Today we celebrate the birthday of a truly singular American talent: the singer, songwriter, and actor Kris Kristofferson. An adaptation of a hit country song, director Sam Peckinpah elevated Convoy’s thin concept to an action-packed modernist western of vehicular chaos. In other words: essential.
After the incisive satire of The Man in the White Suit, the great Alexander Mackendrick continued his cinematic project regarding the struggles with modernity of the working class, but this time on the open sea. The Maggie is yet another perfectly pitched humanist comedy from Ealing Studios.
Next in our selection of highlights from LA OLA’s showcase of new Spanish independent cinema is the first film from Elena Martín, who acted in last year’s LA OLA highlight Agata’s Friends. She stars here, too, as an entrancing embodiment of a millennial student wayward between romance and longing.
A testament to Emigholz’s fascination with geometry, the fourth part of his Streetscapes comes in the shape of a triptych. The film elegantly connects three moments in time through architecture, channeling the notion of permanence across History, and the silent interaction of buildings with nature.
The third entry in Emigholz’s Streetscapes series, and perhaps the one that solves the mystery of it all! Uncharacteristically structured around fictionalized therapy sessions, this is a playful and illuminating experiment shedding light onto the director’s entire architecture-focused body of work.
We’re proud to continue our partnership with Human Rights Watch Film Festival, which is dedicated to defending and protecting human rights. One of the essential highlights of their curation is this passionate, clear-eyed documentary that is now an invaluable capsule of the tumult of the Arab Spring.
Marcello Mastroianni leashing Catherine Denueve? This could only be made by fiercely provocative auteur Marco Ferreri (Dillinger is Dead)! He continues Buñuel’s tradition with this extreme yet ambiguous gender parable of dominion, using the maestro of surrealism’s writer and star from Belle de Jour.
If there’s a word that encapsulates Donoso’s approach to the transgender community of Casa Roshell, that is empathy. Echoing the utopic, non-judgemental atmosphere of the idiosyncratic club, her camera allows people to be who they want to be. A dreamy celebration of identity, an oasis of freedom.
We continue our trip into the comic world of Ealing Studios with a Kafka-esque fable of exploitation, doubling as an ode to creation. Starring Alec Guinness long before his newfound fame with Star Wars, this concise comedy is composed of nothing less than brilliance, character, and style.
We’re excited to partner for a second year with LA OLA to highlight its showcase of the best independent contemporary films from Spain. We begin with Adrián Orr’s award-winning debut, an impressively detailed documentary portrait of a new generation in Spain—and an example of a new cinematic voice.
The second of Heinz Emigholz’s unique documentary film series "Streetscapes"—an intersection with the director’s famed architecture studies—is a provocative juxtaposition of buildings that were designed in Israel’s past for grand social and political goals and now shown in their present state.
We bring you a new documentary series by Heinz Emigholz (from of our Architecture of Autobiography series), the brilliantly unclassifiable “Streetscapes,” pinpointing perspicacious intersections of art, urban landscape, politics, history and psychology. The first, focusing on music, rocks hard.
One of the great films made by the generation after the French New Wave, André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds, a four-time César winner, is a teenage drama electric with currents of sexuality and politics. The 1962 setting is precise (the Franco-Algerian war), yet the tensions live on into the 90s and today.
With his First Reformed now in cinemas and receiving uniform praise, we present this earlier expression of spiritual and existential angst from Paul Schrader. Light Sleeper continues Taxi Driver‘s dark portrait of loneliness’ connection with crime, and the absence (or is it the presence?) of god.
Three great Spanish artists together in one delirious film: Carlos Saura adapting a choreography by Antonio Gades, himself adapting Federico García Lorca. Saura, famed for his dance films, is at his best, capturing both the moments before the show begins, and then all the movement in its beauty.
With an alluring scenario involving the recovery of a booty of (the titular) whiskey, Whiskey Galore! has the perfect charm found in so many of Ealing Studio’s productions. This is one of the most renowned British comedies for good reason: its hilarity and satirical edge are both truly singular.
This beautiful and witty film by José Luis Guerín (In the City of Sylvia) is at once a drama (fiction) and debate (documentary) about the influence and meaning of muses in art. And in life: Arguments (and the stakes) between the professor and his female students inevitably goes beyond the classroom.
Cast yourself back to 1924 and the hopeful promise of two things: The USSR and the movie camera. Uniting them is the visionary Dziga Vertov, who imagined cinema as the technological embodiment of the new, modern citizen. In his hands, the camera is an idealistic tool to unite a country and a people.
Our Resnais celebration continues to dive further into his cinematic puzzle box, this time trading the mysterious villa that was Marienbad in for the shadowy world of 1930’s France aristocracy. Stavisky is a romantic, even elegiac, game of deception which stars the legendary Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Over the next three days we honor the birthday of Left Bank auteur Alain Resnais with a decade-spanning range of visionary cinema. We begin with perhaps the most famous of puzzle films, a time-warping, space-shifting drama of fantasy and memory inspired by Hitchcock and inspiration to The Shining.
“This film was rescued from the best surviving elements, after the original 16mm negatives were destroyed in a flood in 2010, and a fading and deteriorated dupe negative was restored. The soundtrack was preserved from original magnetic 16mm masters, sounding better than any other version.” —NWR
Today we launch a retrospective devoted to the film company behind the golden era of post-war British comedies, Ealing Studios. We begin with one of the very best: Forget the misguided Coen brothers remake, Alexander Mackendrick’s 1955 gem starring Alec Guinness is a wickedly funny classic.
A landmark work in experimental surrealist animation, Suzan Pitt’s short has more ideas than even some features! Brilliantly mixing hand-drawn animation with stop-motion, Asparagus is resplendent with evocative ideas on femininity, interiority, and the body. A truly singular piece of cinema.
We conclude our Claude Sautet retrospective with another incisive yet tender cinematic gift. In A Bad Son this great chronicler of French society focuses on a working class family, and the attempted rehabilitation of their son, to challenge contradictions of masculinity and society at large.
Next in our retrospective devoted to Claude Sautet is one of the French director’s mega-hits at home. A trio of middle-aged men (Yves Montand, Michel Piccoli, Serge Reggiani) face mid-life crises in a prototypical drama of the era. With Gérard Depardieu as the young man they all wish they could be!
A fiery romance turns to a love triangle in another underrated film by Claude Sautet. Revising a familiar scenario of doomed love and romantic indecision, Sautet executes his tale with wisdom and complexity in regards to gender and relationship politics. These are characters you won’t soon forget.
A success in his home country, director Claude Sautet has never had the auteur reputation of his contemporaries (the French New Wave!). We hope to help some with a 4-film retrospective devoted to this nuanced dramatist. We begin with a sinister policier starring Michel Piccoli and Romy Schneider.
Andrew Haigh is a true jewel of a filmmaker—a uniquely measured dramatist, profoundly concerned, through a patient style, with characters above story. We adore his sophomore feature, Weekend for its poignant realization of two characters that feel as though they might be real people. Sublime.
Lucio Fulci is one of the finest talents of his generation—his films are as much audio-visual tapestries as they are narrative experiences, and this giallo revision of Vertigo is no exception. Alternatively titled Perversion Story, cinema doesn’t get more beguiling and darkly cynical than this.