Other Music was an influential and uncompromising New York City record store that was vital to the city’s early 2000s indie music scene. But when the store is forced to close its doors due to rent increases, the homogenization of urban culture, and the shift from CDs to downloadable and streaming music, a cultural landmark is lost. Through vibrant storytelling, the documentary captures the record store’s vital role in the musical and cultural life of the city, and highlights the artists whose careers it helped launch including Vampire Weekend, Animal Collective, Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, William Basinski, Neutral Milk Hotel, Sharon Van Etten, Yo La Tengo and TV On The Radio.

Starring: Kelly O’Sullivan, Ramona Edith-Williams, Francis Guinan, Jim True-Frost

Flailing thirty-four-year-old Bridget (Kelly O’Sullivan) finally catches a break when she meets a nice guy and lands a much-needed job nannying six-year-old Frances (played by a scene-stealing Ramona Edith-Williams). But an unwanted pregnancy introduces an unexpected complication. To make matters worse, she clashes with the obstinate Frances and struggles to navigate a growing tension between Frances’s moms. Amidst her tempestuous personal relationships, a reluctant friendship with Frances emerges, and Bridget contends with the inevitable joys and shit-shows of becoming a part of someone else’s family.

Starring: Alex Zhang Hungtai, Akiko Masuda

Best Movies of 2019 – The New Yorker
“Transcendently inventive.” – Richard Brody

August at Akiko’s is a mystical film that lives in the seams between dream, reality, and memory with a time-signature all its own. Armed with just his suitcase and a sax, cosmopolitan musician Alex Zhang Hungtai (Dirty Beaches, Last Lizard) returns home to the Big Island of Hawai‘i having been away for nearly a decade. Amidst possessed sax solos and brooding strolls, Alex stumbles upon a Buddhist bed and breakfast run by a woman named Akiko (Akiko Masuda). Hungtai’s wild sax and Akiko’s buddhist bells form the base for a rich soundtrack that wraps around the audience like a sonic web surrounding the unexpected new friendship.

Though Yogi took a very visceral and intuitive approach to the production of August at Akiko’s, the film is deeply informed by his sustained meditations on cinema as cultural memory and the Hollywood erasure of the local Hawaiian voice. However, as an intervention into cinematic experience, August at Akiko’s does not set itself in opposition, but rather sets itself apart. There is a quest for healing love, a quest to make sense of losses and transitions, big and small, manmade and earth-made, that courses through the film. August at Akiko’s offers up not just a visual product but a porous skin through which we may, if we allow ourselves to, get a tingly feeling as we experience the expansive flow of Big Island time.

Starring: Fer Ochoa, Josue Ochoa, Juan Ochoa

In Mexico City, the government operates fewer than 45 emergency ambulances for a population of 9 million. This has spawned an underground industry of for-profit ambulances often run by people with little or no training or certification. An exception in this ethically fraught, cutthroat industry, the Ochoa family struggles to keep their financial needs from jeopardizing the people in their care. When a crackdown by corrupt police pushes the family into greater hardship, they face increasing moral dilemmas even as they continue providing essential emergency medical services.

Midnight Family has been shortlisted for an Academy Award for Best Documentary. Amongst numerous awards the film has received the Special Jury Award for Cinematography, U.S. Documentary at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and Grand Jury Award at the 2019 Sheffield Doc/Fest.

Starring: Kevin Van Hentenryck, Terri Susan Smith, Beverly Bonner, Robert Vogel

In honor of their exhibition Baptized by Beefcake: The Golden Age of Hand-Painted Movie Posters from Ghana, we have partnered with Poster House for a screening of Basket Case, one of the many classic horror films featured in the exhibition.

Prior to the screening, audiences will hear from Poster House Chief Curator, Angelina Lippert, about why horror and action movies from the 1980s and 1990s make up the majority of hand-painted Ghanaian movie posters, and why Basket Case in particular reflects Ghanaian cultural values in the 1990s.

10th anniversary special edition remastered in high definition with brand new epilogue with updates to the story from the past decade.

On November 5, 2001, Dr. Andrew Bagby was murdered in a parking lot in western Pennsylvania; the prime suspect, his ex-girlfriend Dr. Shirley Turner, promptly fled the United States for St. John’s, Canada, where she announced that she was pregnant with Andrew’s child. She named the little boy Zachary.

Filmmaker Kurt Kuenne, Andrew’s oldest friend, began making a film for little Zachary as a way for him to get to know the father he’d never meet. But when Shirley Turner was released on bail in Canada and was given custody of Zachary while awaiting extradition to the U.S., the film’s focus shifted to Zachary’s grandparents, David & Kathleen Bagby, and their desperate efforts to win custody of the boy from the woman they knew had murdered their son.

What happened next, no one ever could have foreseen…

Starring: Miles Robbins, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Sasha Lane, Mary Stuart Masterson, Hannah Marks

Preview screenings before official VOD release on 12/6

Troubled college freshman Luke (Robbins) suffers a violent family trauma and resurrects his childhood imaginary friend Daniel (Schwarzenegger) to help him cope. Charismatic and full of manic energy, Daniel helps Luke to achieve his dreams, before pushing him to the very edge of sanity and into a desperate struggle for control of his mind — and his soul.

Filmed over the course of three years, this portrait of fashion colossus Yves Saint Laurent’s final show was suppressed right after its first and only public screening at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival. The film was blocked by YSL’s business (and on-and-off romantic) partner Pierre Berge, who objected to the couturier’s portrayal as frail and not quite all there, and to his own depiction of being the behind the scenes mastermind. The dynamic between the two is said to have inspired Paul Thomas Anderson’s depiction of Daniel Day-Lewis and Lesley Manville’s characters in Phantom Thread.

Fortunately, Berge relented in 2015 (he died in 2017), and thus Celebration is finally available. Director Olivier Meyrou presents an opulent and immersive behind-the-scenes look at haute couture designer Yves Saint Laurent’s final show and is a priceless addition to our understanding of the man, the myth, la marque, that is Yves Saint Laurent.

Starring: Marika Engelhardt, Grace Smith, Ireon Roach, Kayla Carter, Tim Hopper

Knives and Skin follows the investigation of a young girl’s disappearance in a stylized version of a rural Midwest town that hovers just above reality, led by an inexperienced local sheriff. Unusual coping techniques develop among the traumatized small-town residents with each new secret revealed. The ripple of fear and suspicion destroys some relationships and strengthens others. The backdrop of trauma colors quintessential rituals—classrooms, dances, courtship, football games—in which the teenagers experience an accelerated loss of innocence while their parents are forced to confront adulthood failures. This mystical teen noir presents coming of age as a lifelong process and examines the profound impact of grief.

Starring: Matthias Freihof, Dagmar Manzel, Dirk Kummer

As a boy, Philipp was strongly attracted to his best friend, but he put that behind him in order to live within the “norm.” He meets a shy girl who falls for him, and soon the couple is sharing an apartment. But Philipp cannot deny his passionate desire for a young man. After years of repressing his sexuality, he finally accepts himself for who he truly is.

Hailed as the first and only feature film about gay life ever produced in communist East Germany, Coming Out premiered on the night the Berlin Wall opened, November 9, 1989.