Arbelos Films (Firm)
Description
QUEEN OF DIAMONDS follows the alienated life of Firdaus (Tinka Menkes), a Blackjack dealer in a Las Vegas landscape juxtaposed between glittering casino lights and the deteriorating desert oasis. Negotiating a missing husband and neighboring domestic violence, Firdaus’ world unfolds as a fragmented but hypnotic interplay between repetition and repressed anger. Shot with a beautiful compositional rigor echoing Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman,...
Description
A visually sumptuous adaptation of Sándor Petőfi’s famed 1845 poem, and the first-ever feature length animated film produced in Hungary, János Vitéz recounts the exploits of strapping young solider JOHNNY CORNCOB and his mythic quest to be reunited with Iluska, the great love of his life. Directed by legendary Hungarian animator Marcell Jankovics’ (Son of the White Mare, Sisyphus, The Struggle), János Vitéz’s is the product of 22 months...
Description
Shot on location in Israel and North Africa, THE GREAT SADNESS OF ZOHARA traces the solitary, mystical journey of a Jewish girl (Tinka Menkes), who leaves Jerusalem for Arab lands. The film was created entirely by director Nina Menkes and her sister Tinka, on a budget of under {dollar}7,000 and won awards at the San Francisco and Houston International Film Festivals.
Description
Lady Elisabeth Báthory lives a charmed life in a resplendent Romanesque castle. Taking ill one day while traveling through the forest, she’s nursed back to health by a handsome woodsman, and in gratitude gifts him with her own heart. But upon returning home, Lady Báthory’s sunny disposition quickly turns murderous once she discovers the secret to heart-less eternal youth lies in draining the blood of all the young women in her castle.
Description
Shot in the bars and seedy hotels of East LA, this film about the inner life of a sex worker imprisoned for killing her pimp won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association award for “Best Independent/Experimental Film of the Year”, and was featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial as well as in over 40 other film festivals worldwide. Tinka Menkes brilliantly portrays the emotionally frozen protagonist on a circular inner journey,...
Description
Nina Menkes turns the arrest of a young US Marine – recently returned from the Gulf War and found digging a grave for his murdered wife in the middle of the Mojave desert – into a harrowing hallucinatory and mesmerizing look at the desolation of violence. Shot in North Africa and 29 Palms, California THE BLOODY CHILD chillingly illustrates how people lose all human, moral and ethical limits under punishing circumstances of civil war. New restoration...
8) Metalhead
Description
An intense drama of loss, faith, redemption, Megadeth and Judas Priest. METALHEAD begins with a farming accident in the 1980’s that sends a young girl, Hera, and her parents into a tail-spin of grief over the death of her heavy metal music-obsessed older brother. A decade later and Hera has become a surly headbanger and DIY musician. Seemingly trapped in a haunted landscape of slaughterhouses and barren winter fields, making all the wrong choices...
9) Dissolution
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Loosely inspired by Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, DISSOLUTION combines an almost surreal fairy-tale energy with brutal black and white realism to explore the condition of violence which permeate contemporary Israeli society. Shot in Yafo (the predominantly Arab area of Tel Aviv), the movie follows the moral collapse and first glimmer of redemption, of a young, morose Israeli Jew, played brilliantly by non-actor Didi Fire.
Description
Dissatisfied with single life and eyeing marriage, an unnamed fortysomething bachelorette decides to rekindle a relationship with her old childhood friend. But when he arrives for an elaborately prepared dinner rendezvous, her suitor reveals himself to be a boorish, arrogant glutton. Undeterred, she pushes herself to increasingly absurd and surreal ends in romancing this nightmare date… who may just be the devil himself. New 4K restoration.
Description
Director Toshio Matsumoto’s shattering, kaleidoscopic masterpiece is one of the most subversive and intoxicating films of the late 1960s: a headlong dive into a dazzling, unseen Tokyo night-world of drag queen bars and fabulous divas, fueled by booze, drugs, fuzz guitars, performance art and black mascara. No less than Stanley Kubrick cited the film as a direct influence on his own dystopian classic *A Clockwork Orange*. An unknown club dancer at...
12) Sátántangó
Description
One of the greatest achievements in recent art house cinema and a seminal work of “slow cinema,” SÁTÁNTANGÓ (SATAN'S TANGO) , based on the book by László Krasznahorkai, follows members of a small, defunct agricultural collective living in a post-apocalyptic landscape after the fall of Communism who, on the heels of a large financial windfall, set out to leave their village. As a few of the villagers secretly conspire to take off with all...
13) Private Property
Description
Two homicidal Southern California drifters (played to creepy perfection by Warren Oates and Corey Allen) wander off the beach and into the seemingly-perfect Beverly Hills home of unhappy housewife Kate Manx, in this long-lost film noir gem written & directed by *The Outer Limits* creator Leslie Stevens. Shot through with shimmering sexual tension and lensed in stunning B&W by master cameraman Ted McCord (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), PRIVATE...
Description
One of the great psychedelic masterpieces of world animation, SON OF THE WHITE MARE is a swirling, color-mad maelstrom of mythic monsters and Scythian heroes, part-Nibelungenlied, part-Yellow Submarine, lit by jagged bolts of lightning and drenched in rivers of blue, red, gold and green. A massive cosmic oak stands at the gates of the Underworld, holding seventy-seven dragons in its roots; to combat these monsters, a dazzling white mare goddess gives...
15) 2/Duo
Description
Nobuhiro Suwa’s second feature and breakout film, 2/DUO telescopes in on the seemingly mannered, domestic life of a young couple and finds a quiet storm of high stakes affection and alienation. An under-seen masterstroke of recent Japanese cinema lensed by Masaki Tamura, Suwa and his cast deftly conjure the emotional range and improvised precision of Jacques Rivette and Mike Leigh to inhabit a story that incrementally evokes the most universal sentient...
16) Phantom Love
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A surreal psychodrama about a young woman trapped within a suffocating family, PHANTOM LOVE is a powerful evocation of one woman’s descent into self, set in Koreatown, Los Angeles and Rishikesh, India.
17) Chameleon Street
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The improbable but true story of Michigan con man Douglas Street, the titular “chameleon” who successfully impersonated his way up the socioeconomic ladder by posing as a magazine reporter, an Ivy League student, a respected surgeon, and a corporate lawyer. Elevated by a dexterous performance and daring direction from multi-hyphenate actor-writer-director Wendell B. Harris Jr., the film pins a lens on race, class and performance in American identity,...
Description
An instant critic’s darling upon its release 2006, MUTUAL APPRECIATION is at once an utterly timeless and distinctly mid-aughts portrait of the ebb and flow of twenty-something life in New York City. Richly observed and deeply humanist, the film follows Alan, an aspiring musician, who crash-lands in town following the breakup of his band in Boston, immediately taking up with his old friends Ellie and Lawrence while negotiating the affections of...
Description
Exploding a seemingly simple premise – a nameless “cowboy” courier arrives in pre-Handover Hong Kong to deliver a mysterious briefcase to a mercurial Mob boss whilst becoming entangled with his femme fatale mistress. Independent filmmaking legend Wayne Wang’s LIFE IS CHEAP…BUT TOILET PAPER IS EXPENSIVE barrels through inspired genre deconstruction, guerrilla docu-fiction and fierce political jeremiad, all with a keen sense of humor...
Description
An ambitious and extraordinary blood-and-bullets fueled crime saga that charts seventy years in the lives – and spectacular deaths – of two mafia-like families fighting for control of the coal-mining town of Wasseypur, India. Inspired by the real-life exploits of local gangs and beginning with the bandit-like career of Shahid Khan in the 1940s, the film follows the ruthless rise of his son Sardar and his offspring, the surreally-named Danish,...