Janus Films
1) Modern times
Description
When his boss demands more speed and efficiency, Chaplin goes crazy from his repetitious assembly line job.
Formats
Description
Jean Cocteau's sublime adaptation of Mme. Leprince de Beaumont's fairy-tale masterpiece, in which the pure love of a beautiful girl melts the heart of a feral but gentle beast, is a landmark of motion picture fantasy, with unforgettably romantic performances by Jean Marais and Josette Day. The spectacular visions of enchantment, desire, and death in Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête) have become timeless icons of cinematic wonder.
Description
Take one: Director William Greaves presides over a beleaguered film crew in New York's Central Park, leaving them to try to figure out what kind of movie they're making. A couple enacts a breakup scenario over and over, a documentary crew films a crew filming the crew, locals wander casually into the frame: the project defies easy description. Yet this wildly innovative sixties counterculture landmark remains one of the most tightly focused and insightful...
11) Salesman
Description
"A landmark documentary ... Captures in vivid detail the bygone era of the door-to-door salesman. While laboring to sell a gold-embossed version of the Holy Word, Paul Brennan and his colleagues target the beleaguered masses, then face the demands of quotas and the frustrations of life on the road. Following Brennan on his daily rounds, the Maysles discover a real-life Willy Loman, walking the line from hype to despair"--Promotional materials.
Description
In medieval Sweden a knight returns from war only to find a ravaged homeland. He meets up with a group of traveling players and eventually confronts the embodiment of death with whom he engages in a game of chess for his life. The knight and Death play as the cultural turmoil envelopes the people around them as they try, in different ways, to deal with the upheaval the plague has caused.
14) Hearts and minds
Description
Examines the American involvement in Vietnam, and is a chronicle of the war from a psychological perspective. Includes interviews with General William Westmoreland, former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, Senator William Fulbright, Walt Rostow, and Daniel Ellsberg, as well as American Vietnam veterans and Vietnamese leaders. Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon are shown in rare footage.
15) Grey Gardens
Description
Portrait of the relationship between Edith Bouvier Beale and her grown daughter, Little Edie, once an aspiring actress in New York who left her career to care for her aging mother in their East Hampton home, and never left again. The aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis feed their cats and raccoons and rehash their pasts behind the walls of their decaying mansion, Grey Gardens.
Description
Seventeen-year-old Monika and nineteen-year-old Harry Lund meet in a cafe. They spend a happy summer together, and soon Monika discovers that she is pregnant. They marry, but Monika is bored with taking care of the baby and the responsibilities of married life. She begins an affair with a former lover and their marriage falls apart.
Description
Marianne and Johan always seemed to be the perfect couple. But when Johan suddenly leaves Marianne for another woman, they are forced to confront the disintegration of their marriage. Chronicles ten years of turmoil and love that bind the couple despite their divorce and subsequent marriages. Portrays the brutal pain and uplifting peace that accompany a lifetime of loving.
18) Tunes of glory
Description
Jock Sinclair is a whiskey-drinking, by-the-bootstraps commanding officer of a peacetime Scottish battalion. Sinclair is a lifetime military man. He expects loyalty and respect from his men. But when Basil Barrow, an educated, by-the-book scion from a traditional military family enters the scene as Sinclair's replacement, the two men become locked in a fierce battle for control of the battalion and the hearts and minds of its men.
Description
When she suspects her husband of infidelity, a housewife unleashes an unconscious ripe with erotic fantasies. In this film, Fellini's first feature-length color film, his examination of the sexual psyche unfolds via the surrealistic use of abrupt cut-aways to illustrate the woman' sexual fantasies.
Description
Told through the eyes of Alexander and his sister Fanny, we see the exuberant and colorful Ekdahl household in a Swedish town early in the twentieth century. Their parents, Oscar and Emilie, are the director and the leading lady of the local theatre company. Oscar's mother and brother are its chief patrons. After Oscar's early death, his widow marries the bishop and moves with her children to his austere and forbidding chancery. The children are immediately...