Arthouse Watchlist

After causing an accident that left his daughter Christiane severely disfigured, the brilliant surgeon Dr. Génessier works tirelessly to give the girl a new face. He does so, however, by kidnapping young women and attempting face transplants. He has been woefully unsuccessful to date. The doctor's world begins to collapse around him when his daughter realizes just what he has been doing.

A young man has an affair with an older woman. He is very jealous of her husband and decides that they should kill him. One night, after the husband had plenty of sake to drink and was in bed, they strangle him and dump his body down a well. To avert any suspicions, she pretends her husband has gone off to Tokyo to work. For three years the wife and her lover secretly see each other. Finally, suspicions become very strong and people begin to gossip. To make matters worse, her husband's ghost begins to haunt her and the law arrives to investigate her husband's disappearance.

A documentary fantasy. Penniless miners talk in passing about labor unions. A miner and his young son go to a village in Kyushu where the miner has been told he'll find work, but it's a ghost town, save for one woman. The miner leaves and is followed by a man in a white suit and white gloves. A murder takes place: faked footprints, bribery and intrigue, investigations, a frame-up, and a ghost who wants to know why meet in a story of realism and the surreal. A child mutely witnesses all. Does the truth count for anything in this world or in the next? Can everything be manipulated?

In first-century Rome, two student friends, Encolpio and Ascilto, argue about ownership of the boy Gitone, divide their belongings, and split up. and split up. Allowed to choose who he goes with, the boy chooses Ascilto. Only a sudden earthquake saves Encolpio from suicide, and from there he has a series of adventures; eventually he reunites with Ascilto and they help a man kidnap a hermaphrodite demi-god from a temple. The god dies, and as punishment Encolpio becomes impotent and they search for a cure. The film is loosely based on the book Satyricon by Gaius Petronius Arbiter, the "Arbiter of Elegance" in the court of Nero. The book has only survived in fragments, and the film reflects this by being very fragmentary itself, even stopping in mid-sentence.

Yukio is living a charmed life: he is a respected young doctor with a successful practice and a beautiful wife. His only problem is that his wife is suffering from amnesia, and her past is unknown. Things begin to fall apart, however, when both his parents die suddenly, killed by a mysterious stranger with Yukio's face. Only when Yukio confronts this stranger will the mystery of his identity, and his wife's past, be revealed.

Immigrants Luigi and Lafayette work for Andreas Flaxman at his wax museum in Lower Manhattan. Luigi, an asthmatic middle-aged romantic, works as an artist/sculptor while the Lafayette functions as a jack-of-all trades for Flaxman, who is obsessed with Ancient Rome, a preoccupation that most of his exhibits reflect. Lafayette lives in a rat-infested basement some blocks away and carries a whistle with to scare the rodents, which seem to be endemic to the area. He also works as a stagehand for a feminist theater group in their Off-off Broadway theater where he suffers their sexist abuses including being forced to wear a leotard. Angelica, one of the beautiful actresses in the troupe is attracted to him, and they begin a relationship. At the same time Luigi comes across the 50 foot model of King Kong in a Hudson River landfill, apparently discarded after the 1976 movie version of "King Kong." There he finds an orphaned baby chimpanzee which he takes to be the giant simian's son. Allergic to animals, he gives it to Lafayette to adopt. Complications arise when Flaxman advises him to get rid of the monkey and Angelica becomes pregnant.

Isabella, a young model is murdered by a mysterious masked figure at a boarding house run by Max Morlan and his lover Countess Christina Como. When Isabella's boyfriend is suspected of the killing, her diary, which apparently has some incriminating evidence linking her to the killer, disappears, the masked killer begins killing off all the models in and around the house to find the diary.

A surreal period film following an university professor and his eerie nomad friend as they go through loose romantic triangles and face death in peculiar ways.

A psychic who can read minds picks up the thoughts of a murderer in the audience and soon becomes a victim. An English pianist gets involved in solving the murders, but finds many of his avenues of inquiry cut off by new murders, and he begins to wonder how the murderer can track his movements so closely.

A graduate-school student has a friend who is pure evil. His friend and he are out driving one night when they hit a drunkard and the friend leaves the accident victim to die. The student's life then goes downhill from there.

Three directors each adapt a Poe short story to the screen: "Toby Dammit" features a disheveled, drugged and drunk English movie star who nods acceptance in the Italian press and his producers fawn over him. "Metzengerstein" features a medieval countess who has a love-hate relationship with a black stallion - who, it turns out, is really her dead lover. "William Wilson" tells the story of a sadistic Austrian student with an exact double whom he later kills.

A young boys' coming of age tale set in a strange, carnivalesque village becomes the recreation of a memory that the director has twenty years later.

A woman and her daughter-in-law are raped and murdered by samurais during the time of civil war. Afterwards, a series of samurai returning from the war through that area are found mysteriously dead with their throats torn out. The governor calls in a wild and fierce young hero, to quell what is evidently a ghost. He encounters the two beautiful women, in an eerie, beautiful scene. After spiritual purification, he meets the demon in a thrilling fight.

Young opera singer Betty gets her big chance when the previous star of a production of Verdi's 'Macbeth' is run over by a car. Convinced that the opera is bad luck, she accepts--and becomes the target (in Argento's unmistakable style) of a psychopath--a man who has inhabited her nightmares since her childhood.

A very free adaptation of Marlowe's 'Doctor Faustus', Goethe's 'Faust' and various other treatments of the old legend of the man who sold his soul to the devil. Svankmajer's Faust is a nondescript man who, after being lured by a strange map into a sinister puppet theatre, finds himself immersed in an indescribably weird version of the play, blending live actors, clay model animation and giant puppets.

Under the condition that within six months from the death of the accomplished businessman Philip Broadhurst, his beloved daughter and heiress to his immense fortune Lucy gets married to Marquis Pierre de l'Esperance's son Mathurin, innocent fair Lucy heads with her aunt to the crumbling estate of her soon-to-be husband. But the once noble estate is nestled deep in the French dense woods, where centuries ago, a wild and ravenous supernatural beast roamed the very forests driven by a raw and unquenchable lust for virginal unprotected girls. Before long, young Lucy completely unaware of the menacing legend and the strange rumours that cloud the family's name will begin experiencing appalling, yet sensually charged visions of an unprecedented vividness. Is there a bit of truth in the legend of the Beast of Gévaudan?

With Argento's trademark visual style, linked with one of his more coherent plots, Tenebrae follows a writer who arrives to Rome only to find somebody is using his novels as the inspiration (and, occasionally, the means) of committing murder. As the death toll mounts the police are ever baffled, and the writer becomes more closely linked to the case than is comfortable.

A film that defies conventional logic and storytelling, fueled by its dark nightmarish atmosphere and compellingly disturbing visuals. Henry Spencer is a hapless factory worker on his vacation when he finds out he's the father of a hideously deformed baby. Now living with his unhappy, malcontent girlfriend, the child cries day and night, driving Henry and his girlfriend to near insanity.