In the 1990s, an enigmatic dry-cleaner and his 55,000 rental video collection were the cornerstone of film-education for every New York cinephile. In 2008, his store and its treasured tapes disappeared. With the ghosts of cinema past leading his way, cinephile and filmmaker David Redmon sets off on a seemingly quixotic quest to track down what happened to the legendary collection and to free it from purgatory. This mashup of cine-essay, investigative nonfiction, experimental cinema, and even heist movies, forms an ode to the love of cinema and the enduring power its stories hold.

Presented by fellow quixotic video-store revivalist Eden Chubb of Future Shock Video!

A feverish collision of avant-garde aesthetics and grind-house shocks (not to mention a direct influence on Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange), Funeral Parade of Roses takes us on an electrifying, unapologetic journey into the nether-regions of the ‘60s Japanese gay subculture. Nothing is taboo: neither the incorporation of visual flourishes straight from the worlds of painting, comic-books, and animation; nor the unflinching depiction of nudity, sex, drug-use, and public-toilets. With its mixture of purely narrative sequences and documentary footage, Funeral Parade of Roses tests, and even eradicates, the boundaries between fiction and reality, desire and experience, zig-zagging between pathos and hilarity to create a cinematic howl in the face of social, moral, and artistic convention.

Carny is a character piece set in the world of the traveling carnival, in which the character in question is essentially the carnival itself. Eschewing the sensationalist tropes associated with circus films, Robert Kalyor (a documentarian who had previously made roller-derby doc Derby) is more interested in the human experience, following a group of employees/friends going through their daily motions — luring the locals in to see strippers, coning them on the midway, setting up freak shows, greasing palms and antagonizing each other. It’s an under-seen little gem of a film that anyone who’s ever dreamed of running away to join the circus should experience — to feel what it’s really like.

Presented OUTDOORS at the Broadside featuring carny shenanigans from local legend and carnival kid Booke Trout Paulus (LSD Clownsystem, Solid Gold)!

A flamboyantly violent and erotic tale of love on the run, Wild At Heart is one of those films that scoops you up and plants you directly in its own magical, twisted little world as soon as it starts and drops you back on boring old planet earth at the end feeling like you’ve just woken from a dream. Possibly the wildest and most accessible work from the universe of David Lynch, the movie is lurid melodrama, soap opera, exploitation, put-on and self-satire featuring three of the most outrageous performances ever put to film from Nic Cage, Laura Dern, and Williem Dafoe.

A wild ride into the rise of Lil Wayne, soaked in sizzurp and blazing with bud, but digging deeper into his addictive and downright inhuman work ethic, The Carter tracks an explosion of creativity that sees the recording of over 1000 songs in the year 2008 alone. The man does not stop…ever, raising a daughter and constantly creating while proclaiming “Who gives a fuck what I’m drinking or what I do or what’s in my cup? It’s in MY cup!” Come lift one to a New Orleans icon and one of the greatest rappers who’ve ever lived.

Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn battle Mother Nature, the bitch who invented aging, in this stylishly imaginative extravaganza from the man who brought Back to the Future and Who Framed Rodger Rabbit? Insistently grotesque, relentlessly misanthropic, and spectacularly tasteless, Death Becomes Her takes a satirical look at how far people go in their craze to remain young and beautiful. Outdoors at the Broadside with an after-party by Pleasure Savior!

A power-crazed sixteenth-century explorer leads a troupe of conquistadors on a doomed expedition in search of El Dorado, the fabled ‘City of Gold’ in this visceral, ambitious exploration of megalomania and savage beauty. Shot entirely on location in the wild Amazonian jungle near Machu Picchu, Aguirre is the first of Werner Herzog’s brilliant and often turbulent collaborations with Klaus Kinski. As famous for its hallucinatory images as for its notorious production, the film stands as one of German cinema’s totemic masterpieces.

Orlando is a bold, unsentimental re-working of Virginia Woolf’s classic novel in which an innocent aristocrat journeys through 400 years of English history first as a man, then as a woman. A dreamy, swoony reverie of shapeshifting sexual identity, the film stars Tilda Swinton as its time-traveling, sex-changing hero in one of her greatest roles. It was a transgressive riposte to the homophobia of early-90s Britain, and remains celebrated as a landmark of queer and feminist cinema to this day.

Travelogue, memoir, and outrageous cinematic spectacle converge in this kaleidoscopic valentine to the Eternal City, composed by one of its most iconic inhabitants. Leisurely one moment and breathless the next, this urban fantasia by Federico Fellini interweaves recollections of the director’s young adulthood, delighting in sex, food, nightlife: the Colosseum encircled by traffic, ancient frescoes unearthed in a subway tunnel, a pigeon-befouled statue of Caesar. With a head-spinning mix of documentary immediacy and extravagant artifice, Roma penetrates the myth and mystique of Italy’s storied capital, a city Fellini called “the most wonderful movie set in the world.”

“All I’m interested in is love. And the lack of it. When it stops.” - John Cassavetes

Possibly the most alive and uncompromising study of human complexity ever created, Woman Under the Influence details the emotional breakdown of a suburban housewife and her family’s struggle to save her from herself. Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk bring unparalleled fire and authenticity to their characters - a married couple deeply in love but unable to express their ardor in terms the other can understand. A landmark American independent film, a bible for directors and actors, this is the favorite movie of (almost) everyone who’s ever seen it.

“I never really had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. ... Does anyone?” Rob Reiner’s magical movie “Stand by Me” is an ode to boyhood, a classic hero’s Journey, and a rite of passage to manhood where four 12-year-olds sneak off on a two day trek to see their first dead person and become heroes in their town. It stands, sweet and strong, ribald, outrageous and funny; full of the ripe banter of young boys—pre-girls, post-cigarettes and full-on to the mysteries of life. And death.

Come out celebrate the lead up to the New Orleans premier of Ross Brother’s new film Gasoline Rainbow!

Murder, homsexuality, nymphomania, and sadism are among the themes of this black comedy focusing on a brother and sister who become involved with a young, sexy, amoral drifter with a mysterious past. This deep-cut of deviant queer cinema hurls at us Cadebury fake fellatio, cruising in a graveyard, a pitchfork in the thigh, blonde dye-jobs clashing with black leg hair, and MORE in the filmic equivalent of a 70s gelatin and cream dinner-dish served at a key-party held in a room with a corpse.

Based on Robin Nishi’s underground manga, Masaaki Yuasa’s Mind Game is a singularly daring first feature that follows a comic book artist on a surrealistic adventure from death and back again, through the belly of a whale, past childhood crushes, and trapped old men. Technically surreal and aesthetically defying, Mind Game blends flat animation, CGI, and digitally-painted live action into a roughly hewn, artistically exaggerated, cult masterpiece that is unlike anything in Japanese anime and global animation had ever seen.

As nervy as it is hilarious, this screwball masterpiece from Ernst Lubitsch stars Jack Benny and, in her final screen appearance, Carole Lombard as husband-and-wife thespians in Nazi-occupied Warsaw who become caught up in a dangerous spy plot. To Be or Not to Be is a Hollywood film of the boldest black humor, which went into production right before the U.S. entered World War II. Lubitsch manages to brilliantly balance political satire, romance, slapstick, and wartime suspense in a comic high-wire act that has never been equaled.

One of the most beloved films of the Czechoslovak New Wave, this digressive, easygoing slice of life takes place over the course of a weekend in a provincial town where a musician returns, along with his glamorous lover, to visit an old friend. Meandering and consistently surprising, Intimate Lighting skirts the demands of plot in favor of subtler shades of mood. The only feature that Ivan Passer (CUTTER’S WAY) directed before decamping to Hollywood along with his friend and collaborator Miloš Forman, it was banned for two decades by state censorship.

A bright, buoyant comedy starring the powerhouse trio of Winona Ryder, Cristina Ricci (at 9 years old!), AND Cher who plays the kind of free-loving free spirit she used to sing about in the 1970s. Her character Mrs. Flax avoids becoming known as the town tramp only because she moves each time her life comes crashing down around her. Part eccentric family comedy and part coming of age romance in which the realistic and the bizarre exist side by side, Mermaid is infused with a humanity and warmth rarely found in Hollywood pictures. A perfect appetizer for your programming team’s MARRIAGE!

A lightning-in-a-bottle document from arguably New Orleans’ GREATEST native filmmaker Penelope Spheeris, The Decline of Western Civilization trilogy is a legendary cinematic interpretation of the punk phenomenon. Spheeris caught something essential about the scene, specifically the degree to which it revolved around music by and for damaged individuals, people practically radiating with their hurt, for whom this music was nothing less than a lifeline. Part II: The Metal Years takes us from Ozzy, to Alice Cooper, to Motorhead, to Megadeth — metalhead party animals beyond irony in their loutishness, and utterly unforgettable in their humanity.

“Is this the c*ck sucker residence? Isn’t this 4215 P*ssy Way? Now, let me check the zip-code: 2-1-2-F*ck You!!” Yes, the king of bad taste is back with his wickedly funny take on the intersection of suburbia and hell, perfect families and serial killers. Serial Mom’s idealized nuclear unit is but a surface of inane normality, quickly pierced by the secret depravities lurking below the surface. With the brilliant Kathleen Turner as his murderous Betty Crocker - John Waters gives us a riff on violence that is as American as apple pie and out to kick the nation smack in its collective groin.

A major work of American independent cinema, Kent Mackenzie’s revelatory fiction-documentary hybrid chronicles a night in the life of a group of twenty-something Native Americans who were relocated or forcibly removed from their reservations in the 1950s to live in the “blighted” Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles. Built around a scripted narrative based on interviews with its subjects-turned-actors, THE EXILES is an at once gritty and poetic depiction of Los Angeles after dark and a haunting, intimate record of life on the margins of mid-twentieth-century America.

A teenage rebel obsessed with Elvis and the Sex Pistols, a trucker father in prison after drunkenly smashing his rig into a school bus, and a junkie waitress mother who takes refuge in the arms of other men form the rough-cut family at the center of this independent classic that slipped through the cracks on its initial release. Originally hired just to act in Out of the Blue, Dennis Hopper took over directing two weeks into production, rewrote the screenplay, and made a raw, unforgettable poem about alienation that features one of the greatest performances of all time by Linda Manz.

Bringing a documentarian’s sense of open-ended inquiry to her first narrative feature, writer-director Alice Diop travels to Saint-Omer, France, to attend the trial of a young Senegalese woman accused of murdering her infant daughter. Interweaving complex themes of mother-daughter bonds, immigrant alienation, and postcolonial trauma into a piercing portrait of two mysteriously connected women, Diop forgoes mere questions of guilt and innocence in order to plumb the unsettling unknowability of the human soul.

On The Silver Globe is not only one of the greatest science and moral fiction movies ever made, it also presents a singular entropic catastrophe. In 1977, when filming was 80% complete, the Polish government ordered the production to be shut down, all the negatives be destroyed, and kicked the mad genius behind this lunatic creation myth (Andrzej Żuławski, Possession) out of Poland for a second time. Miraculously, 10 years later the original film reels were restored to bring us this story of civilization-sewing astronauts layered with fright wigs, face paint, abandoned buildings, primitive gore effects, jerry-rigged space-age technology, and wailing philosophical inquiry. Even out of time, even incomplete, “On The Silver Globe” endures and its beautiful power will never dim.

A young drifter found frozen to death in a ditch opens into a splintered portrait of an enigmatic woman. Agnès Varda pieces her story together through flashbacks told by those who encountered her (played by a largely nonprofessional cast). Although there are many people who can step forward and say they spoke with the young woman, sheltered her, gave her food and drink, shared cigarettes and even sex with her, there is no one to say that they knew her. Without parable, without metaphor, Varda’s sparse, poetic images present a soul-shaking question - although many have shared our time, how many have truly known us?

The weirder, wilder cousin of Walter Hill’s iconic The Warriors, Streets of Fire is a neo-noir rock n’ roll fable that tells the story of a Joan Jett, Susie Quatro-like icon who’s kidnapped on stage by a nefarious biker (young Willem Dafoe) and his gang of goons. They brawl their way through an unforgettable fantastical dystopia that is both the future and past – a dark, rain-slicked city rife with cops, street gangs, rock fans, and soda jerks. This kitschy, explosive action drama is a shot of pure party that will launch you into the Mardi-Gras right!

Pioneering animator Ralph Bakshi uses his grotesquely beautiful and hallucinatory chiaroscuro cartoon stylings to create a work of pure provocation the likes of which has rarely been seen since. Censored and squashed by all sides of the political spectrum upon its release, the film is an incendiary satire of white america and blaxploitation, making use of the grotesque archetypes and caricatures of black people found throughout racist American art, taking them out of their original context and placing them in a modern story about revolution and retribution that viscerally evokes the madhouse that is the history of race in America.

This mind-blowing mix of documentary and reenactment, where actors fluidly share the screen with their subjects, opens an unprecedented window into the bonds of girlhood in a family growing up in Tunisia. Their coming of age becomes a soul-shaking experience when two of their sisters disappear in 2015 to join ISIS in Libya. In a series of conversations and enactments that unveil the humor, sexuality, and bravery of young women’s lives in the modern Middle East, they dissect the histories that have built them and bring to the forefront the subconscious yearning for all women to experience power.

WW is back for Season 3 with maybe the most iconic film EVER shot in New Orleans? If it’s not, it’s up there. This neo-Beat noir comedy is part nightmare, part fairy tale, all dripping with hot Louisiana sweat and Jim Jarmush’s singular brand of cool. The larger than life cast of Tom Waits, John Lurie, and Roberto Begnini portrays a hapless band of loners and misfits making their way from OPP into the deep swamps on a hilarious, wondrous, unforgettable adventure.