Michael Almereyda (Tesla) Presents...
A selection curated by award-winning American filmmaker Michael Almereyda (Tesla, Hamlet).
"On a different day, I might cavalierly draw up a list naming only films made by Derek Jarman, Jonas Mekas, and Ken Jacobs, three venerable risk-takers who happen to be well-represented on the Filmatique site. The full collection is, after all, an embarrassment of riches—which is to say: I am embarrassed to admit to having seen so few of the titles comprising the complete wide-ranging sprawl. The following list, then, is a semi-random inventory of movies I did manage to catch sight of over the past few years, films that have had a particular impact on me. Many, perhaps two-thirds of them, are touchstones: enthralling, undeniable masterpieces. The others are merely remarkable: captivating, challenging, and/or lots of fun."
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Mephisto
István Szabó • Hungary • 1981 • The Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film.
Germany, the early 1930s. The Reich exerts increasing power, and Hendrik Höfgen faces a choice: to leave, or to stay? The passionate but struggling stage actor abandons his political views, reaping the rewar...
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Liverpool
Lisandro Alonso • 2008 • Argentina • Follows a merchant sailor en route to his hometown.
Farrel has been at sea for years. Steeped in the quotidian routines of life on a merchant ship, one day Farrel requests to disembark. His goal is to visit his ailing mother in Ushuaia. Equipped solely with a...
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Long Day's Journey Into Night
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Bi Gan • China, France • 2018 • A noirish stunner and new landmark in world cinema.
Luo Hongwu left Kaili twenty years ago. Now he has returned—his father is dead. Back in his hometown, memories rush to the surface, including of an enigmatic woman with whom Luo once pursued a stor...
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Silent Light
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Carlos Reygadas • 2007 • Mexico • Filmed with nonprofessional actors among a community of Mennonites.
Johan lives with Esther, his wife, and their seven children in rural Chihuahua state, among a community of Mennonites. For the past two years Johan has engaged in a passionate af...
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The Five Obstructions
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Lars von Trier • 2003 • Denmark-Switzerland-Belgium-France • Lars von Trier challenges his mentor.
Documents the re-making of Jørgen Leth's classic short film The Perfect Human through a maddening maze of obstacles imposed by his former student Lars von Trier.
In 1967, prominent ...
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The Garden
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Derek Jarman • United Kingdom • 1990 • A fierce polemic against discrimination.
Half waking dream and half fiery polemic, The Garden was born of director Derek Jarman’s rage over continued anti-gay discrimination and the delayed response to the AIDS crisis—he had been diagnosed HI...
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A Touch of Sin
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Jia Zhangke • China • 2013 • Four ordinary citizens are driven to the brink of violence
A local boss runs a small village in China’s northern Shanxi province. He’s gotten rich selling collective property, and while most of the villagers look the other way, Dahai, a solitary coal...
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A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
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Ana Lily Amirpour • 2014 • USA • A surreal, stylish vampire western set in Bad City, an Iranian wasteland.
Strange things are afoot in Bad City. The Iranian ghost town, home to prostitutes, junkies, pimps, and other sordid souls, is a place that reeks of death and hopelessness, wh...
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Climates
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Nuri Bilge Ceylan • Turkey • 2006 • A crowning achievement by a contemporary master.
Isa and Bahar have been together for a while. Holidaying by the seaside, the weight of their history is felt in their silences, in stolen glances. Isa has been secretly seeing another woman, and B...
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Goodbye to Language
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Jean-Luc Godard • 2014 • France-Switzerland
A beguiling video-essay on the experience of being-in-the-world—refracted through the eyes of several young lovers, and a dog.
A small town on the shores of Lake Geneva. A ferry comes and goes; a young couple sets up a bookstand. A pr...
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It Felt Like Love
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Eliza Hittman • 2013 • USA • Lila decides to lose her virginity during a summer in South Brooklyn.
A gauzy summer in South Brooklyn. Lila, an awkward adolescent girl, passes her time breaking into beach homes and tagging along on dates between her pretty friend Chiara and Chiara'...
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Russian Ark
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Aleksandr Sokurov • 2002 • Russia • A floating, single-take journey through Russian history.
Filmed in one 96-minute, continuous single-take shot—the first work of cinema to ever do so—Russian Ark foregrounds the sustained unfolding of cinematic time and space as a process of cont...
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Synonyms
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Nadav Lapid • France, Israel, Germany • 2019 • The challenges of putting down roots in a new place
Yoav is a disaffected young Israeli who has fled Tel Aviv to start a new life. Now in Paris, Yoav sees becoming French as his only hope for salvation. Step one is to replace his l...
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The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaucescu
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Andrei Ujică • Romania-Germany • 2010 • A glimpse inside the mind of a narcissistic leader.
On Christmas Day, 1989, Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife, Elsa, died by firing squad–the last people to be executed by the state. A brutal dictator, Ceaușescu had presided o...
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The Mountain
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Rick Alverson • USA • 2018 • A lobotomist recruits a friendless photographer on a tour of asylums
Andy is withdrawn. Seemingly friendless, he is scarred by the institutionalization of his mother, finding little affection from his father, a figure-skating instructor. Dr. Wallace...
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The Red and the White
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Miklós Jancsó • Hungary • 1967 • A magnificent formal investigation of war.
Set in Central Russia during the Civil War of 1918, Russia's Red soldiers and the counter-revolutionary Whites engage in murderous entanglements in the hills along the Volga. This epic conflict moves with...
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The Scent of Green Papaya
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Tran Anh Hung • 1993 • Vietnam
A society's slow decline tracks with a woman's romantic blossoming.
In 1950s Saigon, ten-year-old Mui obtains a job working as a servant for an affluent Vietnamese family. Ten years later, the family has fallen on hard times, leading Mui to change ...
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Tony Manero
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Pablo Larraín • 2008 • Chile • Tony is an obsessive John Travolta impersonator in Santiago de Chile.
Raúl Peralta performs at a bar on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile, meticulously recreating scenes from Saturday Night Fever. His dreams of becoming a star appear reasonably att...
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Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son
Ken Jacobs • United States • 1969 • One of Ken Jacobs' great experiments in photography and editing.
Ken Jacobs started experimenting with found footage, expanding a five-minute fragment of Billy Bitzer’s Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son (1905) to feature length. In Jacobs’s words—“Ghosts! Cine-recor...
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Walden
Jonas Mekas • United States • 1969 • An epic and intimate document of 1960s New York.
A 27-year-old Lithuanian émigré sets out to film his life as it unfolds. In six reels, we encounter several chapters—including the 1960s New York arts scene, featuring many of the filmmaker’s friends: Stan Brak...
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Out 1
8 items
Jacques Rivette • France • 1971
The Holy Grail of Modern French Cinema.
Out 1, an immensely involving, addictive blend of film, literature and theater, has rightly been hailed as the Holy Grail of modern French cinema. Jacques Rivette — co-founder of the French New Wave with Jean-Luc Godard, Fr...