Expanded Narratives

After his collaborations with novelist László Krasznahorkai on the acclaimed, unclassifiable SÁTÁNTANGÓ and WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES, Tarr unexpectedly used a 1933 thriller by Georges Simenon as his source, with a spectacularly chiaroscuroed film-noir visual style to match. Set in a French coastal town, the story concerns a railroad worker who finds a bundle of stolen cash that makes him the target of the eponymous English police inspector, but any conventional genre expectations are superseded by Tarr's epic camera movements and the psychological pressures of the protagonist's relationships with his dissatisfied wife (Swinton) and withdrawn daughter. In French and English with English subtitles. 35mm. (MR)

Using his favorite story hook of "A Woman in Trouble," Lynch’s bizarre, beautiful mystery takes a walk on the dark side of Hollywood. Shortly after arriving in Tinseltown, starry-eyed starlet Betty (Watts) finds an amnesiac stranger (Harring) at her doorstep. As Betty becomes obsessed with unraveling her new companion's mystery, we begin to suspect that neither woman is quite who she appears to be, and that they might not be strangers after all. MULHOLLAND DR. was hailed as a return to form for Lynch, earning him an Oscar nomination for Best Director. 35mm. (Christopher Sanew)

Considered by many to be Denis’s finest film, BEAU TRAVAIL is a haunting tragedy drenched with male eroticism and cast in the form of a languorous tropical dream. The story is based loosely on Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd,” transposed to a remote East African outpost of the Foreign Legion and told from the villain’s point of view. Brooding, craggy Sgt. Galoup (Lavant) relates his obsession with a pure-hearted recruit (Colin) who attracts Galoup’s attention, then his jealousy, and finally his murderous hatred. In French with English subtitles. 35mm. (MR)

Martel’s allusive, atmospheric, sardonic style has established her, in only three films, as one of Latin America’s most important filmmakers. Subtitled “The Temptation of Good and the Evil It Causes,” this perverse fable is set in the same torpid backwater as her celebrated debut LA CIÉNAGA. When impressionable 14-year-old Amalia is groped by a doctor on a crowded street, she takes it as a divine signal to save his soul. In town for a medical convention, he happens to staying at the hotel run by her mother, where this nemesis nymphet relentlessly stalks her molester to his salvation...or his doom. In Spanish with English subtitles. 35mm. (MR)

Weerasethakul, an alumnus of the Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has become one of the most celebrated filmmakers of the past decade, known for his challenging of traditional narrative forms in favor of open-ended structures that evoke both modernist experiments and folklore. Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes, TROPICAL MALADY is divided into two parts that have a suggestively mysterious relationship to each other. The first part depicts a tentative romance between a soldier and a country boy; in the second part, a soldier (the same one?) plunges into a jungle haunted by such creatures as a ghost tiger and a talking baboon. In Thai with English subtitles. 35mm. (MR)

Superstar screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, ADAPTATION) made his directorial debut with this dizzingly self-reflexive tale about small-city playwright Caden Cotard (Hoffman). After receiving a MacArthur “genius” grant, he embarks on an insanely ambitious project that will be nothing less than a reproduction (and virtual replacement) of his entire life. Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, and Jennifer Jason Leigh play the women in Caden’s solipsistic circus. 35mm widescreen. (MR)