Johnson Family Dinner (2008)

Human Nature

Obsessive scientist Nathan and his lover, the naturalist Lila, discover Puff: a man born and raised in the wild. As Nathan trains the wild man in the civilized ways of the world, Lila fights to preserve the man’s natural state. In the power struggle that ensues, an unusual love triangle emerges.

Alistair1918

A social work grad student’s film project on L.A. homelessness becomes something quite other when she and her friends encounter a man claiming to be from another time and place.

Once Were Warriors

A drama about a Maori family living in Auckland, New Zealand. Lee Tamahori tells the story of Beth Heke’s strong will to keep her family together during times of unemployment and abuse from her violent and alcoholic husband.

Secrets of a Soul

Secrets of a Soul: Margarethe, Creator of bizarre sculptures! Night club dancer? Mad woman? Victim of an occult conspiracy?! Dark menaces steal her soul and organs. Though dead they keep her alive...

Beast!

Plot unavailable

The Day of the Purple Sun: Part I

The cosmos of the incurable Margarethe. Her journey through the mysteries of the Egyptian underworld. Will she be coming forth by day? Film in two parts by Carsten Frank.

Paranoid Park

A teenage skateboarder becomes suspected of being connected with a security guard who suffered a brutal death in a skate park called "Paranoid Park".

Edge of Seventeen

1984, Sandusky, Ohio. A naive 17-year-old navigates heartbreak and self-expression as he explores his sexuality.

City of Hope

This gritty inner-city film follows various people living in a troubled New Jersey setting, most notably Nick Rinaldi, a disillusioned contractor who has been helped along his whole life by his wealthy father. Other characters in this ensemble drama about urban conflict and corruption include Asteroid , an unstable homeless person, and Wynn, an idealistic young politician.

The Rules of Attraction

The incredibly spoiled and overprivileged students of Camden College are a backdrop for an unusual love triangle between a drug dealer, a virgin and a bisexual classmate.

Nowhere

In Los Angeles, a colorful assortment of bohemians try to make sense of their intersecting lives. The moody Dark Smith, his bisexual girlfriend, her lesbian lover and their shy gay friend plan on attending the wildest party of the year. But they'll only make it if they can survive the drug trips, suicides, trysts, mutilations and alien abductions that occur as one surreal day unfolds.

Russian Dolls

Five years after their summer together in Barcelona, Xavier, William, Wendy, Martine and Isabelle reunite.

The Lovers

A shallow, provincial wife finds her relationship with her preoccupied husband strained by romantic notions, leading her further towards Paris and the country wilderness.

Local Color

A successful artist looks back with loving memories on the summer of his defining year, 1974. A talented but troubled 18-year-old aspiring artist befriends a brilliant elderly alcoholic painter who has turned his back on not only art but life. The two form what appears to be at first a tenuous relationship. The kid wants to learn all the secrets the master has locked away inside his head and heart. Time has not been kind to the old master. His life appears pointless to him until the kid rekindles his interest in his work and ultimately gives him the will to live. Together, they give one another a priceless gift. The kid learns to see the world through the master's eyes. And the master learns to see life through the eyes of innocence again. This story is based on a real life experience.

Write to Kill

In this thriller, Jamie Sanford is murdered by a group of counterfeiters when he attempts to expose them in order to secure an early parole. However, when aspiring writer Clark learns of his brothers death, he sets out to exact revenge and bring the guilty to justice while being framed for his brothers murder.

Deconstructing Harry

Writer Harry Block draws inspiration from people he knows, and from events that happened to him, sometimes causing these people to become alienated from him as a result.

Pierrot le Fou

Pierrot escapes his boring society and travels from Paris to the Mediterranean Sea with Marianne, a girl chased by hit-men from Algeria. They lead an unorthodox life, always on the run.

Letters to God

A young boy fighting cancer writes letters to God, touching lives in his neighborhood and inspiring hope among everyone he comes in contact. An unsuspecting substitute postman, with a troubled life of his own, becomes entangled in the boy's journey and his family by reading the letters. They inspire him to seek a better life for himself and his own son he's lost through his alcohol addiction.

Chelsea Walls

This movie tells five stories set in a single day at the famed Chelsea Hotel in New York City, involving an ensemble cast of some 30-35 characters.

Melvin Goes to Dinner

Four thirtysomethings convene for a wine-fueled dinner party that turns increasingly intimate as they discuss everything from religion and ghosts to relationships and sexual fetishes.

The Last Time I Committed Suicide

Neal Cassady is living the beat life during the 1940s, working at The Tire Yard and philandering around town. However, he has visions of a happy life with kids and a white picket fence. When his girlfried, Joan, tries to kill herself he gets scared and runs away. But when Joan reappears will he take the chance at that happiness, or will he turn his back on it?

The Sensei

Lonely gay teenager, McClain, struggles to fit in with his classmates in a small, conservative Colorado town. After he's severely beaten at school, Karen O'Neil, a martial arts Sensei, secretly trains him to defend himself. When the town discovers their secret, a series of catastrophic events unfolds.

Socket

Dr. Bill Matthews is struck by lighting. While recovering at the hospital where he works, he begins an intimate relationship with Dr. Craig Murphy, who invites Bill to join a strange group of lightning survivors.

Schwarz Weiss Bunt

Facing the loss of her youthfulness, Matilda finds herself at a turning point in her life. Refreshing encounters and unexpected longings force her to face rigid self-understandings with new openness. A surprising and empathetic look at the lives of young adults.

The Hanging Garden

William, a once obese and troubled teen, goes back to his family's home after being gone, without word, for ten years and finds it (and his family) haunted with his past. He had moved to the city and become a fit, well-adjusted gay man, but during his visit home, he becomes unhinged as the newly remembered reasons for his miserable adolescence come to life in each of their presents.

The Missing Person

John Rosow drinks to forget. He is a former New York City cop turned Chicago-based private investigator. At the last minute, he is hired by someone he's never met to follow a middle-aged male subject on the soon-departing California Zephyr train to Los Angeles.

The Sex Movie

Four friends spend an evening together after time apart. Differences in sex and sexuality reveal deep-rooted conflicts and long-hidden longings.

The Triumph of Love

A princess is determined to restore her homeland's throne to its rightful heir, a young prince with whom she falls in love.

Bunny and the Bull

A young shut-in takes an imaginary road trip inside his apartment, based on mementos and memories of a European trek from years before.

Red Hook

Ten years after witnessing her older sister's brutal murder, Jenny Traylor leaves her hometown in North Carolina to start her freshman year at the University of New York City. Still traumatized by her sister's death and struggling with crippling agoraphobia, Jenny tries to cope with the overwhelming city and figure out her new life.

In Your Hands

Anna, a young theology graduate, starts work as a prison chaplain. She becomes especially concerned about one inmate, Kate, regarded as difficult and withdrawn, but whom the other inmates credit with mysterious healing powers.

Smash Palace

Al Shaw's life revolves around motor racing and his back country junkyard, the "Smash Palace". His French wife, Jacqui, doesn't appreciate the lack of attention due to Al's obsession with cars. When Al finds her in the arms of another man, he takes his daughter, Georgie and heads for the bush, desperately hoping to hold on to the only family he has left.

Camp

Misfits in their lives back home, a group of young people live it up at musical-theater camp. While the sports counselor is completely ignored, the kids' spend all their time in rehearsal for a grueling schedule that involves a new show every two weeks. Several personal stories come to the fore.

High Hopes

Slice-of-life look at a sweet working-class couple in London, Shirley and Cyril, his mother, who's aging quickly and becoming forgetful, mum's ghastly upper-middle-class neighbors, and Cyril's pretentious sister and philandering husband. Shirley wants a baby, but Cyril, who reads Marx and wants the world to be perfect, is reluctant. Cyril's mum locks herself out and must ask her snooty neighbors for help. Then Cyril's sister Valerie stages a surprise party for mum's 70th birthday, a disaster from start to finish. Shirley holds things together, and she and Cyril may put aside her Dutch cap after all.

Up at the Villa

Superficial people are revealed and drastically changed by circumstance or luck in this a tale of death, seduction, blackmail and theft among British and Americans in Florence in the turbulent days just before World War II.

Simple Men

Two diametrically opposite brothers set off on a journey to reunite with their estranged father but when their motorcycle breaks down while passing through a small town, they become entangled in local life.

The Lower Depths

Inhabitants of a flophouse struggle to survive under the harsh treatment imposed by the landlord, Kostyleva. One resident, young thief Wasska Pepel, ends his affair with the landlord's wife, Vassilissa, and takes up with her sister, Natacha. Pepel also befriends the baron, a former nobleman fallen on hard times, but Pepel's attempts at happiness are complicated when he's accused of murder by a spiteful Vassilissa.

Smile

Introduced to a volunteer opportunity with the Doctor's Gift Program, Katie (Mika Boorem) signs up for a trip to China, where she meets Lin (Yi Ding), a girl with whom she shares a birthday. Lin has a facial deformity that discourages her from ever showing her face, but her friendship with Katie helps her start to see life in a new way.

The Serpent's Kiss

A man sends a young architect to build an extravagant garden to bankrupt the husband of the woman he once loved.

Poison

A trio of interweaved transgressive tales, telling a bizarre stories of suburban patricide and a miraculous flight from justice, a mad sex experiment which unleashes a disfiguring plague, and the obsessive sexual relationship between two prison inmates.

The Last Minute

The clock is ticking towards The Last Minute, but no one knows it. No one except Billy Byrne - young, cool and talented, he's the Next Big Thing. At least that's what the London glitterazzi are saying, on the streets, in the clubs, in the Business. But the glitterazzi turn out to be wrong and Billy Byrne is all over in a split second. His world detonates. His self-esteem splinters. Suddenly he's on a rollercoaster ride into the London underworld - a dangerous land of murderers, thieves and talent agents.

Dream with the Fishes

Terry is a suicidal voyeur who treats a dying addict to a final binge, but Terry will only do this if he promises to kill him.

Smoke

Writer Paul Benjamin is nearly hit by a bus when he leaves Auggie Wren's smoke shop. Stranger Rashid Cole saves his life, and soon middle-aged Paul tells homeless Rashid that he wouldn't mind a short-term housemate. Still grieving over his wife's murder, Paul is moved by both Rashid's quest to reconnect with his father and Auggie's discovery that a woman who might be his daughter is about to give birth.

Mad City

A misguided museum guard who loses his job and then tries to get it back at gunpoint is thrown into the fierce world of ratings-driven TV gone mad.

Man About Town

A top Hollywood talent agent finds his cushy existence threatened when he discovers that his wife is cheating on him and that his journal has been swiped by a reporter out to bring him down.

The Last Sin Eater

In seeking her own redemption from the one man of whom she is most afraid, 10-year-old Cadi Forbes discovers a secret sin haunting her community of Welsh immigrants in 1850s Appalachia.

The Last Run

When a young accountant is devastated after discovering his inspiringly beautiful girlfriend is cheating on him, his best friend, who's engaged to a girl he doesn't love, convinces him to go on a "run" and sleep with as many women as he can to get over his heart break.

Kid

Hal Hartley's senior thesis film from SUNY-Purchase. A young man attempts to leave his Long Island suburb, but is thwarted by a series of absurd obstacles.

3 Nights in the Desert

Three former band mates enter a cave after hearing it has the power to give them what they need. As unsettling desires rise to the surface, they all wonder if the cave has real power.

The Wedding Banquet

A Taiwanese-American man is happily settled in New York with his American boyfriend. He plans a marriage of convenience to a Chinese woman in order to keep his parents off his back and to get the woman a green card. Chaos follows when his parents arrive in New York for the wedding.

This Is My Father

When schoolteacher Kieran Johnson discovers that his father was not a French sailor (as he had been led to believe) but rather an Irish farmer, he looks to his mother for answers. When she refuses to provide any, Kieran travels to Ireland.

Ballast

A single mother and her embattled son struggle to subsist in a small Mississippi Delta township. An act of violence thrusts them into the world of an emotionally devastated highway store owner, awakening the fury of a bitter and longstanding conflict.

Love & Sex

When her rather explicit copy is rejected, magazine journalist Kate is asked by her editor to come up with an article on loving relationships instead, and to do so by the end of the day. This gets Kate thinking back over her own various experiences, and to wondering if she is in much of a position to write on the subject.

Written By

A lawyer who is killed in a car accident finds himself resurrected as a character in his daughter's novel.

Septem8er Tapes

September Tapes is best described as Blair Witch in Afghanistan. Instead of hunting a witch in the woods, a small documentary film crew brave the dangers of Afghanistan in search of Osama Bin Laden. Much like The Blair Witch Project, the idea behind this film is that eight tapes were found in a cavern in the Afghanistan mountains and they were put together to create this fictional documentary

Deadline

A screenwriter travels to an abandoned house to finish a script on time, but a series of strange events lead her to a psychological breakdown.

Trust the Man

Overachieving actress Rebecca must come to grips with her failing marriage to stay-at-home dad Tom. While Rebecca's slacker brother Tobey can't seem to commit to his aspiring-novelist girlfriend, Elaine. As both relationships spin out of control, the two couples embark on a quest to rediscover the magic and romance of falling in love in New York.

Adrift in Manhattan

The lives of three lonely strangers intersect while commuting on New York's 1 and 9 subway lines.

The Magician

Following the dealings of Melbourne-based hitman Ray as seen through the eyes of his ex-neighbour and friend Max, an Italian film student. Max and his camera witness Ray's work life as it unfolds from day to day, giving an insight into a world we rarely see, and at the same time developing an unusual friendship with his subject.

Blessed

Seven lost children wander the night streets while their mothers await their return home.

Yesterday Was a Lie

Hoyle, a girl with a sharp mind and a weakness for bourbon, finds herself on the trail of a reclusive genius. Along the way, her reality becomes disconnected and surreal. Her loyal partner and an ethereal lounge singer help her along the way, but ultimately she must turn within and confront her own shadow.

Living the Dream

"Living the Dream" is a docudrama about two friends who after being bullied as children become corrupt when growing up because they have been conditioned to believe that they need to achieve materialistic success to be 'accepted' and liked by others, in a society where the end justifies the means.