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All About Lily Chou-Chou
Directed by Shunji Iwai | 146 mins | 2001
Incredibly prescient in its understanding of how a still-young internet would fundamentally alter youth culture, Shunji’s film introduces Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara) in an ice field, the landscape gradually obscured by accreting chat room messages. Alienated... -
4 itemsKiller Films 30th Anniversary
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Forged in tandem with the New Queer Cinema of the early nineties, the nascent Killer Films weathered controversy for such bold, unabashedly gay films as Todd Haynes’s “Poison” (1991). Today, the production company’s titles—“Carol” (2015), “First Reformed” (2017), and “Past Lives” (2023) among the...
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MovieMusic
Movie
Directed by Angela Schanelec | 105 mins | 2023
Winner of the 2023 Berlinale Best Screenplay prize, Angela Schanelec’s oblique but vivid film transposes “Oedipus Rex” to contemporary Greece—though Sophocles’ tragedy is here distilled beyond easy recognition, with the rigor characteristic of the qu... -
Not a Film: Films by Jafar Panahi
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Even before it won the 2025 Palme d’Or, Jafar Panahi’s tragicomic revenge thriller “It Was Just an Accident” marked a momentous feat, as the Iranian master’s first film after the unexpected lifting of the 20-year filmmaking ban imposed on him by his government in 2010, when he was accused of maki...
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Whisky
Directed by Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll | 98 mins | 2004
When Jacopo (Andrés Pazos), sullen, punctilious loner and owner of a decrepit sock factory in Montevideo, learns of an impending visit by his estranged brother, Herman (Jorge Bolani), returning to Uruguay from Brazil for the annivers... -
Movie + 1 extraThe Dells
Movie + 1 extra
Directed by Nellie Kluz | 72 mins | 2024
The resort town of Wisconsin Dells, the self-appointed “Waterpark Capital of the World,” is located about 200 miles northwest of Chicago. Filmmaker Nellie Kluz (“How to with John Wilson”) goes behind the scenes of this kitschy oasis to mingle with the peop... -
The Decline of Western Civilization: The Complete Trilogy
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From its first installment, "The Decline of Western Civilization" (1981), Penelope Spheeris’s genre-defining documentary trilogy offers an unflinching and empathetic look at the punk and metal "scenes" that emerged from Los Angeles in the late 1970s.
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Come As You Are: ’90s Music on Screen
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The decade that broke punk and packaged grunge, the decade of New York Club Kids and Wu Wear and $5 Fugazi shows, the ’90s loom large in our age of hip-hop shout-outs to Kurt Cobain and the re-emergence of JNCOs. Was it the last gasp of American pop and countercultural vitality? A great rock ’n’ ...
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Big Fish & Begonia
Directed by Xuan Liang and Chun Zhang | 105 mins | 2016
“Spirited Away” meets “The Little Mermaid” in this gorgeously crafted fantasy blockbuster—a tale of shapeshifting, interspecies love and sacrifice sprung from ancient Chinese fables. The teenaged Chun—one of a mythical race of beings residin... -
The Decline of Western Civilization
Directed by Penelope Spheeris | 100 mins | 1981
Without doubt one of the great rock docs, Penelope Spheeris’s headily discordant portrait of West Coast punk—her directorial debut—showcases such hardcore luminaries as X, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and Germs. As pure and pungent a time capsule as th... -
The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years
Directed by Penelope Spheeris | 93 mins | 1988
The scummy, lightening-in-a-bottle Los Angeles punk scene that Penelope Spheeris captured in the first “Decline of Western Civilization” (1981) had morphed considerably by the time of this second instalment, nearly a decade later: the hair was bigger... -
The Decline of Western Civilization Part III
Directed by Penelope Spheeris | 86 mins | 1998
After a detour into the high heady heyday of Sunset Strip hair metal in the second film of her essential social history of rock ’n’ roll in southern California, Spheeris returned to the hardcore punk roots of her first Decline, embedding herself amon... -
Fear of a Black Hat
Directed by Rusty Cundieff | 88 mins | 1993
Overshadowed somewhat at the time of its release by another gangsta rap mockumentary send-up of the same year, the Chris Rock vehicle "CB4," Cundieff’s shoestring-budget feature debut gets just as many laughs at a fraction of the price, following sociol... -
Swoon
Directed by Tom Kalin | 94 mins | 1992
Tom Kalin’s coruscating debut returns to the scene of the infamous Leopold and Loeb murder case, likewise a key inspiration for Hitchcock’s Rope, but in this telling the unspoken homosexual undercurrent of the crime is put boldly front and center. A heavily ... -
Poison
Directed by Todd Haynes | 85 mins | 1991
With his first feature, Haynes took his influence from the patron saint of all queer outlaw art, the French writer and director Jean Genet. The result, a landmark of New Queer Cinema, was a trio of intercut, stylistically distinct stories drawn together by... -
Postcards from America
Directed by Steve McLean | 87 mins | 1994
Based on the autobiographical writings of David Wojnarowicz and coming hot on the heels of the firebrand artist-activist’s death from AIDS in 1992, Steve McLean’s feature debut remains an underseen landmark of New Queer Cinema. Interwoven are fictionalize... -
3 Faces
Directed by Jafar Panahi | 100 mins | 2018
Panahi’s fourth post-filmmaking ban feature begins with a smartphone video of a young woman (Marziyeh Rezaei) who, forbidden by her parents to pursue her dream of acting professionally, appears to take her own life. The video is addressed to Behnaz Jafar... -
This Is Not a Film
Directed by Jafar Panahi | 75 mins | 2011
Placed on house arrest by the Iranian government and forbidden from any further filmmaking activity for the following 20 years, Panahi used the slender resources at his command—his own apartment as a “set,” the aide of friends, including credited co-direc...
