In 1990 acclaimed filmmaker Frank Perry (DAVID & LISA, DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE) received the devastating diagnosis of inoperable prostate cancer. What might have been a death sentence became instead the impetus to create his most revealing and highly personal film. An intimate first-person portrait of the artist as cancer patient, ON THE BRIDGE is the inspirational story of Perry’s vigorous and seemingly victorious battle against the disease on its many fronts: physical, mental and spiritual. It is a battle which, like those of many fictional film figures, is full of suspense, comedy and heroics; yet this fight can’t be resolved in one scene. This fight is for keeps.
Month: August 2021
A phantasmagoric, definition-defying film from perhaps France’s premier underground filmmaker, Treasure of the Bitch Islands begins with the mysterious disappearance of an engineer who has discovered a new energy source, and follows a post-nuclear Ulysses’ voyage to find the substances used in the engineer’s formula, only to be harvested on an island of mad scientists and headhunters.
Fact-based story about a 90’s espionage case that was chronicled as the worst case of espionage in US history. Aldrich Ames was a middle-class CIA agent, whose problems with alcohol and general ineptness had kept him from rising further in the ranks of the agency.
An experimental drama that spins the tale of a woman, her sister, and the man who completes the triangle. Told through such fertile sources as grand opera, classical painting, and Victorian melodrama.
This inspired hybrid of documentary and fiction follows Jabir, who runs a mobile cinema from his old truck throughout the West Bank while his wife works to bring emergency medical care to Palestinians. When Jabir is invited by a spirited schoolteacher to make a screening in the old city of Jerusalem, he becomes obsessed with the idea of this pilgrimage and begins to investigate the possibilities.
Necchi (a bar owner), Perozzi (a journalist), Melandri (an architect) and Mascetti (a broken nobleman) live in Florence. They have been friends since their youngest years and spend every free moment together organizing complex and terrible jokes to all the people they meet, or just wandering around Tuscany. One of these crazy trips ends up in the hospital run by military-like Professor Sassaroli. Melandri falls in love with his wife, and steals her from the husband, much to the delight of Sassaroli himself. The relationship won’t last but the Professor becomes the fifth member of the team of friends, and jokes get even more complicated and powerful.
Art critic Keller was once part of a far-left radical group. They contact him again 10 years later and ask him to assassinate a Chilean doctor and war criminal, who’s visiting London, but Keller has lost his ideals and feels conflicted.