Marcos is a professional jai alai player undefeated on the court in 26 matches. The super confident Marcos has acquired a Trumpian disdain for weak losers, including a fellow player who suffers a fracture as a result of Marcos’ carelessness. When he’s not dominating his opponents, he’s trying to balance his relationships with several women, including recently widowed old flame Sara, nightclub thrush Lucrecia, and mother-to-be Rebeca. Marcos promises to wed Rebeca without telling her he’s about to leave Mexico permanently, setting in motion a plot by Rebeca’s brother Armando to blackmail the first class heel while also getting out of his debt to gambler Marcial.
Year: 2022
A documentary profiling a Japanese taiko drumming group based in the remote Sado Island, Japan. The film blurs the line between real-life documentary footage of the troupe’s training and practice regimes, and staged performances of their varied musical acts, with sets designed by artist Tadanori Yokoo and an additional experimental electronic music score by Toshi Ichiyanagi.
In this, his 1977 feature-film debut, director Kidlat Tahimik, who is widely regarded as the father of independent Philippine cinema, stars as a Filipino jeepney driver who wants to emigrate to America to become an astronaut. Dreaming of an idealized version of the West, he chairs the fan club of the rocket designer Wernher von Braun and is a devoted listener of Voice of America. Traveling in his colorfully decorated extended jeep he arrives in Paris, where his illusions can’t survive.
Muscle Beach is a fascinating location for people-watching in the L.A. area, and in 1963, the strangeness of its sights was much more pronounced than today. Pat O’Neill’s first film (made with Robert Abel) progresses from humorous, curious observation to energetic, graphical interaction with the sights and sounds of Santa Monica’s famed beach.
Gabe Kaplan stars as David Greene, a New York deli owner who moonlights as a basketball coach at pickup games around the city. One day, David gets the offer of his dreams: a coaching position at Cadwallader College in Nevada.
A traveling minister and his wife are quietly menaced by a devil cult in the Old West. By the time the Good Reverend figures out what’s going on it may be too late to stop the evil.
Irene, a thirty-something housewife with a successful husband and a young son, has her life thrown in a spin when she becomes attracted to Billy, a member of a landscape crew outside her house. When Irene’s husband and son leave for a weekend fishing trip, Irene wanting to see Billy, gets locked in the back of his trailer and ends up at remote Lake Consequence with Billy and his girlfriend Grace where they take Irene on a trip into the nearby town to a Chinese New Year Festival, and through a series of adventures they bring out the repressed sexual needs Irene has been holding inside for a long time.
——UPGRADED——
The young and handsome Kano Sozaburo is admitted to the Shinsengumi, an elite samurai group that seeks to defend the Tokugawa shogunate against reformist forces. Kano is a skilled swordsman, but his physical beauty leads the members of the strictly male group to compete for his affections, generating tensions that threaten to become lethal. In Gohatto, Nagisa Oshima explores the ambiguous forms of masculinity that the samurai code concealed, with a terrific cast including Ryuhei Matsuda, Takeshi Kitano and Tadanobu Asano subtly capturing the dangers of repressed homoerotic desire.