art

In a nostalgic childhood memoir, the octogenarian director,

The story of self-taught Georgian painter Niko Pirosmani.

A thief awakens Valerie, just 13, taking earrings left to her by her mother. By morning, the earrings have been returned, Valerie's first period has begun, and a troupe and a missionary have arrived in her 19th century town. The thief is Orick; he reports to a cloaked constable who may also be the missionary. Attention to sexuality is everywhere: Valerie's grandmother's puritanical nature, the missionary's sermon to the town's virgins, the parish priest's attempt to seduce Valerie, and lusty adults at play. Valerie's nascent sexuality puts her in great danger. Can she navigate the passage from innocence to experience, a route teaming with vampires, a murderer, and an obscure family tree?

Andreiv Rublev charts the life of the great icon painter through a turbulent period of 15th Century Russian history, a period marked by endless fighting between rival Princes and by Tatar invasions.

A few decades after the destruction of the Inca empire, a Spanish expedition leaves the mountains of Peru and goes down the Amazon river in search of gold and wealth. Soon, they come across great difficulties and don Lope de Aguirre, a ruthless man who cares only about riches, becomes their leader. But will his quest lead them to "the golden city", or to certain destruction?

This playful film is at once a documentary of a day in the life of the Soviet Union, a documentary of the filming of said documentary, and a depiction of an audience watching the film. Even the editing of the film is documented. We often see the cameraman who is purportedly making the film, but we rarely, if ever, see any of the footage he seems to be in the act of shooting!

From the distant 16th century, Queen Elisabeth I summons the spirit Ariel with the aid of the court's alchemist, the sage Doctor John Dee, to witness the appalling revelation of a dystopian London drowned in filth and plagued with crime. As a result, the Queen horrified with the vivid vision of a broken-down British Empire, asks to travel beyond the veil of time, some 400 years into the future, to see firsthand, that in this futuristic and horrendous new order, the capital is overrun by a corrupt police and that an autonomous vicious gang of punk guerrilla girls led by the new Monarch of Punk, Bod, has declared a multi-levelled open war. Now that Britain is practically a wasteland, where is her Majesty, the righteous Queen Elisabeth II?

In his final-and most daring-cinematic statement, Jarman the romantic meets Jarman the iconoclast in a lush soundscape pulsing against a purely blue screen. Laying bare his physical and spiritual state in a narration about his life, his struggle with AIDS and his encroaching blindness, BLUE is by turns poignant, amusing, poetic and philosophical.

Through

Wandering minstrel Ashik Kerib falls in love with a rich merchant's daughter, but is spurned by her father and forced to roam the world for a thousand and one nights - but not before he's got the daughter to promise not to marry till his return. It's told in typical Paradjanov style overlaid with Azerbaijani folk songs.

Russia, 1916. Be it by craft or madness, Rasputin exercises power over the indecisive Nicholas, and the religious Czarina worships the Siberian as God. He manipulates the Czar in his relations with the Duma and influences the choice of a new premier. Rasputin assaults a baroness; her husband is jailed for defending her, and she must offer sexual favors to Rasputin to save her husband. The Czar finally orders Rasputin from St. Petersburg, but somehow he enters the palace and, in a disheveled trance, convinces the Czar to make a disastrous change in war strategy. A cadre of nobles take matters into their own hands and arrange a last dinner party for the interloping monk.

A film version of a well-known Georgian folk-tale. A young boy has to be immured into the walls of a fortress in order to stop it from crumbling to pieces.

Tokyo's nasty underside, seen primarily through the eyes of Oscar, a heavy drug user, whose sister Linda is a stripper. Oscar also has flashbacks to his childhood when trauma upends the siblings. Oscar's drug-fed hallucinations alter Tokyo's already-disconcerting nights, and after the police shoot him, he can float above and look down: on his sister's sorrow, on the rooms of a love hotel, and on life at even a molecular level. The spectrum's colors can be beautiful; it's people's colorless lives that can be ugly. And what of afterlife, is there more than a void?

Tarkovsky mixes flash-backs, historical footage and original poetry to illustrate the reminiscences of a dying man about his childhood during World War II, adolescence, and a painful divorce in his family. The story interweaves reflections about Russian history and society

Suffering from acute kidney failure, Uncle Boonmee, who lives in a house on a farm with his sister-in-law Jen and his nephew Tong has chosen to spend his final days surrounded by his loved ones in the countryside. Surprisingly Huay, the ghost of his deceased wife appears to care for him, and his long lost son returns home in a non-human form. Contemplating the reasons for his illness, he treks through the jungle with his family to a mysterious hilltop cave - the birthplace of his first life.

A young man -- starving, nearly catatonic and barely responsive -- is confined in a sanitarium. He is taken on a field trip along with other residents to the city's red-light district. There, he encounters by chance a woman from his past, triggering a series of flashbacks. We see that he was traumatized as a child, when he and his family were circus performers, and when he witnessed a murder/suicide: his father -- an American expatriate living in Mexico under suspicious circumstances -- cuts off the arms of his beloved mother, a possessive wife and religious fanatic who led a heretical church called "Santa Sangre (Holy Blood)," the members of which worshipped a martyred girl whose arms were severed by her father following her rape, and then commit suicide. Back in the present, buttressed by shock of his remembrance, he escapes the sanitarium and, in a series of hallucinations and dream-fulfillments, believes he has rejoined his armless mother. He "becomes her arms" and the "two" undertake a grisly campaign of murder and revenge.

An unseen man regains consciousness, not knowing who or where he is. No one seems to be able to see him, except the mysterious man dressed in black. He eventually learns through their discussions that this man is a 19th century French aristocrat, who he coins the "European". This turn of events is unusual as the unseen man has a knowledge of the present day. The two quickly learn that they are in the Winter Palace of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the European who has a comprehensive knowledge of Russian history to his time. As the two travel through the palace and its grounds, they interact with people from various eras of Russian history, either through events that have happened at the palace or through the viewing of artifacts housed in the museum. Ultimately, the unseen man's desired journey is to move forward, with or without his European companion.

Fando and his partially paralyzed lover Lis search for the mythical city of Tar. Based on Jodorowsky's memories of a play by surrealist