——UPGRADED——
While traveling through the South after the ravages of the Civil War, a parentless young boy named George Mellish is told the spooky tale of an axe-murderer called “The Fool Killer.” When George befriends the odd Milo Bogardus, he begins to fear that the legends might not be mere fiction.
——UPGRADED——
This Soviet film is a biography of the Georgian primitive artist Nikoloz Pirosmanishvili (1862–1918), better known as Pirosmani, who died of starvation and sold his paintings to bars and restaurants for food and drink. The film experiments with color control techniques based on the painter’s style.
——UPGRADED——
In the 1930s, a schoolteacher named Gakuen, while searching for his missing friend Akira, comes upon a mysterious, drought-stricken village beside a pond. After asking for food from a beautiful young woman named Yuri, Gakuen discovers that she is married to Akira, who is also the keeper of the village bell. Unless it is struck three times a day, a spirit that dwells in the pond, the Dragon Princess, will flood the town and kill all its inhabitants. When the Dragon Princess receives an offer of marriage from a prince, she offers to leave the pond in exchange for a human sacrifice, and Yuri is chosen as the victim.
——UPGRADED——
Graduate student Harry Bailey was once one of the most visible undergraduate activists on campus, but now that he’s back studying for his master’s, he’s trying to fly right. Trouble is, the campus is exploding with various student movements, and Harry’s girlfriend, Jan, is caught up in most of them. As Harry gets closer to finishing his degree, he finds his iconoclastic attitude increasingly aligned with the students rather than the faculty.
——UPGRADED——
Transcending its genre trappings, the first of Matti Kassila’s adaptations of Mika Waltari’s detective novels was voted the greatest Finnish film of all time in a 2012 critics’ poll. After a crime-themed party, a wealthy playboy is found dead in his pool—initially deemed a misadventure, until Inspector Palmu begins to suspect foul play. A stylish, suspenseful thriller marked by caustic humor and a memorable jazz-tinged score.
——UPGRADED——
During World War I, small-town girl Josephine Norris has an illegitimate son by an itinerant pilot. After a scheme to adopt him ends up giving him to another family, she devotes her life to loving him from afar.
Captain Darman is a communist party hitman now living peacefully in exile in England where he runs a bookshop in Brighton. That is until a visitor gives him a coded message summoning him back to Spain where he’s instructed to execute a traitor. As he prepares for the hit he starts to doubt the guilt of his target as it bears similarities to a previous hit which he now thinks was innocent.
——UPGRADED——
An incestuous portrait of the Notre Dame de Paris cathedral that reveals the feminine nature of this monument. Notre-Dame Cathedral is the support of an ecstatic vision: the convulsions of the camera and the frenzy of the editing, accompanied by loops of liturgical and noisy music, dematerialize the monument, transforming it into flashes of colour, lines and fleeting forms.
