The Winter
A young man with a top hat and a typewriter, Niko is a Greek expatriate writer floundering in London who returns to his father’s house, a place of evil for the villagers of his birthplace. One of the most cinematically compelling recent films in any genre, this enigmatic horror story by director Konstantinos Koutsoliotas depicts the porous boundary in the human imagination between fantasy and reality, past and present, the spiritual and the material.
How to Change the World
The environmental movement was new when Robert Hunter left art school, hired a boat called Greenpeace and sailed with friends to a U.S. atomic test in the Aleutians, turning it into a media spectacle. Next, the Canadians interfered with a Soviet whaling fleet, capturing the bloody carnage on camera. How to Change the World is a bracing documentary on the founding of Greenpeace and their carefully calibrated campaign against the despoilers of the Earth.
Sembene!
Ousmane Sembene was a Senegalese dockworker in Marseilles when the idea of filmmaking came to him. His homeland was still a French colony and the images of black people circulating in the West were largely the work of whites. Called “the father of African cinema,” Sembene’s Black Girl (1966) became an international art house hit. A documentary by Jason Silverman and Samba Gadjigo, Sembene! tells his story through interviews, archival footage and snippets from his films.
Murders in the Rue Morgue / The Dunwich Horror
The Miskatonic University coed overcomes her suspicion and follows a handsome stranger with hypnotic eyes to his crumbling ancestral home. The Dunwich Horror (1970) updated H.P. Lovecraft’s story with two things the reclusive author seldom spoke of—the generation gap and sex. Produced by Roger Corman, it features acid trip depictions of Lovecraft’s extra-dimensional beings and great Hollywood character actors Ed Begley and Sam Jaffe. Packaged on Blu-ray with a 1971 version of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic.
