Tom Ripley (Alain Delon) travels to Italy to visit his playboy friend Phillippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet) and Phillippe's new fiancée, Marge Duval (Marie Laforêt). What Phillippe doesn't know is that his father has paid Tom to convince his son to abandon Europe and return to his family responsibilities in San Francisco. But when Phillippe's family cuts off their funding of Tom's extravagant lifestyle during his covert mission, he discovers another way to maintain his newfound standard of living.
During World War II era, a young woman, Wang Jiazhi, gets swept up in a dangerous game of emotional intrigue with a powerful political figure, Mr. Yee.
Lars von Trier's Palme d'Or-winning musical masterpiece stars Björk as Selma, a Czech immigrant on the verge of blindness. She struggles to make ends meet for herself and her son, who has inherited the same genetic disorder and will suffer the same fate without an expensive operation. When life gets too difficult, Selma learns to cope through her love of musicals, dreaming up little numbers to the rhythmic beats of her surroundings.
In a small Castilian village in 1940, in the wake of Spain's devastating civil war, six-year-old Ana attends a traveling movie show of Frankenstein and becomes possessed by the memory of it. Produced as Franco's long regime was nearing its end and widely regarded as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s, The Spirit of the Beehive is a bewitching portrait of a child's haunted inner life and one of the most visually arresting movies ever made.
This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves.
Julie Dash’s 1991 masterpiece was her first feature, and the first American feature directed by an African American woman to receive a general theatrical release. It announced a formidable talent, and in the grandeur and intricacy of its formal construction and themes, powerfully emblematized its director’s purposeful commitment to cinema.
Abounding with surprise, the film transports us to a little-known setting to unfold a universal tale. The year is 1902, in the home of an extended family off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia where they maintain strong connections to African linguistic and cultural traditions. Here, many members of the Peazant family are on the verge of a planned migration to the U.S. mainland, where American modernity seems, vaguely, to offer a better life.
However, family members clash over the meaning of this move. Viola, who has lived up North and returned as a Christian convert, views the crossing as a step out of bankrupt African superstitions into a kind of light. Scandal-tinged “Yellow Mary,” returning to the family from a long self-exile, still asserts her independence but fears losing the touchstone of home. Nana Peazant, the aged matriarch, refuses to migrate and frets over the possibility of broken family ties and lost traditions. Eulah, young and with child, fears that the family’s plan represents a futile flight from intractable legacies of pain.
A brilliant cast enacts these negotiations with exceeding depth, befitting the weight of the decision the Peazants face: to embrace the land that other Africans once fled. Dash constructs their home as a rarefied world, possibly soon a “paradise lost,” through a masterful interplay of mise-en-scène, symbolic markers and magical realist gestures. All of this is graced by the luminous cinematography of A. Jaffa Fielder and John Barnes’ stunningly original score. Named to the National Film Registry in 2004 by the Library of Congress, Daughters of the Dust eloquently frames concerns that have preoccupied many independent filmmakers of Dash’s generation: the place of family and tradition in ameliorating historical wrongs, the hope of spiritual escape from a history of trauma, and the elusive possibility of finding deliverance together. —Shannon Kelley
Rosaria Parondi (Katina Paxinou), an impoverished Italian mother, moves to Milan with her close-knit family of five sons to find opportunity in the big city. A heated rivalry begins when two of Rosaria's boys -- Rocco (Alain Delon) and Simone (Renato Salvatori) -- fall for Nadia (Annie Girardot), a beautiful prostitute with whom each has an affair. As soft-spoken Rocco and brutal Simone both pursue Nadia in their own way, tension between them threatens to tear the family apart.
Rachel doesn't realize she has grown up in captivity working for an advertising agency where her job is to assess Mommy 6.0, her favorite pop star in the whole entire world.
Ten years after their high school graduation, Romy (Mira Sorvino) and Michele (Lisa Kudrow) haven't exactly accomplished everything that they set out to do. Despite their strong friendship, their personal and professional lives are still lacking. When they hear of their upcoming high school reunion, they take it as an opportunity to show their classmates how much they've changed -- first by trying to reform themselves, then by creating a lie that eventually spins out of control.
A lonely gravedigger, who stinks of corpses, finally meets her dream man – but their romance is cut short when he tragically drowns at sea. Grief-stricken, the gravedigger goes to morbid lengths to resurrect him through madcap scientific experiments, resulting in grave consequences and unlikely love.
Presented in Stink-o-vision; scratch and sniff cards will be available for all shows.
When a young boy's family is killed by the mob, their tough neighbor Gloria becomes his reluctant guardian. In possession of a book that the gangsters want, the pair go on the run in New York.
Robert Bresson plumbs great reservoirs of feeling with Mouchette, one of the most searing portraits of human desperation ever put on film. With a dying mother, an absent, alcoholic father, and a baby brother in need of care, the teenage Mouchette seeks solace and respite from her circumstances in the nature of the French countryside and daily routine. Bresson deploys his trademark minimalist style to heartbreaking effect in this essential work of French filmmaking, a hugely empathetic drama that elevates its trapped protagonist into one of the cinema's most memorable tragic figures.
First of a trilogy of films. During the Second World War, a Japanese conscientious objector named Kaji works as a supervisor in a Manchurian prison camp. He hopes to avoid duty as a soldier, but he also hopes to be helpful to the welfare of his prisoners. An escape attempt by Chinese prisoners results in Kaji's arrest for collusion. He faces the possibility of transferral to combat--or worse.
The crowning triumph of a career cut tragically short, the final film from Larisa Shepitko won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival and went on to be hailed as one of the finest works of late Soviet cinema. In the darkest days of World War II, two partisans set out for supplies to sustain their beleaguered outfit, braving the blizzard-swept landscape of Nazi-occupied Belorussia. When they fall into the hands of German forces and come face-to-face with death, each must choose between martyrdom and betrayal, in a spiritual ordeal that lifts the film's earthy drama to the plane of religious allegory. With stark, visceral cinematography that pits blinding white snow against pitch-black despair, THE ASCENT finds poetry and transcendence in the harrowing trials of war.