Directed by Brian De Palma, Phantom of the Paradise satirizes both horror films and rock groups in the story of a composer of a rock cantata on the theme of Faust, who sells his soul for rock ’n’ roll. Oscar-winner Paul Williams stars and composed the superb rock musical score.
Suture is one of the most outstanding neo-noirs of the 1990s. The wealthy and self-assured Vincent (Michael Harris) meets his blue-collar half-brother Clay (Dennis Haysbert) at their father’s funeral, and is struck by their similarity. He decides to murder Clay and take his identity — only Clay survives the assassination attempt with no memory and is mistaken for Vincent.
Serial Mom is a 1994 American black comedy written and directed by John Waters. Happy housewife Beverly Sutphin has a charmed life — a beautiful suburban home, a successful dentist husband, and two normal teenagers. However, when one of her son’s teachers speaks disparagingly of the boy at a parent-teacher conference, Bev runs the instructor over in the school parking lot.
A girl on the verge of womanhood finds herself in a sensual fantasyland of vampires, witchcraft, and other threats in this eerie and mystical movie daydream. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders serves up an endlessly looping, nonlinear fairy tale, set in a quasi-medieval landscape.
John Cassavetes’ hymn to that berserk business of performing, Opening Night is enhanced by its intense “old Hollywood” pedigree as Ben Gazzara, John Blondell, Paul Stewart and Cassavetes himself are the backing band for Rowlands’ knife-edged soloing.
Like a quasar burning past the gaslight, director Lisa Cortés’ eye-opening documentary explodes the whitewashed canon of American pop music. Little Richard: I Am Everything shines a clarifying light on the Black, queer origins of rock ’n’ roll, and establishes the genre’s big bang: Richard Wayne Penniman.
The father of video art and coiner of the term “electronic superhighway,” Nam June Paik was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Director Amanda Kim tells the remarkable story of Paik as a citizen of the world and trailblazing artist, who both saw the present and predicted the future with astonishing clairvoyance.
Made not long before the fall of the Berlin wall, this stunning tapestry of sounds and images, shot in black and white and color by the legendary Henri Alekan, is movie poetry. And it forever made the name Wim Wenders synonymous with film art.
In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric masterpiece, an upper-middle-class sextet sits down to a dinner that is continually delayed, their attempts to eat thwarted by vaudevillian events both actual and imagined, including terrorist attacks, military maneuvers, and ghostly apparitions.
Jim Jarmusch combined his love for the ice-cool crime dramas of Jean-Pierre Melville and Seijun Suzuki with the philosophical dimensions of samurai mythology for an eccentrically postmodern take on the hit-man thriller.
Michael Schultz directed this deeply felt recollection of adolescent life on Chicago’s near North Side in 1964. Like American Graffiti, Cooley High deals with girl, school, and police troubles as a group of high school seniors prepare for post-high-school life.
Almas’s Rainbow is a coming-of-age comedy/drama about three Black women living in Brooklyn. Ayoka Chenzira’s feature film explores the life of teenager Rainbow Gold (Victoria Gabrielle Platt) who is entering womanhood and navigating conversations and experiences around standards of beauty, self-image, and the rights of Black women have over their bodies.
This stark modern homage to Howard Hawk’s Rio Bravo updates the action with a youth gang attacking a closing police station in a blighted ghetto neighborhood.
Featuring brilliant performances from Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall, this dreamlike masterpiece from Robert Altman careens from the humorous to the chilling to the surreal, resulting in one of the most unusual and compelling films of the 1970s.