Leaving April 1

Directed by Jonathan Demme | 80 mins | 1974
Among Corman’s hall-of-fame stable of writers and directors was Demme, who offers a more humorous (but still titillating) take on the women-in-prison genre here in his directorial debut. The inmates fend off the abuses by the warden (Ba...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Roger Corman | 74 mins | 1961
Billed as a monster movie, Corman’s horror comedy actually begins as a spy caper, starring future Chinatown scribe Robert Towne as Agent XK150. Riffing on Castro’s then-recent revolution in Cuba, the bonkers story reels in a cutthroat mob...

Directed by Béla Tarr | 116 mins | 1987
Tarr’s first collaboration with writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai produces a quintessential Eastern bloc brew of voluptuous gloom and romantic doom that became the filmmaker’s defining style. The story of a hard-drinking man, the wicked cabaret singer he loves, a...

Directed by Harry Kümel | 87 mins | 1971
Profoundly inspired by the spirit of Belgian Surrealist and Symbolist painting, Kümel’s darkly poetic horror film begins with a young newlywed couple waylaid at a grand hotel en route to England, where they fall under the spell of the elegant Hungarian Cou...

Directed by Dick Richards | 95 mins | 1975
In this handsome adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s 1940 novel, noir icon Robert Mitchum meets one of the genre’s quintessential figures, Detective Philip Marlowe. The search for a missing girlfriend and a stolen jade necklace brings him into contact with ...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Bruce D. Clark | 81 mins | 1981
The Corman tradition of riffing on genre trends rode strong into the 1980s with this cross between "Alien" and "Solaris" that anticipates "Nightmare on Elm Street". Rescuers sent to the planet Morganthus soon discover that their worst f...

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 96 mins | 1967
Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, and Anne Wiazemsky co-star in Godard’s rouge-tinted, slogan-splattered political comedy concerning five innocents passing their summer vacation in a shared apartment by discoursing on Mao, performing agitprop theater, a...

Directed by Kathleen Collins | 86 mins | 1982
One of the first feature films directed by an African American woman, and a charming, complex tale of personal discovery that follows the marriage between a philosophy professor (Seret Scott) and her painter husband (Bill Gunn), both at a crossroads ...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Allan Arkush and Joe Dante | 93 mins | 1979
The moptop Ramones liberate a school from killjoy Principal Togar (Mary Woronov) in this sweetly rambunctious romp starring P.J. Soles (Halloween) as lead rebel of the student body. The innocent music-fueled anarchy (directe...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Peter Bogdanovich | 114 mins | 1979
Nobody could hit a suave groove like Ben Gazzara. In Bogdanovich’s melancholy character study, Gazzara plays an American pimp in Singapore who carves out a charmed space in the red-light underworld. But his luck turns in this ambien...

Directed by Béla Tarr | 439 mins | 1994
A cinephile rite of passage, Tarr’s magnum opus immerses us in the world of about a dozen characters in a shuttered factory town who are visited by a messianic figure but are also distracted by their own eyebrow-raising personal missions. Creating a rich te...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Penelope Spheeris | 95 mins | 1983
After chronicling the LA punk scene in The Decline of Western Civilization, Spheeris delivers the affecting story of desperate teenagers—who adopt the moniker “The Rejected”—who squat in an abandoned house. Their violent struggles to...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Jack Hill | 95 mins | 1971
The Corman-produced women-in-prison classic was the breakthrough for action stylist Hill and his future star Pam Grier (later in "Coffy" and "Foxy Brown," here also singing the theme song). A hubby-killing new arrival (Judy Brown) at a Manil...

Directed by Michael Winner | 99 mins | 1978
The second screen adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel transposes the notably labyrinthine plot to 1970s London, with a deliciously weathered Robert Mitchum reprising the iconic role he’d recently assumed in "Farewell, My Lovely" (1975): Detectiv...

Directed by John Dahl | 110 mins | 1994
Skipping town on her husband Clay (Bill Pullman), Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino) sets about seducing a series of men into abetting her lethal money-making schemes. The fact that this erotic thriller played initially on TV meant that Fiorentino was ineli...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Stephanie Rothman | 82 mins | 1970
Rothman’s debut feature—and first production under contract with Roger Corman’s New World Pictures— co-produced and co-written with her husband Charles Swartz. Working under the particular constraints of the Exploitation genre, Rothm...

Directed by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky | 155 mins | 2011
Tarr’s final feature distills the essence of his cinema with the potency of farmer’s moonshine: a cart driver and his daughter survive harsh lives amid the stark beauty of desolation. With a nearly mood-altering dilation of time, this pr...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Stephanie Rothman | 80 mins | 1971
Directed by Roger Corman protégé Rothman and laced with an addictive psych score, this cult item remains endearing five decades after its initial release. Dune buggies, rattlesnakes and hippies aren’t common staples of your average v...

Directed by Alan Rudolph | 111 mins | 1985
Alan Rudolph’s underseen noir oddity soaks in the grimy ambiance of Rain City, where Hawk (Kris Kristofferson)—a former cop, more recently a convict—is readjusting to the straight world and struggling young father Coop (Keith Carradine) is being drawn in...

Directed by Bette Gordon | 100 mins | 1983
A young woman lands a job as a cashier at a downtown porno theater, and soon finds herself inexorably drawn towards what’s happening onscreen—as well as other troubling fantasies. One of the great independent films of the ’80s, featuring a who’s who of t...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Roger Corman | 61 mins | 1959
Corman’s lo-fi corporate twist on "The Fly"–style metamorphosis shifts the focus to the beauty standards inflicted on women with this tale of a cosmetics company executive desperate to stay on top. Susan Cabot plays the steely exec who ex...