebe's spy spoof is a gaudy 1960s pop delight that ranks with the likes of Joseph Losey's Modesty Blaise and Mario Bava's Danger: Diabolik!
The Trial
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Anthony Perkins (PSYCHO) stars in Orson Welles' adaption of the Franz Kafka novel. A taut psychological thriller and drama about a man who is accused of a mysterious crime that he has no recollection of, caught in a nightmarish labyrinth of bureaucracy leading him to doubt his own innocence.
La Madre Muerta (The Dead Mother)
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Ismael (Karra Elejalde, Timecrimes) breaks into the house of a fine art restorer and shoots the homeowner dead, leaving her daughter orphaned and traumatized for life. Years later Ismael is working in a bar where he sees the daughter again. Paranoid that she has recognised him and will report him, he kidnaps her and holds her hostage, demanding that her hospital pay a ransom for her release. A gothic thriller with pitch-black humour that recalls the Coen brothers, Juanma Bajo Ulloa's sophomore feature won a host of prestigious international awards and was a precursor to the Spanish genre explosion.
NFTV 3
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