Starring: Jane Adams, Lara Flynn Boyle, Cynthia Stevenson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Dylan Baker, Ben Gazzara, Jon Lovitz, Jared Harris
4K restoration
This dark ensemble-comedy is centered on the three Jordan sisters. Joy (Jane Adams) moves through lackluster jobs with no sense of purpose. Now employed teaching adults, she is dating a student, Russian taxi-driver Vlad (Jared Harris). Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle) is an esteemed poet who becomes amused by her perverted neighbor, Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman). And eldest sister Trish (Cynthia Stevenson) is married to Bill (Dylan Baker), a psychiatrist with a very disturbing secret life.
Starring: Gael García Bernal, Fele Martínez, Javier Cámara, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Lluís Homar, Francisco Maestre
When an old friend brings filmmaker Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) a semi-autobiographical script chronicling their adolescence, Enrique is forced to relive his youth spent at a Catholic boarding school. Weaving through past and present, the script follows a transvestite performer (Gael García Bernal) who reconnects with a grade school sweetheart. Spurred on by this chance encounter, the character reflects on her childhood sexual victimization and the trauma of closeting her sexual orientation.
Starring: Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Betsy Baker, Richard DeManincor, Theresa Tilly
Ashley “Ash” Williams (Bruce Campbell), his girlfriend and three pals hike into the woods to a cabin for a fun night away. There they find an old book, the Necronomicon, whose text reawakens the dead when it’s read aloud. The friends inadvertently release a flood of evil and must fight for their lives or become one of the evil dead. Ash watches his friends become possessed, and must make a difficult decision before daybreak to save his own life in this, the first of Sam Raimi’s trilogy.
Starring: Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody, Bobby Carnavale, Evan Williams, Xavier Samuel
This film is rated NC-17 and includes depictions of sexual assault and abuse
Based on the bestselling novel by Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde boldly reimagines the life of one of Hollywood’s most enduring icons, Marilyn Monroe. From her volatile childhood as Norma Jeane, through her rise to stardom and romantic entanglements, Blonde blurs the lines of fact and fiction to explore the widening split between her public and private selves.
Starring: Eusebio Poncela, Antonio Banderas, Carmen Maura, Miguel Molina, Manuela Velasco, Nacho Martinez
When porn director Pablo (Eusebio Poncela) reluctantly breaks up with his boyfriend, Juan (Miguel Molina), he encourages him to stay in touch. Juan moves away to live in a lighthouse and eventually writes his ex, but in the interim Pablo has taken up with a psychotic new lover, Antonio (Antonio Banderas). Antonio intercepts their correspondence and flies into a towering rage, terrifying Pablo, but also inspiring him creatively as he works on a play about his transsexual sister (Carmen Maura).
Starring: Sonney Weil, Bick Balse, Herb Hummel
For a long time, Japanese animation had a bad rep in America: “those freaky violent cartoons with the schoolgirls and the tentacle monsters.” UROTSUKIDŌJI: THE LEGEND OF OVERFIEND is the film that’s largely responsible for this reputation. A video store staple in America, Hideki Takayama’s gruesome adaptation of Toshio Maeda’s erotic horror comic had a brief stint in U.S. theaters rocking a well-earned NC-17 rating.
Grim-faced and grotesque, Urotsukidōji is a hellish Freudian vision of torn bodies, sexual depravity and bitter pessimism. The apocalyptic film picks up just before the prophesied rise of the demon-god The Overfiend, whose re-birth would merge the worlds of men and demons. As time of prophecy draws closer, demons flood into the dimension of men, throwing the Earth into a chaotic storm of sex and violence.
Starring: James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, Rosanna Arquette
Film producer James Ballard (James Spader) has a pretty plush life, but even with his wealth and beautiful wife, things are starting to feel a little mundane. Late one night, Ballard’s life changes in a flash, a terrible, twisted car wreck that only he and another passenger (Holly Hunter) survive. The two strangers meet in recovery, and they obsess over one-another’s gruesome scars and the white hot memory of hard impact, twisted metal and supple flesh. They aren’t alone, either. As the two start an affair, they fall in with a cult of other crash survivors who are hellbent on recapturing the intense, sexual fusion of flesh with steel.
Starring: Elizabeth Berkley, Gina Gershon, Kyle MacLachlan
To make an additional $10 donation to Black Trans Liberation Kitchen, select the “Event + Donation” ticket on the checkout screen.
What lengths will a drifter-turned-stripper-turned-showgirl go to achieve her dreams of Vegas stardom?
To know this film is to love this film. What is it that can be said about Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls except that it is probably one of the most memorable films to come out of the 1990s. Elizabeth Berkley (from Saved by the Bell fame) plays Nomi, a young dancer who moved to Las Vegas to make it big. She gets her chance and trips, claws, and sleeps her way to the top only to discover that there’s a heart underneath that stripper facade. Gina Gershon is magical as the “aging” and manipulative Cristol Conner while Kyle MacLachlan moves from Lynch-weird to Verhoeven-weird status. You know what I mean.
Versace.
Starring: Axel Jodorowsky, Blanca Guerra, Guy Stockwell, Thelma Tixou, Sabrina Dennison, Adan Jodorowsky
Santa Sangre is a Mexican-set avante-garde thriller whose psychedelic cinematic exploration into the twisted lives of a circus family vividly shows the horrifyingly weird consequences to their violent actions. The story unfolds as follows: while performing her high vantage circus act, the mother sees that her husband is fooling around with the tattooed lady. So, she throws acid on his privates. He cuts off her arms and kills himself. Their young son Fenix enters the insane asylum. Years later, all grown up and somewhat sane, Fenix rejoins his mother on a murderous revenge spree by providing her the arms she needs.
