
Bert Deling's surreal, button-pushing and hallucinogenic paean to the emerging possibilities of avant-garde and homemade filmmaking. Telling the tale of a violent ex-cop searching for the man who killed his partner, the film takes an unexpected turn when he encounters drug lord Plastic Man and a tribe of LSD enthusiasts. What follows is both literal and metaphorical mayhem as the boundaries of the film start collapsing and our idea of what's real is pushed to its very limits.
1973-11-15
6
10.0Engel und Puppe is the first film by Italian filmmaker and writer Ellis Donda. Screened at Oberhausen in 1975, Engel und Puppe is a political adaptation of some lines from Rilke's Duino Elegies, featuring the French poet Jacqueline Risset and a young Rossella Or (soon to become an avant-garde theatre actress).
8.0A dying man in his forties recalls his childhood, his mother, the war and personal moments that tell of and juxtapose pivotal moments in Soviet history with daily life.
7.0The final 17 years of American singer and musician Karen Carpenter, performed almost entirely by modified Barbie dolls.
5.5Lacking a formal narrative, Warhol's mammoth film follows various residents of the Chelsea Hotel in 1966 New York City. The film was intended to be screened via dual projector set-up.
0.0Karma, an international high school student from Sikkim struggles to fit in and hold onto his cultural identity when he is stuck at home with his host sibling, Alex.
General arrives in Baden-Baden with his stepdaughter Polina and his mother, seeking social standing and respite. Secretly, they chase casino fortunes alongside a French businessman and beauty. Alexej, Polina’s tutor, struggles with his own gambling past while falling for her. When the wealthy “Babushka” dies, the family’s financial woes vanish, freeing Alexej to court Polina. Yet he loses everything in a sudden winning streak that upends loyalties and reveals the world’s true stakes: love, money, and chance.
4.7This is the only feature directed by the famed French painter and sculptor Martial Raysse. In keeping with the revolutionary spirit of the time, the movie has no plot to speak of and appears to have been largely made up on the spot. We follow the cat man into a bizarre fantasy universe presented in negative exposure that reverses color values (black is white and vice versa) and written words. The cat man steals a car and then picks up a young girl he promises to take to “Heaven.” Heaven turns out to be a country chateau inhabited by several more animal mask wearing weirdoes...
10.0A man attempts to operate a mysterious device, but with each attempt comes a new set of problems.
0.0A taxi driver, a young girl and a backpacker simultaneously experience a wonderful journey in Tokyo, where they find connections to their own homes in Africa, Europe and Southeast Asia.Throughout their journey, they run into the same Japanese woman named Akiko. Meanwhile, a writer in Paris recalls her encounter with Akiko in Tokyo.
3.7Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the "forest." There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York "underground scene" who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.
6.4An unknown future. A boy confesses to the murder of another in an all-boy juvenile detention facility. More an exercise in style than storytelling, the story follows two detectives trying to uncover the case. Homosexual tension and explosive violence drives the story which delivers some weird and fascinating visuals.
7.1Forty-year-old Andreas arrives in a strange city with no memory of how he got there. He is presented with a job, an apartment - even a wife. But before long, Andreas notices that something is wrong. Andreas makes an attempt to escape the city, but he discovers there's no way out. Andreas meets Hugo, who has found a crack in a wall in his cellar. Beautiful music streams out from the crack. Maybe it leads to "the other side"? A new plan for escape is hatched.
7.1El Topo decides to confront warrior Masters on a trans-formative desert journey he begins with his 6 year old son, who must bury his childhood totems to become a man.
10.0Chaos, Murder, and Despair have walked among humans for eons, tasked with sowing discord among them. However, the thrill of Earthly life has long faded, and with it, their power. Only one way exists to reclaim it: resurrect their long-dead sister.
0.0A mother and son are eating sushi at a conveyer belt sushi bar in Tokyo. This film depicts their conversation using cutout animation.
9.0Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery protests failed to defeat the neo-imperialist Japan-US Security Treaty. The ritualistic solemnity of the charged sexual scenes contribute to the oneiric qualities of Closed Vagina which Adachi would later insist was an open work, not meant to deliver any kind of deliberate political message. - Harvard Film Archive
A bereaved epileptic ditches her pills and follows a mysterious woman to the outskirts of her town, where she slips back into the fearsome yet ecstatic throes of the seizure.
7.5A spell of time in the life of a family in rural Tochigi prefecture. Yoshiko is not an ordinary housewife, instead working on an animated film project. Uncle Ayano, a successful music producer, is looking to get his head together after living in Tokyo. Meanwhile, Sachiko is concerned with why she seems to be followed by a giant version of herself. As the lazy days pass by, each member of the family is followed in a series of episodic vignettes.
6.4Young and disenchanted Sam meets a mysterious and beautiful woman who's swimming in his building's pool one night. When she suddenly vanishes the next morning, Sam embarks on a surreal quest across Los Angeles to decode the secret behind her disappearance, leading him into the murkiest depths of mystery, scandal and conspiracy.
6.8An exiled magician finds an opportunity for revenge against his enemies muted when his daughter and the son of his chief enemy fall in love in this uniquely structured retelling of the 'The Tempest'.
7.1Carla Zachanassian had a child by Serge Miller as a teenager. When Serge refused to marry her, she was driven out of town. By her own wit and cunning, she has returned as a multi-millionaire for a visit. The town lays out the red carpet expecting big things from Carla, only to learn that her sole purpose is to see Serge Miller killed...
6.994-year-old Eleanor Morgenstein tries to rebuild her life after the death of her best friend. As a result, she moves back to New York City after living in Florida for decades.
7.0Across different eras, a poor family, an anxious developer and a fed-up landlady become tied to the same mysterious house in this animated dark comedy.
6.4Two lost souls: she a con-artist in L.A.; he a puppeteer in San Antonio have the same dream linking each with the other. He travels to L.A. to find this woman he has become obsessed with. She resists, afraid of his kooky ideas until she travels with him to San Antonio and meets his wise grandmother. Story of two disparate people linked by "fate" gets increasingly interesting as it rolls along.
7.3When a proud noble refuses to kiss the hand of the despotic King James in 1690, he is cruelly executed and his son surgically disfigured.
6.8In Los Angeles, a colorful assortment of bohemians try to make sense of their intersecting lives. The moody Dark Smith, his bisexual girlfriend, her lesbian lover and their shy gay friend plan on attending the wildest party of the year. But they'll only make it if they can survive the drug trips, suicides, trysts, mutilations and alien abductions that occur as one surreal day unfolds.
6.2While serving life in prison, a young man looks back at the people, the circumstances and the system that set him on the path toward his crime.
6.6A 21-year-old reformed gangster's devotion to his family and his future is put to the test when he is released from prison and returns to his old stomping grounds in Watts, Los Angeles.
6.6In a seemingly perfect community, without war, pain, suffering, differences or choice, a young boy is chosen to learn from an elderly man about the true pain and pleasure of the "real" world.
6.6Nothing is as it seems when a woman experiencing misgivings about her new boyfriend joins him on a road trip to meet his parents at their remote farm.
5.8A boozy lowlife tries to bury the truth about his crazy stepson's suspicious death, but a nosy newspaper columnist and the young man's mother complicate matters.
5.8The story of a young writer's transformation when her past invades her present.
6.2A group of friends' fishing boat capsizes off the coast of Mexico and they're left alone stranded at sea and struggling for survival.
7.1A burned-out paramedic tries to survive his last 24 hours on the job while training a new recruit.
6.3Conman Robert Freegard poses as an undercover MI5 agent and kidnaps countless victims amidst a high-stakes manhunt, until the woman who fell for him brings him to justice.
6.3Davey Gordon, a New York City boxer at the end of his career, falls for dancer Gloria Price. However, their budding relationship is interrupted by Gloria's violent boss, Vincent Rapallo, who has eyes for Gloria. The two decide to skip town, but before they can, Vincent and his thugs abduct Gloria, and Davey is forced to search for her among the most squalid corners of the city, with his enemy hiding in the shadows.
7.4A woman is released from prison after serving a sentence for a violent crime and re-enters a society that refuses to forgive her past.