It’s New Release Tuesday!

ALMA’S RAINBOW (1994)

Alma’s Rainbow is a coming-of-age comedy-drama about three Black women living in Brooklyn. Ayoka Chenzira’s feature film explores the life of teenager Rainbow Gold (Victoria Gabrielle Platt) who is entering womanhood and navigating conversations and experiences around standards of beauty, self-image, and the rights women have over their bodies. Rainbow attends a strict parochial school, studies dance, and is just becoming aware of boys. She lives with her strait-laced mother Alma Gold (Kim Weston-Moran), who runs a beauty parlor in the parlor of their home. When Alma’s free-spirited sister Ruby (Mizan Kirby) arrives from Paris after a 10-year absence, the sisters clash over what constitutes the “proper” direction Rainbow’s life should take. Alma has fooled herself into believing she has no need of male companionship and advises her daughter to follow her example. Ruby encourages both her niece and her sister to embrace life – and love – fully and joyfully. Alma’s Rainbow highlights a multi-layered Black women’s world where the characters live, love, and wrestle with what it means to exert and exercise their agency.  (DVD)

BROKER (2022)

The film follows two brokers who sell orphaned infants, circumventing the bureaucracy of legal adoption, to affluent couples who can’t have children of their own. After an infant’s mother surprises the duo by returning to ensure her child finds a good home, the three embark on a journey to find the right couple, building an unlikely family of their own. (BLU-RAY)

CALENDAR GIRLS (2022)

CRIMSON RIVERS (2001)

Pierre Niemans is a tough city cop assigned to investigate a brutal murder at a college in the Alps, Max Kerkerian a young investigator trying to find out why the grave of a ten-year-old girl was desecrated. As their parallel investigations start, slowly they converge and the duo find themselves with more bodies leading them to a dark secret in Mathieu Kassovitz’s dark, cerebral thriller. (BLU-RAY)

DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993) (CRITERION)

EMPIRE OF LIGHT (2022)

Set in and around a faded old cinema in an English coastal town in the early 1980s, it follows Hilary (Olivia Colman), a cinema manager struggling with her mental health, and Stephen (Micheal Ward), a new employee who longs to escape this provincial town in which he faces daily adversity. Both Hilary and Stephen find a sense of belonging through their unlikely and tender relationship and come to experience the healing power of music, cinema, and community. (BLU-RAY and DVD)

ENNIO (2021) (CODE B)

From Oscar -winning director Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso), ENNIO celebrates the life and legacy of the legendary Italian composer Ennio Morricone, who passed away on 6 July 2020. Through interviews with directors, screenwriters, musicians, songwriters, critics and collaborators, Tornatore’s documentary retraces the life and works of the cinema’s most popular and prolific 20th century composer – who wrote over 500 scores for film & television and sold over 70 million records – from his cinema debut with Sergio Leone, to winning an Academy Award for The Hateful Eight in 2016. (BLU-RAY)

GIOVANNI’S ISLAND (2014)

Brothers Junpei and Kanta live in Shikotan, a tiny fishing island that has been spared from the devastations of World War II. The two children are named after Giovanni and Campanella from their late mother’s favorite book, Night on the Galactic Railroad, which becomes a source of solace in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat. When Soviet forces arrive with their families to settle in the island, Junpei meets Tanya, the daughter of the commander. Despite their language barrier and growing tension, the children soon form an unlikely friendship. (BLU-RAY)

HEAD, THE (1959)

A scientist’s procedure for keeping body parts functioning is turned against him when a demented assistant decapitates him and keeps his head alive in the laboratory. The scientist’s brain is preserved in order to assist in a far more demonic experiment – the attachment of his hunchbacked nurse’s head to the body of a voluptuous stripper… (BLU-RAY)

HUNTER, THE (1980)

Steve McQueen’s last movie shows the dynamic talent of the late, great actor in one of his most memorable roles: the true story of Ralph “Papa” Thorson, a modern day bounty hunter. Thorson’s exploits are detailed as he pursues a number of fugitives who have skipped bail. The chase comes full circle when he becomes the quarry of a vengeful psychopath. McQueen’s multi-dimensional performance as Thorson, a man born in the wrong age, is counterpoint to the explosive action in The Hunter. (BLU-RAY)

IDEAL PLACE TO KILL (1971)

Two free-spirited teenagers, Dick and Ingrid (Ray Lovelock and Ornella Muti), set out to spend the summer together in Italy. To pay their way they sell Scandinavian porn mags and nude pictures of Ingrid. But then they get busted by the cops and are given 24 hours to leave the country.

Instead of leaving they take to the road, where they come up against a thieving biker gang and then are mistaken for a pair of bank robbers. Heading south in a hurry, they run out of gas in the middle of nowhere and take refuge in the house of Barbara Slater (Irene Papas) a seemingly bored middle-aged housewife who appears to be up for some sexual shenanigans. The naïve pair party with Barbara but soon discover that she is hiding a terrible and deadly secret. (BLU-RAY)

INDOCHINE (1992)

Catherine Deneuve stars in this Oscar-winning (Best Foreign Language Film, 1992) tale of passion and revolution in colonial Veitnam. Deneuve stars as Elaine Devries, the seemingly repressed owner of a prosperous rubber plantation in French Indochina. Her steely exterior, however, is only a mask intended to hide her torrid love affairs from upperclass society. But when her adopted Indochinese daughter innocently falls in love with Elaine’s secret lover, the scandalous lover’s triangle threatens to destroy their entire family. A sensual story of unbridled passion set against the violence of the bloody Communist uprising, Indochine is a historically accurate, emotionally wrenching epic of love and war.(BLU-RAY)

INSPECTION, THE (2022)

KNIFE IN THE HEAD (1978)

Bruno Ganz gives a tour-de-force performance as Hoffman, an innocent bystander who survives a gunshot to the head by the police during a raid on a group of revolutionaries. In order to justify the shooting, the police claim he is a dangerous radical who attacked a policeman. The leftist revolutionaries in turn claim him as a hero and victim of police brutality. As Hoffman struggles to recover from the trauma to his brain and memory loss, he must try to piece together what really happened that fateful night. Featuring a stunning first solo score by Irmin Schmidt, co-founder of the legendary krautrock band CAN. (BLU-RAY)

LIFE’S WORK (2020)

What’s it like to dedicate your life to work that won’t be completed in your lifetime? Fifteen years ago, filmmaker David Licata focused on four projects and the people behind them in an effort to answer this universal question.

The subjects include Jill Tarter, Director of the SETI Institute, who has been involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence since the 1970s; David and Jared Milarch, father and son tree farmers and co-founders of the Champion Tree Project, who clone old-growth trees to combat climate change; gospel music archivist Robert Darden, who founded the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project, an organization that is trying preserve at-risk recordings from the black gospel music tradition; and Paolo Soleri, controversial architect behind Arcosanti, a town designed to test his theories about housing an overpopulated planet. We discover what inspired them to begin, what obstacles they face, what drives and sustains them, and how they measure success of an endeavor they will not live to see completed. (DVD)

MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960)

Academy Award winner Yul Brynner stars in the landmark Western that launched the film careers of Steve McQueen (The Great Escape), Charles Bronson (The Dirty Dozen), and James Coburn (Affliction). Tired of being ravaged by an army of marauding bandits, the residents of a small Mexican village seek help from seven American gunfighters. The only problem? It’s seven against 50! (BLU-RAY + 4KULTRAHD)

NOCEBO (2022)

A fashion designer (Eva Green) suffers from a mysterious illness that confounds her doctors and frustrates her husband (Mark Strong) – until help arrives in the form of a Filipino nanny (Chai Fonacier) who uses traditional folk healing to reveal a horrifying truth. (DVD)

OLD WAY (2023)

PRICE WE PAY (2022)

RETALIATORS, THE (2021)

An upstanding pastor uncovers a dark and twisted underworld as he searches for answers surrounding his daughter’s brutal murder. A high-octane original soundtrack and cameos from some of the biggest names in rock music set the tone as this horror-thriller reveals a game of revenge played using a new set of rules. (BLU-RAY)

RING-A-DING RHYTHM (1962)

Richard Lester directs this singular British musical extravaganza. The pop culture explosion reveals a generation gap in a small English town when the mayor (Felix Felton, Up in the Air, 1969) forces a teenage hangout to stop using its TV set and jukebox. A pair of crafty local teens, Helen (Helen Shapiro, Play It Cool) and Craig (Craig Douglas, Murder Can Be Deadly), counterattack by trying to put together a festival that will demonstrate the merits of traditional jazz and rock ‘n’ roll. While trying to enlist disc jockeys for the jazz show, they hear such talents as Del Shannon, The Dukes of Dixieland, Gary (U.S.) Bonds, the inimitable Chubby Checker, Gene Vincent and many others. (BLU-RAY)

SALVATORE: SHOEMAKER OF DREAMS (2020)

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE/SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE II (1987)

The Slumber Party Massacre

When Trish (Michele Michaels) decides to invite her high school girls’ basketball teammates over for a slumber party, she has no idea the night is going to end with an unexpected guest – an escaped mental patient and his portable power drill – crashing the party in the cult classic, The Slumber Party Massacre.

Slumber Party Massacre II

Courtney, the younger sister of the “new girl across the street” in the first film, is all grown up now, but suffers from nightmares about the Big Wet Incident. She and the other members of her female rock group go to a condo for the weekend to play music and have fun with their boyfriends. Courtney’s dreams are of her sister, who is in a mental institution, warning her of having sex, and the dreams begin to spill into real life, threatening Courtney and her friends as they begin experiencing an attrition problem. (BLU-RAY + 4KULTRAHD)