Steve Dollar

Keyframe digs into six essential highlights from Fandor’s 29-film package of festival favorites, drawn largely from this side of the millennium, including LIFE AND NOTHING MORE, RARE BEASTS and A FEAST OF MAN.

Tsukamoto’s RAGING BULL more or less, TOKYO FIST’s often surreal and disorienting saga brings a fraught romantic triangle to the boxing ring, where passions, regrets and revenge are played out as ferocious bloodsport. The lyric “Love will tear us apart, again” has never rung truer…

On the short list of movies made about movies that were never made, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno sits near the top. It’s a fascinating descent into the perilous rabbit hole of artistic madness, an object lesson in the dangers of an auteur gone wild. It’s not unique in this regard…

Not exactly the Four Musketeers, this goofy bunch reveals a surplus of issues, whether it’s the girlfriends they want to get back together with, a need to pull annoying pranks, or completely empty pockets. For the longest time, I simply marveled at the lip garnish flaunted by Mssrs. Crombey and Saint-Macary, and I wasn’t alone. The film, as one Letterboxd user enthused: “Beautifully captures what it was like to have a mustache in the 1970s.”

Bobbing up to the surface like the sea-weathered curio its name describes, Paul Taylor’s debut feature is overdue for rediscovery. The nearly silent drama enjoyed an impressive launch at the 2016 Slamdance Film Festival, where its oddly seductive and discomfiting fairy tale took the Grand Jury Prize for Narrative Feature.

Having a hard time keeping your cool this summer? The world is on fire, the air conditioner is sputtering, and the misery index is off the charts. Take heart, Fandor is here to show you how much worse it could be in their “Cruel Summer” 28-movie collection.

A besotted dream of a very clean tramp, THE LEGEND OF THE HOLY DRINKER is also a throwback to a particular kind of half-logy, umber-infused, myth-laden European arthouse cinema layered thick with obscure portents and kept aloft with lyrical fantasy interludes. It’s so old-fashioned that it’s practically new again.

This month, in honor of this beloved Everyman of American cinema, Fandor revisits one of Alan Arkin’s more rarely noted performances. The 1978 made-for-TV drama THE OTHER SIDE OF HELL doesn’t exactly sound like someplace you’d expect to find the actor. But then why not?

Japanese cult filmmaker Teruo Ishii delights in slathering the frame with blood and guts—including a stomach-churning tattoo flaying—and surprises with moments of visual elegance and surreal poetry.

The 1986 documentary, now streaming on Fandor in their “No Wristband Required” collection, makes an easy introduction to jazz legend Sonny Rollins in his mid-50s, with concert performances in upstate New York and Japan, plus a conversation between filmmaker Robert Mugge, Rollins and his wife Lucille in Central Park.