Janus Films

In a series of dramatic vignettes to explore the scientific hypothesis that witches of the middle ages and turn-of-the-century psychiatric patients suffer from the same type of hysteria. Its a witches brew of the scary, the gross and the darkly humorous.

La chambre: The camera goes around the room three times, starting at a table, and slowly making its way 360 degrees around the room. Hotel Monterey: Short film consisting entirely of shots of people walking in and out of a rundown New York hotel. News from home: Presents a series of abstract and fragmentary images of everyday urban life in 1970s New York City, accompanied by the distinctive narration of filmmaker Chantal Akerman as she dispassionately...

Major Barbara: Barbara is a major in the Salvation Army, but also the daughter of Andrew Undershaft, a millionaire arms manufacturer. A comedic battle rages between daughter and father, posing the question: does salvation come through faith of science?--International Movie Data Base. Caesar and Cleopatra: Cleopatra hasn't been on the throne of the pharoahs of Egypt very long when Julius Caesar pays a visit. Caesar finds the prospect of romance more...

Set in 1920's Spain, this film is a scathing examination of moral decay. Tristana, a victim of her own captivating beauty, is desired by two men. One is her lecherous guardian whose physical advances repulse her and cause her to have nightmares of his death by decapitation, and the other is a young artist who wants to marry her, but lacks the courage.

The story of a cheat: "Considered Sacha Guitry's masterpiece, this fleet, witty picaresque about a gambler and petty thief is a whimsical delight. Guitry himself stars as the tricheur looking back fondly on a life of crime, which he narrates with an effervescence matched by that of the film's skillful editing and cinematography. With its rapid storytelling and novel use of voice-over, The Story of a Cheat has influenced filmmakers from Orson Welles...

Pitfall: When a miner leaves his employer and treks out with his young son to become a migrant worker, he finds himself moving from one eerie landscape to another, intermittently followed (and photographed) by an enigmatic man in a clean, white suit, and eventually coming face-to-face with his inescapable destiny. Woman in the dunes: An amateur entomologist leaves Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle that resides in a remote, vast desert....

The arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated well-known filmmaker, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, is the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence. Real people from the case play themselves.

Abbas Kiarostami first came to international attention for his wondrous, slyly self-referential trilogy of films set in the rural Iranian town of Koker. Poised delicately between fiction and documentary, comedy and tragedy, these lyrical fables exemplify both the gentle humanism and playful sleight of hand that defines the director's sensibility.

A look at acclaimed Japanese author and playwright Yukio Mishima, the impossible harmony he created between self, art, and society, and his famously committed public seppuku (ritual suicide). Includes interviews, commentary, documentary, and more.

A musical comedy about a pair of young lovers who lose a lottery ticket worth a million francs and chase it frantically across Paris. Considered one of the very first musical films.