Director Shahram Mokri’s first feature is a delightfully offbeat B&W comedy about the mysterious workings of Fate, played out in deadpan Jim Jarmusch-like vignettes. Two blind jewel thieves, a young man who can’t succeed at killing himself, a love-struck police officer and two female morgue attendants find their lives interconnected when an unusual fish is set free and a charmed ring is moved. Watch for sly references to film noir classics including LE SAMOURAI and KISS ME DEADLY in this wonderful and eccentric Iranian gem.

From Karen Shakhnazarov, director of ZEROGRAD, ASSASSIN OF THE TSAR is a mysterious and labyrinthine psychological drama in which the tormented chambers of a patient’s mind come to warp everything around him, even the folds of history itself. In one of his finest latter-day performances, the great Malcolm McDowell
(A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, TIME AFTER TIME) stars as Timofeyev, a severe schizophrenic in a dreary Soviet mental hospital who is convinced that, impossibly, he’s the killer of two Tsars: Alexander II in 1881 and Nicholas II in 1918. The thoughtful new head of the hospital, Dr. Smirnov (Oleg Yankovskiy) is determined to cure Timofeyev of his madness – but instead finds himself literally pulled back through time, inhabiting the ghosts of the past as they march towards their tragic destiny.

From GOD ON A BALCONY director Biswajeet Bora, BOOMBA RIDE is a scathing comic satire of corruption in India’s rural education system – and one 8-year old boy (newcomer Indrajit Pegu, in a remarkable performance) who knows how to rig the game for himself. Inspired by a true story, the film was shot in the state of Assam on the banks of the Brahmaputra River with a mostly nonprofessional cast.
The story revolves around an impoverished school where there is only one (unwilling) student, Boomba. Desperate to keep their jobs and funding, the teachers wind up bribing the hilariously impassive and uncooperative boy to show up to class – while Boomba’s secret wish is to attend the better-funded school in town where a slightly older and very pretty girl just happens to be a student.

Hungarian director György Kovásznai’s wildly idiosyncratic animated musical is one of the most indescribably strange, personal and totally irresistible cartoon features ever made. A walking ball of anxieties, shop window decorator Zsolt (voiced by Kornél Gelley, with Albert Antalffy singing) bursts into the apartment of his fiancée’s best friend Anikó (voiced by Vera Venzcel, with Kati Bontovits singing), paralyzed with fear at his impending marriage. Zsolt is like a stoned hippie alleycat, or an Eastern European Frank Zappa in a tux; medical student Anikó a more curvaceous and leggy post-modern Betty Boop – and both unsure of their attraction to each other, of the choices they’ve made, of what life has in store for them.

Inspired by a real-life tragedy, the infamous Cinema Rex fire in 1978 that triggered the Iranian Revolution, CARELESS CRIME follows three “timelines” – of arsonists planning to burn down a movie theatre; of workers and students at the cinema; and of characters within the film screening at the cinema – which may or may not all be happening at the same time. One of the most dazzling and enigmatic films in recent memory, Mokri’s mind-bending mystery leapfrogs between past and present, fact and fiction to create an unforgettable picture of Time not as a straight line, but as an elastic, constantly spinning Moebius strip.

Unflappable and unstoppable mouse secret agent Nick Grabovsky (László Sinkó) with his deadpan voice, baggy pants and a big “G” on his shirt, goes up against the criminal cat gang run by the sinister, metal-pawed Mr. Teufel (Miklós Benedek), in Hungarian director Béla Ternovszky’s surreal, animated sci-fi treasure. Set in the year 80 AMM (“After Mickey Mouse”) on Planet X where cats and rats have banded together to eliminate mice, the film features a show-stopping series of musical numbers including a deranged Euro-disco song (“Just purr with me / Touch me with tender paws”) and a bizarre chorus of Mexican vampire bats named Los Vampiros who inhabit an ancient Mayan temple. A cross between 1980s Don Bluth-style animation (THE SECRET OF NIMH) and the British TV series “Danger Mouse” (clearly an inspiration here), CAT CITY has long been a beloved cult favorite in Eastern Europe – recently restored by the National Film Institute in Hungary from the original 35mm camera negative. In Hungarian with English subtitles.

THE CATHEDRAL OF NEW EMOTIONS (DIE KATHEDRALE DER NEUEN GEFÜHLE) – 2006, Cinegrafik, 60 min. Dir. Helmut Herbst. On a shortlist with Eiichi Yamamoto’s BELLADONNA OF SADNESS and René Laloux’s FANTASTIC PLANET as one of the most surreal, psychedelic and truly cosmic animated features ever made, German director Helmut Herbst’s utterly insane THE CATHEDRAL OF NEW EMOTIONS follows a commune of Berlin stoners and intellectuals who get set adrift in space in 1972 in a packing container clutched in a giant flying hand. Various space flotsam smashes into the windshield – enormous insects, Mighty Mouse, a Bird Man from “Flash Gordon” – while hypnotic Krautrock drones in the background moaning “Where am I??”, and a naked man bounces up and down off a massive red pepper. So begins our descent down the psychotic rabbit hole of CATHEDRAL, a true hallucinogenic Space Freakout if there ever was one: imagine Ralph Bakshi animating an R-rated version of John Carpenter’s DARK STAR, or the cartoon equivalent of Can’s “Ege Bamyasi” or Pink Floyd’s “Astronomy Domine.” In other words: set the controls for the heart of the sun. Narrated by the commune’s (possibly Indian or Black) ship’s doctor Quistard in the same synthesized voice everyone uses, the crew includes the female commander Bakunskaja with long gray hair and a pink hippie frock; lizard-tongued head of security Dierksen; and the (probably) transgender James and Jones, a pair of redheaded and often bare-breasted twins. The crew spend their days staring into the pulsating light of the fusion reactor wondering about the outcome of the Vietnam War, or bemoaning their sexual inertia: “Do you know what an erotically stale situation is? … Eternal lust and unspeakable horror. All empty promises.” Their descent into moral and political lethargy is interrupted by the arrival of a very attractive young man, Mulligan, who’s discovered in their monthly supply shipment from the discount store. Eventually this screwy crew of seriously baked stoners find themselves searching for the enigmatic Matthew Madson, a Yeti-like wild man who may be the mysterious astronaut who first convinced them to embark on their deranged odyssey. Visually the film is like no other, filled with holographic blue phallus plants and characters morphing into gray fleshy blobs every time they pass a Black Hole, constantly disrobing and attempting to seduce each other (and despite the random nudity, the crewmembers are weirdly androgynous as if genders are becoming meaningless.) The dialogue is equally bizarre, littered with cryptic sound bites: “Did you know that neutrons can smile?”, “I think you are also just fiction” and the film’s mantra, “My eyes are cast down in awe.” The movie’s genesis is equally strange: apparently based on a 1974 film by Herbst called “Die phantastische Welt des Matthew Madson,” CATHEDRAL was eventually finished after a decades-long gestation in 2006 (Herbst passed away in 2021.) One of the rarest and most obscure tiles in world animation and never before officially released on physical media, CATHEDRAL has been newly restored from the original camera negative and sound elements by Deaf Crocodile with the cooperation of Herbst’s wife, Renate Merck. In German with English subtitles.

From Prasanna Vithanage, one of Sri Lanka’s most acclaimed directors, comes GAADI – CHILDREN OF THE SUN, a sweeping historical drama of imperial politics, religion, caste, gender and impossible love. Set in 1814 during the era of repressive British colonial rule in Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) and the last days of the Kandyan kingdom, GAADI begins with a collaborationist English agent convincing the local Sinhala Buddhist nobility to attempt to overthrow the rival Tamil king. The subsequent military disaster forces a Sinhala noble woman, Tikiri (Dinara Punchihewa in her debut role) to choose between suicide and marriage to a low-caste outcast Vijaya (Sri Lankan star Sajitha Anuththara, in an irresistible performance).

From Achal Mishra, director of THE VILLAGE HOUSE (GAMAK GHAR), DHUIN is a stunning, novella-length portrait of a 25-year old street theatre actor (Abhinav Jha, in a breakout performance) who is desperate to leave his rural hometown of Darbhanga for Mumbai, but finds himself trapped by family obligations, lack of experience and connections, and the all-enveloping fog of living.

“Oh no, stranger. The dead come to me,” whispers Jesaja, the cat Guardian of the Dead in the skeleton-filled catacombs and labyrinths of director Michael Schaack’s brilliant and surprisingly graphic animated feature about a grisly serious of unsolved murders among a group of domestic cats. (“Felidae” is the scientific name for cats.) A combination feline detective story, Gothic mystery and occult horror, FELIDAE follows green-eyed protagonist Francis (voiced by Ulrich Tukur) and his grizzled, one-eyed companion Blaubart (voiced by Mario Adorf) as they unravel a series of killings stretching back decades, involving death cults, genetic experimentation and a mysterious martyr religion. One of the most sought-after titles among world animation fans and never before officially released in the U.S., FELIDAE marries the dark, adult themes and nightmarish imagery of PLAGUE DOGS and WATERSHIP DOWN with the family friendly animation style of Don Bluth circa THE SECRET OF NIMH. Be forewarned, though: this is not a kids’ animated movie – FELIDAE features R-rated language and cat-themed slang (humans are merely “can openers”), bloody dissections and even simulated cat sex.

A group of attractive young Iranian kite-flying enthusiasts gather at a dismal lake, near a restaurant where two sinister characters straight out of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE are serving up grisly fare. Shahram Mokri’s breakout second feature is an unclassifiable brilliant, single-shot meditation on 1970s American slasher films like FRIDAY THE 13th but filtered through a purely art-house lens.
Eerie, circular and overwhelmingly mysterious, with strange and unexpected tangents, weird tales of phantom lights, and an insistent, repetitive dream logic, FISH & CAT is a “horror” film in the same way Tarkovsky’s STALKER is “science fiction.”

“A crime is a crime, even if committed by kings,” intones the narrator of director József Gémes’ animated portrait of the supposedly “heroic” age of medieval knights and kings, a sprawling and bloody tapestry of ruthless combat to rival Game Of Thrones. Based on an epic narrative poem by 19 th century Hungarian writer János Arany, HEROIC TIMES has a unique visual style combining gorgeous oil paintings and 2-D animation, similar to the Japanese anime BELLADONNA OF SADNESS. Stylistically, the film is closer to sweeping medieval sagas like Aleksandr Ptushko’s ILYA MUROMETS, John Boorman’s EXCALIBUR and Ralph Bakshi’s underrated version of THE LORD OF THE RINGS, tied together by the battle-wearied voice of the narrator: “I haunted the alien streets as a spirit of withered times.” Winner of the feature film award at the 1985 Annecy Animated Film Festival, the long-unseen HEROIC TIMES has been newly restored by the NFI – National Film Institute-Film Archive in Hungary for its first-ever U.S. release by Deaf Crocodile. In Hungarian with English subtitles.

Legendary fantasy filmmaker Aleksandr Ptushko’s sweeping, visual F/X-filled epic is one of his most enchanting achievements: a stunning Cinemascope ballad of heroic medieval knights, ruthless Tugar invaders, wind demons and three-headed fire-breathing dragons.
Based on one of the most famous byliny (oral epics) in Kievan Rus’ culture, the film stars Boris Andreyev as the bogatyr (warrior) Ilya, waging a decades-long battle against the Tugars who threaten his homeland, kidnap his wife and raise his own son to fight against him.

The latest film from acclaimed director Karen Shakhnazarov (ZEROGRAD and THE ASSASSIN OF THE TSAR, both released by Deaf Crocodile) is a tremendously entertaining historical detective mystery adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Sign of Four” -- but in place of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, the film features two real-life figures from Russian history. In Moscow in 1902, famed actor and theater director Konstantin Stanislavski (Konstantin Kryukov) is struggling to understand the life of slum dwellers for his latest production of Gorky's "The Lower Depths" -- so he turns to journalist Vladimir Gilyarovsky (Mikhail Porechenkov) who takes him on a guided tour of the Khitrovka district, pretty much Moscow's version of Whitechapel circa Jack the Ripper. There, they accidentally stumble across the bizarre murder of a chess playing friend of Gilyarovsky's called The Rajah and cross paths with a stunningly beautiful fallen aristocrat named The Countess (Anfisa Chernykh) and a savage Englishman and his blow-dart shooting killer companion. For fans of the Jeremy Brett-starring Sherlock Holmes series and the recent Kenneth Branagh-directed Hercule Poirot mysteries, this is an irresistible treat. Shakhnazarov clearly has great affection for the classic period in Russian theater (Anton Chekhov makes a cameo appearance at one point) and for the Holmes stories this pays loving tribute to. In Russian with English subtitles.

Director Shahram Mokri’s third and most formally challenging film continues the time-bending, single-shot experimentation of FISH & CAT (and later, CARELESS CRIME) in a science-fiction/detective/vampire story, with nods to stylized 1980s New Wave-era films like LIQUID SKY.
Sometime in the future, teams of tattooed athletes play a vaguely defined sport in an ominous, labyrinthine stadium where a murder has taken place. When police try to reconstruct the crime, teammates of the murdered man force his vampiric twin sister to assume his identity, in hopes of killing her off too. But all too soon time, identity and the bonds of reality break down in another of Mokri’s fascinating, genre-defying creations.

Imagine Andrei Tarkovsky circa SOLARIS directing Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and you’ll come close to the existential weirdness of the wonderfully loopy Soviet-era sci-fi comedy KIN-DZA-DZA! Two average Muscovites – a plainspoken construction foreman (Stanislav Lyubshin) and a Georgian violin student (Levan Gabriadze) – encounter an odd homeless man on the street who asks, “Tell me the number of your planet in the Tentura?” In a flash, they’re teleported across the universe to the planet Pluke in the Kin-Dza-Dza galaxy – a Tatooine-like desert world whose inhabitants are hilariously noncommunicative (their main words are “ku” for good and “kyu” for very bad) and where common wooden matches are tremendously valuable. A deadpan, absurdist mixture of Kurt Vonnegut, Monty Python, Samuel Beckett and Jodorowsky’s never-made Dune where alien cultures are even more haphazard and WTF? than our own, the film is also a savage satire of bureaucratic idiocy and dysfunction no matter what political system you’re living under – or what planet you’re living on. Recently restored by Mosfilm for its first-ever U.S. release by Deaf Crocodile. In Russian with English subtitles.

“In the dark she felt the key turning in the latch and a voice spoke to her: open the door”, whispers Maura (Mary Ryan), the odd, intense daughter of an impoverished rural family in early 1800s Ireland who is accused of witchcraft after she’s seen consorting in the woods with a conjurer and fiddle player named Scarf Michael (Mick Lally). Her neighbors and even her own family become increasingly consumed by fear and superstition, as Maura starts to experience surreal, poetic flashes of her latent powers. A major rediscovery for fans of folklore, fantasy and folk horror, THE OUTCASTS was the first feature directed by Robert Wynne-Simmons, famed for his work as writer on the seminal British folk horror film BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW. THE OUTCASTS plays like an ancient ballad somehow captured on film, filled with the sorcery of earth and woods, musicians hooded in pagan straw masks and skirts, prejudice, myth and religion – and the peat and the mud and the bone-chilling cold. “There’s a queer sweetness in the air. It’s an unnatural state of affairs,” as one character murmurs. Ryan delivers an unforgettable performance as Maura with her piercing, raven-like beauty, matched by Lally as the nearly-mythic Scarf Michael. With a superb, lyrical score by acclaimed traditional folk composer Stephen Cooney. Recently restored by the Irish Film Institute – Film Archive, THE OUTCASTS emerges as one of the great gems of Irish cinema – released for the first time ever in the U.S. by Deaf Crocodile.

The final film from Russian fantasy master Aleksandr Ptushko (ILYA MUROMETS, SAMPO), RUSLAN AND LUDMILA was a glorious and magical summation of his career: a 2-1/2 hour greatest hits package filled with the sweeping lyricism, bejeweled visual F/X and mythic storytelling that put him on par with Walt Disney, Ray Harryhausen and Mario Bava. Based on an epic fairy tale written in 1820 by Alexander Pushkin (Ptushko had previously adapted Pushkin’s THE TALE OF TSAR SALTAN, and half-jokingly said they were related), the film opens with the seemingly-joyous marriage of bogatyr (warrior) Ruslan (Valeri Kozinets) to Ludmila (Natalya Petrova), the daughter of Prince Vladimir. (Like his earlier ILYA MUROMETS, the action of the film is set during the legendary era of the Kyivan Rus’ culture that pre-dated both modern Ukraine and Russia.) On their wedding night, Ludmila is spirited away by the riotously long-bearded wizard Chernomor (Vladimir Fyodorov), and taken to his sinister palace where she’s held prisoner. On their epic quest to rescue her, Ruslan and his three rivals encounter some of Ptushko’s most unforgettable imagery: a giant’s monstrous, decapitated head slumbering on an open plain, magic rings and stone warriors, sorcery and sacrifice, all in the hope of reuniting lost lovers. Newly restored by Mosfilm for release by Deaf Crocodile. In Russian with English subtitles.

Based on the Finnish national epic “Kalevala,” director Aleksandr Ptushko’s ravishing, mystical fantasy tells the story of a sinister witch Louhi (Anna Orochko) who covets the Sampo, a magical, rainbow-colored mill that can produce endless salt, grain, and gold. When the hero Lemminkäinen (Andris Oshin) attempts to stop her, Louhi steals the sun, plunging the world into eternal darkness. A Finnish/Soviet co-production and shot like its predecessor ILYA MUROMETS in gorgeous CinemaScope, SAMPO features some of Ptushko’s most surreal and fantastical imagery: a glowing red horse plowing a field of vipers; a boat of fire with a stag’s head; a weeping mother literally walking across the sea to find her lost son. With its witch’s incantations and repeated scenes of forging magical items – “Give me fire for the furnace from the nave of the sky!” – there is a Macbeth-like occult force to the film as well, underscored by the raging blue-gray seas and rock-strewn landscapes. Previously released in the U.S. in a dubbed, butchered version as THE DAY THE EARTH FROZE (and later mocked on MST3K), SAMPO has been beautifully restored in 4K by KAVI – the Finnish National Audiovisual Institute for its first-ever American release in its original Finnish-language version by Deaf Crocodile.

“We have more ghosts than live people,” murmurs the pale, haunted mistress of the mansion of Marsh Firs (Elena Dimitrova) to a scholar of ancient folklore (Boris Plotnikov) who has arrived at her castle to research the bloody legend of King Stakh, a murdered 15th century nobleman whose spirit supposedly thunders through the local woodlands. Part folk horror, part supernatural mystery, KING STAKH is a melancholy, chilling mixture of Terry Gilliam, Italian Gothic Horror, 1960s Hammer Films and THE WICKER MAN – and a major rediscovery for genre fans. The longer the young scholar stays in this mysterious house of “shadow, gloom, madness and death,” the more strange and surreal the imagery becomes: a mad widow in a white wig; a man bleeding spontaneously from his skull; a dwarf hiding in a decayed doll’s house; screeching ravens and maniacal puppet shows. Long unavailable, the film has recently been restored from the original film elements in its extended 126 min. Director’s Cut by Belarusfilm, Deaf Crocodile and Seagull Films for its first-ever U.S. release. (In Russian with English subtitles.)

The long-lost, independently financed Black urban crime/action film SOLOMON KING (1974) from director/actor/producer/writer Sal Watts is set for restoration and re-release in 2022 from distributor Deaf Crocodile Films. SOLOMON KING was shot in Oakland, CA in 1973 with a cast of mostly non-professional actors, a stunning soul-funk soundtrack, and incredible clothes from Watts’s own Mr. Sal’s Fashion stores. Restored with the cooperation of the filmmaker’s widow, Belinda Burton-Watts (who appears in the film), and utilizing one of the only surviving complete prints of the film from the UCLA Film & TV Archive alongside the original soundtrack elements (which had been stored in Burton-Watts’s closet for several decades)

Based on a famous fairy tale in verse by Alexander Pushkin, THE TALE OF TSAR SALTAN is one of director Aleksandr Ptushko’s most sublime creations: a
ravishingly beautiful fantasy about love, magic, betrayal and abandoned family. Driven from the Russian court by her sisters’ scheming, the young Tsarina (Larisa Golubkina) is thrown into the sea in a cask with her infant son. Surviving the storm-tossed voyage, the mother and her now magically-adult son (Oleg Vidov) land on a remote island where he falls in love with a Swan Princess in human form (Kseniya Ryabinkina), and longs for reunion with his estranged father, Tsar Saltan (Vladimir Andreyev).

Arguably the only anime ever made inspired by both Hello Kitty and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, TAMALA 2010 is a futuristic techno fever dream that flows back and forth in time, following the adorable wide-eyed kitty Tamala on her home world of Meguro City, Cat Earth, a BLADE RUNNER-like mega-city controlled by the Catty & Co. corporation. Escaping into space, she’s waylaid by the God of Death and crash-lands near Hate City on the Planet Q, where she meets a new boyfriend, goes bowling and shopping in a thrift store – and realizes she may be the latest reincarnation of an ancient Greek cat cult with ties to the omnipresent Catty & Co. A heady, conceptual work of psychedelic sci-fi, influenced by the style of classic manga and anime such as Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy and Takashi Murakami’s postmodern art movement Superflat, TAMALA 2010 is also a savage take on modern consumer culture: in Meguro City a giant Colonel Sanders stalks the streets with an axe buried in his head, and Tamala’s eerie cat’s eyes are everywhere, advertising chocolate, toothpaste and drugs for forgetfulness. Written, directed and composed by the two-person team of t.o.L. – their incredibly addictive electronica / space-lounge score is worth the price of admission alone – TAMALA 2010 is equal parts Philip K. Dick, METROPOLIS and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (with a few sly nods to THE SHINING thrown in for good measure.) In Japanese with English subtitles.

“Japanese art collective t.o.L. (Tree of Life) have taken the hipster kitsch of Hello Kitty to a delirious extreme in this animated feature, which bears as much resemblance to current anime as Stan Brakhage does to Vincente Minnelli … Sudden veers into darkly colored scenes of dense, skeletal architecture reveal a Matrix-like world beneath the surface, adding to an atmosphere of conspiracy and decay.” – Jon Strickland, L.A. Weekly

Legendary animator and cartoonist Bill Plympton’s first feature, THE TUNE is a wildly surreal animated musical comedy about a struggling songwriter named Del (voiced by Daniel Neiden), desperate to write a hit tune to save his relationship with his pert, long-suffering girlfriend Didi (voiced by Maureen McElheron, who co-wrote the script and composed the music). On his way to meet her and his boss, Del gets sidetracked in the cheerfully deranged Alternate Universe of Flooby Nooby: a strangely nostalgic vision of 1950s middle-class America as filtered through the affectionate-but-twisted sensibilities of David Lynch, Talking Heads and classic Warner Bros. Bugs Bunny ‘toons. There’s a Doggie Elvis who croons about his pompadour; a love duet between a Burger and Fry, a slice of Cherry Pie and a Scoop of Ice Cream; and a joyfully sadistic Bellhop at The Love Sick Hotel, all singing lovably warped tunes like “Dig My Do,” “No Nose Blues” and “Tango Shmango”. Plympton’s famed animation style, done in colored pencils with a gorgeous pastel palette, is perfectly suited to this beautifully off-kilter saga of a man who loses his way only to find his heart: “Lost?” “No, I just don’t know where I am.” Restored by the Academy Film Archive.

Set in a dystopian world of gleaming white towers, Sony video monitors and inflatable furniture, where the beautiful inhabitants all dress as Edie Sedgwick-like pixie sprites or medieval page boys out of LOGAN’S RUN, the film follows a historian of late 20 th century culture (played by Arto Tuominen) researching the mysterious death many years earlier of a free-spirited erotic model. In a VERTIGO-like twist, he hires the model’s exact double, an earthy, uninhibited engineer named Kisse (actress Ritva Vepsä plays both parts) to recreate the model’s death for a TV program. Director Jarva was one of Finland’s most acclaimed fiction filmmakers and documentarians before he was tragically killed in an auto accident returning from the premiere of his latest film in 1977.

In the twisted tradition of classic anthology horror films such as TALES FROM THE CRYPT and CREEPSHOW, TRAPPED ASHES features four stories of the surreal, macabre and terrifying, helmed by five of Hollywood’s most unique directors: Joe Dante (GREMLINS, THE HOWLING), Ken Russell (ALTERED STATES, THE DEVILS), Monte Hellman (TWO-LANE BLACKTOP), Sean Cunningham (FRIDAY the 13th), and John Gaeta (Oscar winner for Visual F/X on THE MATRIX Trilogy). Seven strangers (including legendary character actors John Saxon and Henry Gibson) are trapped inside an infamous Roger Corman/AIP-style House of Horrors during a Hollywood movie studio tour, and forced to confess their most disturbing personal memories to get out alive. In Ken Russell’s “The Girl With The Golden Breasts,” a struggling actress (Rachel Veltri) decides to get gel implants made from reprocessed human cadavers – with monstrous results for her and her boyfriend (Jayce Bartok). In Sean Cunningham’s “Jibaku,” an unhappily-married American woman (Lara Harris) and her architect husband (Scott Lowell) have a nightmarish encounter with a dead monk on a visit to Japan. In Monte Hellman’s “Stanley’s Girlfriend,” , two ambitious young filmmakers become unlikely friends in 1950s Hollywood: Leo (Tahmoh Penikett), writer of sadistic little B-pictures like “The Strangler,” and a soon-to-be-famous director named Stanley Kubrick (Tygh Runyan). When they both fall in love with the same eerie, irresistible woman (Amelia Cooke), it unleashes a decades-long mystery involving desire and celluloid. And in John Gaeta’s “My Twin The Worm,” a young Goth woman (Michele-Barbara Pelletier) reveals the horrific, Cronenberg-like tale of the inhuman “twin” that grew alongside her in her mother’s womb. With marvelous visual F/X by multi-Academy Award winner Robert Skotak (TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY, ALIENS) and a superb, haunting soundtrack is by acclaimed Japanese composer Kenji Kawai (THE RING, GHOST IN THE SHELL), TRAPPED ASHES is a dark and surreal love letter to classic genre filmmakers like Mario Bava, to the phantoms (literal and figurative) of the film industry, and to the art of telling scary stories. Newly restored in 2K for its first-ever U.S. Blu-ray release!

THE UNKNOWN MAN OF SHANDIGOR is a marvelous and surreal hall of mirrors, part-DR. STRANGELOVE, part-ALPHAVILLE, with sly nods to British TV shows like “THE AVENGERS” and “DOCTOR WHO.” The film stars a Who’s Who of great Sixties European character actors starting with the unforgettable Daniel Emilfork (THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN, THE DEVIL’S NIGHTMARE) as crazed scientist Herbert Von Krantz, who’s invented a device to sterilize all nuclear weapons called “The Annulator.”
A mad herd of rival spies are desperate to get their hands on the device, including legendary French singer Serge Gainsbourg as the leader of a sect of bald, turtleneck-wearing assassins, and Jess Franco veteran Howard Vernon (THE AWFUL DR. ORLOF). Gainsbourg’s deranged jazz-lounge song, “Bye Bye Mr. Spy” – performed by him on funeral parlor organ, no less – is arguably the film’s high point.

The astonishing debut feature from 23-year old writer/director Achal Mishra. THE VILLAGE HOUSE (Gamak Ghar) is a lovely, luminous and gentle portrait of a large extended Indian family over several decades as they gather at the matriarch’s rural home, following the inevitable rhythms of change, children moving away to the city, and the inexorable decay of traditional village life.
Like Bergman’s FANNY AND ALEXANDER, THE VILLAGE HOUSE is suffused with warmth and nostalgia, and a remarkable eye for detail: men cheating amiably at cards, vegetables frying in oil, kids and uncles mesmerized by a Salman Khan movie, the ephemeral poetry of the present as it slips away. “Gradually we came down to visiting only once a year,” one character observes sadly as the house falls slowly into disrepair – and as the building ages with the family, THE VILLAGE HOUSE becomes the most intimate of epics, tracing birth, death and rebirth like a flood leaving its high water mark on the bark of a tree.

Imagine if Troma Films had been hired to make a Sid & Marty Krofft Saturday morning kids’ show, and if you have some idea of the unspeakable strangeness of VISITORS FROM THE ARKANA GALAXY, a truly gonzo Croatian sci-fi / fantasy about a struggling writer, Robert (Zarko Potocnjak), who dreams up a story of gold-skinned alien androids named Andra, Targo and Ulu from a distant planet. Incredibly, his fictional alien creations become reality, causing chaos in his relationship with his girlfriend Biba (Lucie Zulová) and threatening his small seaside village. The alluring lead robot Andra (Ksenia Prohaska) looks like H.R. Giger re-designed the Maschinenmensch from Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS; watch for the scene where she pours hot coffee and cream out of her fingertips. But for sheer jaw dropping insanity, nothing rivals the Mumu Monster -- created for the film by legendary Czech animator Jan Svankmajer -- a rubber-suited, multi-tentacled creation that destroys a wedding party, ripping off heads and spouting plumes of toxic green smoke while a blind accordion player blithely plays his squeezebox. VISITORS was a rare feature film from animator Dusan Vukotic (1927-1998), best known for his stunning UPA-style cartoon shorts.

The official Iranian entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2023 Academy Awards, and the Winner of the Orizzonti Awards for Best Film and Actor at the Venice Film Festival 2022, director Houman Seyedi’s savage, mysterious thriller/drama WORLD WAR III is one of the darkest, most enigmatic portraits of class inequality, desperation and murder since Lee Chang-dong’s BURNING and Bong Joon-ho’s PARASITE. Mohsen Tanabandeh delivers an unforgettable performance as Shakib, an anonymous day laborer still grieving the deaths of his wife and son who’s given a job guarding the set of a film about the Holocaust. When the lead actor playing (yes) Hitler is struck ill, Shakib is enlisted to wear the costume and mustache – and for the first time in his life, he has a little money, respect and a place to sleep. Unexpectedly, his sex worker “girlfriend” (Mahsa Hejazi) shows up, threatening to upset his tenacious hold on prosperity. What starts out as a dark satire of the Iranian film industry quickly evolves into a near-Hitchcockian thriller of the underclass struggling violently to be heard, to be seen – with an apocalyptic ending that is truly something to behold. Rated 100% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. In Persian with English subtitles.



“Houman Seyedi’s sixth feature starts out as jet-black comedy before darkening still further into tragedy, a journey embodied in an absorbing and extraordinary central performance by Mohsen Tanabandeh as the film’s downtrodden hero. … Times may change, Seyedi is telling us, but the ways in which power is exercised remain the same, and there’s always someone at the bottom of the pyramid who will refuse to be forgotten.” – Jonathan Holland, Screen Daily

Part Kafka, part Agatha Christie and part Monty Python, director Karen Shakhnazarov’s surreal 1988 satire of Communism ZEROGRAD (ZERO CITY) follows an Everyman engineer named Varakin (Leonid Filatov) who arrives in a remote city where nothing quite makes sense, but everyone acts as if it does.
The more complex and absurdist the mystery becomes, the more poignant and plaintive Varakin’s predicament – “I have to get back to Moscow,” he pleads to no avail. Along the way we’re treated to a bizarre and wonderful sideshow of non sequiturs out of a Wes Anderson film, including an underground museum filled with a thousand years of real and imagined Russian history (“Here’s the pistol with which Urusov shot the False Dimitry II.”) Frozen in time, frozen far beneath the surface, the waxwork figures are strangely beautiful and forlorn, like Shakhnazarov’s marvelous and enigmatic satire of Soviet bureaucracy. With music by the great Eduard Artemyev (SOLARIS, STALKER). (In Russian with English subtitles.)