Janus Films.
1) Grey Gardens
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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.
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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...
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Filmmaker Les Blank considered this free-form feature documentary about singer-songwriter Leon Russell, filmed between 1972 and 1974 while Blank was living at the Russell/Shelter records recording studio compound on Grand Lake of the Cherokees in NE Oklahoma, but unreleased due to creative differences and music clearance problems, to be one of his greatest accomplishments. Includes scenes of Russell and his band and others performing, both in concert...
4) The innocent
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Part crime thriller, part romantic comedy, Louis Garrel's The Innocent shows the dangerous and outlandish lengths two men go to for the women they love. Garrel stars as Abel, an aquarium educator whose mother, Sylvie, marries one of her drama pupils in the local penitentiary, Michel. Once on parole, Michel attempts to start a legitimate life but soon reverts to his old ways, eventually roping Abel into one of his schemes. Complicating matters is Clm̌ence,...
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In the hands of the renowned experimental theater director Peter Brook, William Golding's legendary novel on the primitivism lurking beneath civilization becomes a film as raw and ragged as the lost boys at its center. Taking an innovative documentary-like approach, Brook shot Lord of The Flies with an off-the-cuff naturalism, seeming to record a spontaneous eruption of its characters' IDs. The result is a rattling masterpiece, as provocative as its...
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An offshoot of a Japanese television series of the same name, "Three outlaw samurai" is a classic in its own right. A wandering, seen-it-all ronin becomes entangled in the dangerous business of two other samurai hired to execute a band of peasants who have kidnapped the daughter of a corrupt magistrate. With remarkable storytelling economy and thrilling action scenes, it's an expertly mounted tale of revenge and loyalty.
10) Odd man out
Description
Taking place largely over the course of one tense night, Carol Reed's psychological noir, set in an unnamed Belfast, stars James Mason as Johnny McQueen, a revolutionary ex-con leading a robbery that goes horribly wrong. Injured and hunted by the police, he seeks refuge throughout the city, while the woman he loves (Kathleen Ryan) searches for him among the shadows.
11) Vampyr
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"With Vampyr, Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyser's brilliance of achieving mesmerizing atmosphere and austere, profoundly unsettling imagery was for once applied to the horror genre. Yet the result--concerning an occult student assailed by various supernatural haunts and local evildoers in a village outside Paris--is nearly unclassifiable, a host of stunning camera and editing tricks and densely layered sounds creating a mood of dreamlike terror....