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2014 French-Taiwanese film directed by Tsai Ming-liang

25 year-old John, his teenage brother Erbol, and their sickly 12 year-old sister Aliya, are forced to leave their house in the Kazakh city of Almaty. By luck their mother left them a house in a remote village, where they plan to prepare their comeback. But the house appears to be on the wish list of the District Officer’s alcoholic brother, who has lived there illegally for 10 years.

2014 film by Abel Ferrara

2013 film directed by Fred Schepisi

While the young captains lead the revolution in the streets, the people of Fontainhas search for Ventura, lost in the woods.

The great French actor, Marcel Dalio, who has the lead role in Jean Renoir's THE RULES OF THE GAME, also appears in Renoir's GRAND ILLUSION. In both films he plays a character who is Jewish, as Dalio was in real life. In fact, in most of the French films he's in the 1930s, he almost always plays shady characters, informers, blackmailers and gangsters. In other words, he is always "the Jew." When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, he fled to America and appeared in CASABLANCA and TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. In America, he was no longer the Jew but The Frenchman. He became, in dozens of films, America's idea of a typical Frenchman. His film career has these two strands in which he has two different identities. Are you defined by other people and their perceptions of who you are? Are you always a creation of the way people want to see you? Or can you exist outside of the arbitrary boundaries which are placed on you? Written by Fandor

2015 film by Chantal Akerman

One of America’s foremost practitioners of the essay film presents a major new work inspired by the writings
 of Gilles Deleuze on cinema. The Thoughts That Once We Had is a richly layered journey through cinematic history, masterfully edited as it playfully moves across decades and genres, and suffused at every turn by the renowned filmmaker and critic’s lifelong passion for the movies.

In this delicate, deceptively small-scale drama from award-winning Iranian director Reza Mirkarimi, Youness, an ageing taxi driver, takes a young woman to a hospital at the end of his working day not knowing what awaits him there.

First begun in 2006, WAKE (SUBIC) completes the documentary diptych, FOR EXAMPLE, THE PHILIPPINES, the first part of which, VAPOR TRAIL (CLARK) was released in 2010. Collectively this nine-hour essay explores circumstances of toxic contamination around the former US military bases in the Philippines as the locus for a meditation on historical amnesia, colonial privilege, and the consequences of unchecked militarism. Interweaving both cinéma-vérité and interview footage of Filipino victims and their families, environmental spokespersons, and community activists, along with early photographic material pertaining to the Philippine-American War, partisan songs, historical texts, and landscape photography, both films are an attempt to construct a work capable of rendering some measure of this human and environmental tragedy and the complexities of its remedy.

Charlie talks wealthy farmer's daughter Tillie into eloping with him (and taking her father's money). In the city Tillie gets drunk and lands in jail while Charlie runs off with her money and his old girlfriend Mabel. Later Charlie reads that Tillie (now working as a waitress) has inherited the estate of her multi-millionaire uncle. Charlie dumps Mabel and talks Tillie into moving into her uncle's villa, and Mabel arranges to become a housemaid there. The uncle (never really dead) returns and summons the police to have them all thrown out.

A masterpiece of comic cinema that shows how the medium can transform and distort, as well as record, reality. Swedish cinema in the period 1917-21 was arguably the most sophisticated in the world, its major figure being the actor-director Victor Sjostrom, whose magnificently downbeat films combined literary adaptation, action, melodrama and astonishing natural backdrops. There are some of us, however, who prefer comedy to action melodramas, Lubitsch to Ford, and for this we turn to Sjostrom's contemporary, Mauritz Stiller, unfairly relegated in history to 'The Man Who Discovered Greta Garbo'.
'Thomas Graal's Best Film' is one of the best comedies of the silent era. It works as an adorable romantic comedy about a concupiscent novelist who falls for his secretary; as a startling social tract, with the dessicated aristocracy giving onto the modern world of cinema, entrepreneurs and the New Woman; as one of the first films about filmmaking - there is an exquisite parody of Griffith's monumental 'Intolerance', as the actor playing a hanged criminal complains about the pain of being hoist from a ceiling.
As early as 1917, before Hollywood was even heard of, we meet the philistine mogul hurling scripts into a wastepaper basket; the hysterical director; the overwrought, melodramatic actors. There is a wonderful scene where Bessie on horseback sees a man attacking a woman on a country road; coming cracking her whip to the rescue, she notices that a film crew are standing beside the roadside; she has mistaken fantasy for reality. This is the film's main theme, and the longest sequence features the title hero writing a screenplay after his mauling Bessie has forced her to flee; he imagines a desperate background of poverty for her from which he rescues her - this is the Best Film of the title.
Stiller's movie shows a thrilling modernity in this sequence as it blurs not only the reality of Graal's writing and the fantasy he imagines, but also intrudes Bessie's own story: she disrupts his narrative just as she disrupts all the forces of (male) power that would try to pin her down. Bessie is one of the great heroines of silent film, permanantly amused by the absurd complacency of the inferiors surrounding her, with a gorgeous, generous grin suggesting both a taste for playfulness, and a voracious sexual appetite. The scene where she flees her father and ritualistically forces him to abandon his paternalistic intentions by destroying the bridge between them is hilarious but provocative.
Graal's screenplay is not merely amusing for the gap between his assumptions and the actual truth. The imagined scene where the aristocratic parents become peasants, the father violent and drunk is subversive in itself (gentry reduced to peasants), but is also an apt metaphor for the patriarchal assumptions of the aristocracy.
Another aspect of the film's modernity is its narration, expressed through intertitles, sarcastic at the expense of the characters, suggesting melodramatic attitudes appropriate to the plot, than showing a very different reality (eg the despairing lover Graal sunbathing merrily on a country lake). There is a ritualistic sexual content (eg the scene in the boat where Graal blows on the window), and a willingness to sidetrack on 'irrelevant' bits (eg the cigarette tricks) that also excite the viewer; while the Surreal/Magritte/Feuillade-like abduction scene, fragmented and seemingly arbitrary, where bowler-hatted servants wait to pounce on Bessie, is spooky.
What makes 'Thomas Graal' a true classic though, and nearer to Sjostrom (who is terrific, his overacting more suited to comedy than drama), is the way the defiant artifice of the drama is shot against natural locations, producing a fruitful, jarring effect - Graal chasing Bessie through a country lane, slipping and losing his hat; a desperate Graal pushing a little old lady and stealing her boat, foreshadowing Seinfeld and a famous loaf of rye. There is a startling scene in a butcher's shop, a gallery of fresh carcass bloating the screen.

Amid big-budget medieval pageantry, King Richard goes on the Crusades leaving his brother Prince John as regent, who promptly emerges as a cruel, grasping, treacherous tyrant. Apprised of England's peril by message from his lady-love Marian, the dashing Earl of Huntingdon endangers his life and honor by returning to oppose John, but finds himself and his friends outlawed, with Marian apparently dead. Enter Robin Hood, acrobatic champion of the oppressed, laboring to set things right through swashbuckling feats and cliffhanging perils!

The first part tells the story of Moses leading the Jews from Egypt to the Promised Land, his receipt of the tablets and the worship of the golden calf. The second part shows the efficacy of the commandments in modern life through a story set in San Francisco. Two brothers, rivals for the love of Mary, also come into conflict when John discovers Dan used shoddy materials to construct a cathedral.

Millie Stope lives with her grandfather on a remote island. Man-child Nicholas, a fugitive from justice, also lives there and is terrorizing them - and he's interested in Millie. One day widower John Woolfolk, sailing on his yacht, happens upon the island. Soon he and Millie fall in love. Will jealous Nicholas stand for this?

In 1921, we follow two women - Marie and Grete - from the same poor Viennese neighborhood, as they try to better the lives of themselves and their families during the period of Austrian postwar hyperinflation.

1925 film by Monta Bell

When lifelong best friends Leo and Ulrich return home after completing their military training, Leo meets the stunning Felicitas at a railway station and is mesmerized by her beauty. A scandal follows, for which Leo is sent away. Returning home three years later, he discovers that much has changed.

The story of a female German spy who willingly sacrifices her life for her country.

Men and women, fathers and children. Ahmed, son of Diana and Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan, falls in love with Yasmin, a dancing girl who fronts her father's gang of mountebanks. Among the cutthroats is Ghobah, a villainous Moor to whom Yasmin is promised. In ruins near Touggourt, the city where Yasmin dances, she and Ahmed meet secretly until one night when her father and the gang capture the son of the sheik, torture him, and hold him for ransom. Will Ahmed believe that Yasmin set him up for capture? Even if true love finds a way through webs of deceit, what will the vigorous and imposing sheik say about his son consorting with a dancing girl?