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...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Dario Argento | 119 mins | 1996
Asia Argento, the director’s daughter and a future star in her own right, plays a detective on the trail of a serial killer, who takes advantage of her condition: entering an unconscious or fugue state upon encountering certain artwork....

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 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 Christoph Schlingensief | 63 mins | 1990
Called “one of the greatest artists who ever lived” by Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek, Schlingensief—who died in 2010 at age 49—was a multihyphenate whirling dervish of chaotic creative energy and relentless ...

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 Dario Argento | 106 mins | 1980
Showing Argento’s doubling down on visual logic of dreams, this mystical yarn of alchemy and witchcraft unfolds as a series of lurid setpieces and cryptic clue-drops, largely in a New York apartment building. Resisting explication, the ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Will Tremper | 82 mins | 1963
A dense fog has grounded all flights out of West Berlin’s Tempelhof airport in Tremper’s episodic naturalist melodrama, which tracks the chance encounters between the handful of passengers stranded overnight in the terminal’s central hall...

Directed by Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña | 73 mins | 2018
One of the most stunning animated debuts of the past decade, this cracked fairy tale follows a young woman fleeing a cult and settling into a transmogrifying house inhabited by two pigs. Shot frame by frame and melding painted animati...

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...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Pia Frankenberg | 91 mins | 1985
A screwball comedy shrewdly observing the manners, mating habits, and class hang-ups of upwardly mobile 1980s West Germany, "Ain’t Nothin’ Without You" stars director Frankenberg as Martha, a filmmaker and single mother wracked with gu...

Directed by Michael Haneke | 108 mins | 2003
A family flees to the countryside because of an unexplained crisis in the world and finds that societal breakdown is well underway. Haneke’s lacerating, under-seen portrayal of civilization collapse was a bellwether for the cinema’s all-consuming 21st-...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Michael Brynntrup | 128 mins | 1985
A punky black-and-white Super 8 telling of the life and afterlife of the Nazarene, this iconoclastic underground epic stars project initiator Brynntrup in the title role, seen in 35 episodes taken from the New Testament interpreted ...