Search

Release: November 14, 2023

$7.99

Description

The inaugural film of Eric Rohmer’s sparkling “Comedies and Proverbs” cycle, The Aviator’s Wife is a fleecy farce of romantic overanalysis that finds the director exploring the possibilities of handheld camerawork as he seeks a narrative expression of the opening epigraph: “It is impossible to think of nothing.” A young man sees his girlfriend’s ex leaving her apartment one early morning, and his imagination is off to the races, as stars Philippe Marlaud and Marie Rivière (The Green Ray) introduce a younger, less perfectly articulate type of Rohmer character than those of the “Moral Tales.” Special Features: • Audio commentary by film historian Adrian Martin • Trailer Top About this item Similar From the Brand Reviews The Aviator's Wife [Blu-ray]

Release: November 28, 2023

$7.99

Description

In Boyfriends and Girlfriends (aka My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend) Rohmer uses the amorous misadventures of two girlfriends in the Paris suburbs to test the old proverb “les amis de mes amis sont mes amis” (“the friends of my friends are my friends”) in the final episode of his “Comedies and Proverbs” series. Taking an identifiable stab at a yuppie(ish) set, Rohmer’s witty Shakespearean roundelay involves the buttoned-up Blanche (Emmanuelle Chaulet, in a superb debut) and the free-spirited Lea (Sophie Renoir), and their current amours. The pair are tempted by each other’s love interests, testing both their friendship and their understanding of matters of the heart. Special Features: • Audio commentary by film historian Adrian Martin • Trailer

Release: March 24, 2020

$6.99

Description

In 1981, writer and Warhol associate Glenn O’Brien, Swiss photographer Edo Bertoglio, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, a graffiti innovator and noise music artist who’d just begun to exhibit his paintings, hit the streets of lower Manhattan to make a movie about the bombed out bohemia that they knew, with a script by O’Brien, Bertoglio directing, and Basquiat, a naturally compelling presence, starring. Left incomplete due to money problems and assembled for release in 2000, Downtown 81, which follows Basquiat trying to move a painting while hustling for a place to sleep, became a window on a lost world of life on the margins and crazy creative ferment. Featuring John Lurie, Fab Five Freddy, and Debbie Harry, with musical performances by DNA, James White and the Blacks, and Kid Creole and the Coconuts—and Manhattan in all its mangy glory. Special Features: -Audio commentary with writer Luc Sante and artist Lee Quiñones -Re-release trailer -Downtown 81: The Metrograph Oral History by Horacio Silva (booklet)

Release: November 21, 2023

$7.99

Description

Shot quickly in and around Paris during a production break on Rohmer’s The Green Ray (Le Rayon Vert), Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle is a breezy, witty film that traces the exploits of two young women—one an ethnology student from the city, the other an unsophisticated aspiring artist from the country. Reinette and Mirabelle (played by Joëlle Miquel and Jessica Forde) become instant friends upon meeting in the first of four vignettes that make up the film (“The Blue Hour”), and in their first two days together, they decide to become roommates in Paris. Throughout the three remaining stories, they encounter many of the inevitable characters of a modern city: the impossible waiter (“The Waiter”), the Metro-station hustler (“The Beggar, the Kleptomaniac and the Hustler”), and the snooty gallery owner (“Selling the Painting”). Special Features: • Audio Commentary by writer Kristen Yoonsoo Kim • Trailer

Release: December 12, 2023

$7.99

Description

Like the Royal Theater in The Last Picture Show and the title movie house in Cinema Paradiso, the Fu-Ho is shutting down for good. The Fu-Ho’s valedictory screening is King Hu’s 1967 wuxia epic Dragon Inn, playing to a motley smattering of spectators. The standard grievances persist: patrons snack noisily and remove their shoes, treating this temple of cinema like their living room. The sense that moviegoing as a communal experience is slipping away takes on a powerful and painful resonance. Yet Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn is too multifaceted to collapse into a simple valentine to the age of pre-VOD cinephilia. A minimalist where King Hu was a maximalist, preferring long, static shots and sparse use of dialogue, Tsai rises to the narrative challenges he sets for himself and offers the slyest, most delicate of character arcs (the manager, a woman with an iron brace on her leg, embarks on a torturous odyssey to deliver food to the projectionist, played by Lee Kang-sheng). By the time the possibility arises that the theater is haunted, we’ve already identified it as a space outside of time—indeed, two stars of Hu’s original opus, Miao Tien and Shih Chun, watch their younger selves with tears in their eyes, past and present commingling harmoniously and poignantly. 4K Restoration by CINEMATEK, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium. Special Features: • Audio commentary by film critic Phoebe Chen • Introduction by film critic Nick Pinkerton • Light (2019, a short film by Tsai Ming-liang) • Re-Release Trailer

Release: December 19, 2023

$7.99

Description

The first independent film released in post-Handover Hong Kong, director Fruit Chan’s atmospheric shoestring-budget character study is a rough-and-ready piece of work shot on grainy leftover 35mm short ends in the city’s overcrowded subsidized housing projects. The result is a tough, pessimistic film, a portrait of a city on the brink that follows the drifting of high school dropout and wannabe Triad tough Autumn Moon (Sam Lee, in a star-making role, opposite a largely nonprofessional cast), who sees little hope for his future or that of his home as a newly created Special Administrative Region within China. A raw, groundbreaking drama and portrait of nihilistic youth in the same vein as Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991), and The Doom Generation (Gregg Araki, 1995), the film poses questions that remain burningly relevant as tumult engulfs Hong Kong. The 4K restoration was carried out in the Hong Kong and Bologna headquarters of L’Immagine Ritrovata, made from the original camera negative with the supervision of director Fruit Chan and cinematographer O Sing-Pui. Special Features: • Audio Commentary by Film Critics Sean Gilman and Ryan Swen • Re-Release Trailer • Interviews with Director Fruit Chan, Producer Doris Yang, and Producer Daniel Yu

Release: June 27, 2023

$7.99

Description

A stylish and seductive submersion into the techno-scored neon nightlife of Taipei, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Millennium Mambo is a much-misunderstood marvel. Presented in a stunning 4K restoration, it stars Shu Qi (The Transporter) as an aimless bar hostess drifting away from her blowhard boyfriend and towards Jack Kao’s suave, sensitive gangster. Structured as a flashback to the then-present from the then-future of 2011, it’s a transfixing trance-out of a movie, drenched in club lights, ecstatic endorphin-rush exhilaration, and a nagging undercurrent of ennui. Special Features: • Audio commentary by Rolling Stone film critic K. Austin Collins • Video essay by Adrian Martin and Cristina Alvarez Lopez • Re-release Trailer