We have announced our Fall 2015 new release schedule for September through the end of the year.

Opens September 11:
Goodnight Mommy
Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz, Austria, 2014, DCP, 100m
German with English subtitles
The dread of parental abandonment is trumped by the terror of menacing spawn in Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s exquisite, cerebral horror-thriller. Lukas and Elias are 9-year-old twins, alone with their fantastical playtime adventure-worlds in a countryside home, until their mother comes home from facial-reconstructive surgery. Or is she in fact their mother? The boys begin to wonder what this stranger—her head entirely bandaged and personality radically changed—has done to their “real” mother. As with most fairy tales, it turns out that children can imagine and endure things that cause more mature minds and bodies to wither from fear. Produced by renowned auteur—and frequent co-writer with Franz—Ulrich Seidl, Goodnight Mommy is a bold step forward for Austrian cinema. Fans of Michael Haneke’s work will find much to appreciate as well. Ultimately, this is a heartbreaking tale of love and loss wrapped in one of the scariest films of the year. A New Directors/New Films 2015 selection. A RADiUS-TWC release.

Opens September 11:
Paul Taylor: Creative Domain
Kate Geis, USA, 2013, DCP, 82m
Paul Taylor is one of the dance world’s most elusive and admired choreographers. For over 50 years, he has given only glimpses into his creative process, but for his 133rd dance, Three Dubious Memories, he opens the door and allows us into his creative process. The dance he is choreographing is a Rashomon-like exploration of memory: three characters entangled in a relationship, each believing only in his own dark recollection of it. The dominant voice in the documentary is Taylor’s, and it is alternately soothing, demanding, and amused. Between the guarded and unguarded moments, the viewer is witness to a mysterious work ethic that has created some of the most iconic modern dances of our time. A Resident Artist Films release.

Chocolat

Chocolat. Photo courtesy of Film Desk.

 

Opens September 18 – One-Week Exclusive – New 35mm Print:
Chocolat
Claire Denis, France/West Germany/Cameroon, 1988, 35mm, 105m
English and French with English subtitles
The great Claire Denis made her debut with this semi-autobiographical feature, based on her childhood in colonial French Africa as the daughter of a civil servant. France (Mireille Perrier) reminisces about her childhood in Cameroon as her father (François Cluzet) comes and goes on call, which leads to the strengthening of her friendship with their devoted house servant, Protée (Isaach de Bankolé), and to the escalating sexual tension between him and her mother, Aimée (Giulia Boschi). As Protée increasingly becomes an object of desire and of scorn, France’s memories become increasingly ambivalent. Prefiguring the concerns of Denis’s later films (Beau Travail, White Material) and establishing the tactile sensuality and elliptical style for which she is known, Chocolat today stands as a modern classic. A Film Desk release.

A Ballerina's Tale

A Ballerina’s Tale. Photo courtesy of Sundance Selects.

 

Opens October 14:
A Ballerina’s Tale
Nelson George, USA, DCP, 2015, 85m
Nelson George’s documentary is a cinema verité–influenced look at the journey of Misty Copeland—the first African-American female principal dancer in the 75-year history of New York’s American Ballet Theatre. From the success of Firebird, her challenging return to the American Ballet Theatre stage following a potential career-ending injury, to her subsequent rise to pop stardom, Copeland overcame great challenges and brought to light the numerous obstacles within the world of classical ballet—in particular, the lack of women of color at major companies and the unhealthy emphasis on professional ballerinas’ body images. George positions Copeland as the “great hope” in a line of black ballerinas who struggled for recognition. The well-structured and deftly shot A Ballerina’s Tale tells the story of how her incredible talent and discipline found opportunity within the insular world of classical dance. A Sundance Selects release.

Opens October 14 – One-Week Exclusive:
Local Color: The Short Films of Dustin Guy Defa
With a body of work comprised mostly of intensely personal, category-defying short films, Dustin Guy Defa has rapidly established himself as one of the most unique and promising voices in American independent cinema today. Defa’s short-form output ranges from visionary reconstructions of found footage and home movies that are as comical as they are mortifying, to low-key dramas rich with atmosphere, sense of place, and unforgettable characters. The works included in this showcase all evidence the satisfying and alluring je ne sais quoi of Defa’s artistry, a mysterious touch that translates the situations he depicts into an intoxicating swirl of sensuously composed images and clever writing.

Family Nightmare
Dustin Guy Defa, USA, 2011, HDCAM, 10m
By turns bleak and funny, but always moving, Defa delves into his family’s home-movie archive in this Bosch-esque group portrait, an act of personal exorcism on VHS.

Declaration of War
Dustin Guy Defa, USA, 2013, digital projection, 7m
Defa takes the piss out of Bush-era foreign policy as our then-President’s declaration of the War on Terror is met by an unrelenting standing ovation.

Lydia Hoffman Lydia Hoffman
Dustin Guy Defa, USA, 2013, HDCAM, 15m
A young woman (Hannah Gross), who has just been dumped by her fed-up boyfriend (Josh Safdie), allows an alluring stranger (Dakota Goldhor) to crash at her place, unwittingly opening a Pandora’s Box of insecurities and paranoia.

Person to Person

Person to Person

 

Person to Person
Dustin Guy Defa, USA, 2014, HDCAM, 18m
The morning after hosting a party, record-store clerk Benny (Bene Coopersmith) finds a stranger (Deragh Campbell) passed out on his floor; upon waking, she refuses to leave. A New Directors/New Films 2014 selection.

Review
Dustin Guy Defa, USA, 2015, digital projection, 4m
A young woman recounts a story to a group of friends who listen on with rapt attention, but the tale sounds very familiar…

theassassin2

 

Opens October 16:
The Assassin
Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan/China/Hong Kong, 2015, DCP, 105m
Cantonese with English subtitles
Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien reinvents the martial-arts genre with his first film in eight years. In 9th-century imperial China, Nie Yinniang, the 10-year-old daughter of a decorated general, is abducted and transformed into an exceptional assassin. Dispatched to kill a provincial governor (Chang Chen) to whom she was once betrothed, Yinniang (Shu Qi, in a near-wordless, brilliantly gestural performance) must choose between the man she loves, or break forever with the sacred way of the assassin. With its caressing camera movements, dream-like sound design, and startling shifts between mythic landscapes and opulent interiors, the film earned Hou the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. An entrancing and sensuous evocation of Tang Dynasty–era imperial intrigue, The Assassin is above all pure cinema: a hallucinatory interplay of color, movement, and light, and a mesmerizing study of bodies in space. An NYFF53 selection. A Well Go USA release.

Opens November 13:
Entertainment
Rick Alverson, USA, 2015, DCP, 110m
Following up his 2013 breakthrough, The Comedy, director Rick Alverson reteams with that film’s star, Tim Heidecker (here serving as co-writer), for a hallucinatory journey to the end of the night. Or is it the end of comedy? Cult anti-comedian Gregg Turkington (better known as Neil Hamburger) stars as a washed-up comic on tour with a teenage mime (Tye Sheridan), working his way across the Mojave Desert to a possible reconciliation with the estranged daughter who never returns his interminable voicemails. Our sort-of hero’s stand-up set is an abrasive assault on audiences, so radically tone-deaf as to be mesmerizing. Alverson uses a slew of surrealist flourishes and poetic non sequiturs to fashion a one-of-a-kind odyssey that is by turns mortifying and beautiful, bewildering and absorbing. John C. Reilly, Michael Cera, Amy Seimetz, Dean Stockwell, and Heidecker are among the performers who so memorably populate the strange world of Entertainment, a film that utterly scrambles our sense of what is funny—and not funny. A New Directors/New Films 2015 selection. A Magnolia Pictures release.

Opens December 4:
Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One
Miguel Gomes, Portugal/France/Germany/Switzerland, 2015, DCP, 125m
Portuguese with English subtitles
An up-to-the minute rethinking of what it means to make a political film today, Miguel Gomes’s shape-shifting paean to the art of storytelling strives for what its opening titles call “a fictional form from facts.” Working for a full year with a team of journalists who sent dispatches from all over the country during Portugal’s recent plunge into austerity, Gomes (Tabu, NYFF50) turns actual events into the stuff of fable, and channels it all through the mellifluous voice of Scheherazade (Crista Alfaiate), the mythic queen of the classic folktale. Volume 1 alone tries on more narrative devices than most filmmakers attempt in a lifetime, mingling documentary material about unemployment and local elections with visions of exploding whales and talking cockerels. It is hard to imagine a more generous or radical approach to these troubled times, one that honors its fantasy life as fully as its hard realities. An NYFF53 selection. A Kino Lorber release.

Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One

Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One. Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber.

 

Opens December 11:
Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One
Miguel Gomes, Portugal/France/Germany/Switzerland, 2015, DCP, 131m
Portuguese with English subtitles

In keeping with its subtitle, the middle section of Miguel Gomes’s monumental yet light-footed magnum opus shifts into a more subdued and melancholic register. But within each of these three tales, framed as the wild imaginings of the Arabian queen Scheherazade and adapted from recent real-life events in Portugal, there are surprises and digressions aplenty. In the first, a deadpan neo-Western of sorts, an escaped murderer becomes a local hero for dodging the authorities. The second deals with the theft of 13 cows, as told through a Brechtian open-air courtroom drama in which the testimonies become increasingly absurd. Finally, a Maltese poodle shuttles between various owners in a tear-jerking collective portrait of a tower block’s morose residents. Attesting to the power of fiction to generate its own reality, the film treats its fantasy dimension as a license for directness, a path to a more meaningful truth. An NYFF53 selection. A Kino Lorber release.

Opens December 18:
Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One
Miguel Gomes, Portugal/France/Germany/Switzerland, 2015, DCP, 125m
Portuguese with English subtitles
Miguel Gomes’s sui generis epic concludes with arguably its most eccentric—and most enthralling—installment. Scheherazade escapes the king for an interlude of freedom in Old Baghdad, envisioned here as a sunny Mediterranean archipelago complete with hippies and break-dancers. After her eventual return to her palatial confines comes the most lovingly protracted of all the stories in Arabian Nights, a documentary chronicle of Lisbon-area bird trappers preparing their prized finches for birdsong competitions. Right to the end, Gomes’s film balances the leisurely art of the tall tale with a sense of deadline urgency—a reminder that for Scheherazade, and perhaps for us all, stories can be a matter of life and death. An NYFF53 selection. A Kino Lorber release.