- Cult Cinema Chronicles
- Posts
- New Cult Releases April 15th - May 1st
New Cult Releases April 15th - May 1st
Keeping you up to date on the best in cult and genre cinema
How can this newsletter be better? The feedback is appreciated.
Table of Contents
Arrow Films Releases
1963: in the thick of the Cold War, roguish CIA agent Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill, Mission: Impossible – Fallout) forms an uneasy alliance with brooding KGB officer Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer, Call Me by Your Name) to thwart a criminal organization with apocalyptic intentions. The rebellious daughter of a missing nuclear scientist (Alicia Vikander, Ex Machina) is their only ticket inside the sinister ring – but to whom is she truly loyal? A desperate race against time will determine whether the scientist’s atomic research will shatter the delicate balance of power in the world.
Extras:
Brand new audio commentary by critics Bryan Reesman and Max Evry
The Hollywood Way - brand new interview with co-writer/producer Lionel Wigram
A Lineage of Bad Guys – brand new interview with actor Luca Calvani
Legacy of U.N.C.L.E. - brand new featurette celebrating the original 1960s TV series and its influence on the 2015 movie, featuring Helen McCarthy, David Flint and Vic Pratt
Cockneys and Robbers - brand new featurette exploring director Guy Ritchie's oeuvre, featuring Kat Hughes, Hannah Strong and Josh Saco
Spy Vision: Recreating 60s Cool, A Higher Class of Hero, Metisse Motorcycles: Proper and Very British, The Guys from U.N.C.L.E. and A Man of Extraordinary Talents - five archival featurettes exploring the making of the film
U.N.C.L.E.: On-Set Spy - four archival, bite-sized featurettes going behind the scenes on the film set
Overnight fame, overnight fortune, and any-night girls, the men of Banjo Baker’s racing team press ‘em all to the limit in this story of three ambitious young drivers trying to make their names in the thrilling world of stock-car racing. It’s a dangerous life for the drivers and the women who love them. In the red zone beyond 7000 RPM the engine might blow, but it’s the only way to win.
Extras:
Audio commentary by Julie Kirgo and Nick Redman
Bruce Kessler: Man in Motion, a new interview with assistant director Bruce Kessler
Gas, Gears, Girls, Guys & Death, a new visual essay on the film by filmmaker and critic Howard S. Berger
A Modern Type of Woman, a new visual essay on the "Hawksian Woman" in Red Line 7000 by film scholar Kat Ellinger
Image gallery of posters, lobby cards, and stills

First up, Nico then shows a more thoughtful side in The Time Traveller, where the widow (Adrienne Barbeau, The Fog) of an astronaut and her young son come across a mysterious man (Kier Dullea, 2001: A Space Odyssey) with uncanny powers on a beach in Greece. The wacky Sky High sees three American jocks on holiday in Greece being handed a tape by a mysterious figure, who begs them to not let it fall into the wrong hands before being shot by an unseen assassin. Featuring an early score from the great Hans Zimmer, Terminal Exposure focuses on two carefree beach photographers, who accidentally photograph a murder and immediately set after the assassin: a tall, gorgeous blonde with a rose tattoo on her behind. Glitch! sees two bumbling burglars whose attempt to throw the house party of the century in the luxury home of a Hollywood producer is foiled by a group of mobsters determined to collect what the producer owes them – no matter what. Take a martial arts school, throw in a snotty rich kid, a clumsy geek, a paranoid survivalist, two beach joggers, a cool secret agent and a mime, and you get Ninja Academy, a madcap karate comedy like no other starring Gerald Okamura (Big Trouble in Little China). Finally, in The Naked Truth, Mastorakis pays homage to a certain Billy Wilder film when two friends decide to pass as women and pose as makeup artists for a local beauty pageant to elude a vicious mafia boss. It seems like the perfect cover, until the mafioso gets the hots for one of them!
Extras:
Nico's Self Interviews, six brand new interviews with writer, director and producer Nico Mastorakis where he looks back on how the films in this collection came to be, featuring behind-the-scenes footage and cast and crew interviews
Dan Hirsch: A Revealing Self-Interview, a brand new interview with the star of Sky High Dan Hirsch looking back on his role in the film
Gerald Okamura, Ninja Academy's "Chiba" Remembers, a brand new interview with Gerald Okamura, looking back on his role as Chiba in Ninja Academy, and his career as an actor and martial artist
Original trailers for each film
Criterion Collections Releases

Aspiring San Francisco folk singer Rose (Lili Taylor) and hotheaded, Vietnam-bound marine Eddie Birdlace (River Phoenix), who meet on the occasion of a cruelly misogynistic party where men compete to bring the most unattractive dates they can find. But what begins as a night to forget unexpectedly develops into something far more meaningful
Extras:
Audio commentary featuring Savoca and producer Richard Guay
New interview with Savoca and actor Lili Taylor conducted by filmmaker Mary Harron
New interviews with cinematographer Bobby Bukowski, production designer Lester W. Cohen, script supervisor Mary Cybulski, music supervisor Jeffrey Kimball, supervising sound editor Tim Squyres, and editor John Tintori
Trailer
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
PLUS: An essay by film critic Christina Newland

I Am Cuba unfolds in four explosive vignettes that capture Cuban life on the brink of transformation, as crushing economic exploitation and inequality give way to a working-class uprising
Extras:
“I Am Cuba,” the Siberian Mammoth, a 2004 documentary on the making of the film featuring key participants
Interview from 2003 with filmmaker Martin Scorsese
New appreciation of the film by cinematographer Bradford Young
Trailer
Alternate Russian-dubbed soundtrack
New English subtitle translation
PLUS: An essay by film critic Juan Antonio García Borrero

Adapted from a novel by László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown time in an unnamed village, where, one day, a mysterious circus—complete with an enormous stuffed whale and a shadowy, demagogue-like figure known as the Prince—arrives and appears to awaken a kind of madness in the citizens that builds inexorably toward violence.
Extras:
Family Nest (1979), Tarr’s first feature film
New interview with Tarr by film critic Scott Foundas
Trailer
New English subtitle translation
PLUS: An essay by film programmer and critic Dennis Lim

Based on an acclaimed 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock is set at the turn of the twentieth century and concerns a small group of students from an all-female college who vanish, along with a chaperone, while on a St. Valentine’s Day outing.
Extras:
Interview with Weir
Program on the making of the film, featuring interviews with executive producer Patricia Lovell, producers Hal McElroy and Jim McElroy, and cast members
Introduction by film scholar David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film
On-set documentary hosted by Lovell and featuring interviews with Weir, actor Rachel Roberts, and source-novel author Joan Lindsay
Homesdale (1971), a black comedy by Weir
Trailer
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
PLUS: An essay by author Megan Abbott and an excerpt from film scholar Marek Haltof’s 1996 book Peter Weir: When Cultures Collide

Aimlessly passing their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé), and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui)—Jewish, African, and Arab, respectively—give human faces to France’s immigrant populations, their bristling resentment at their marginalization slowly simmering until it reaches a climactic boiling point.
Extras:
Audio commentary by Kassovitz
Introduction by actor Jodie Foster
Ten Years of “La haine,” a documentary featuring cast and crew members
Featurette on the film’s banlieue setting
Production footage
Deleted and extended scenes, with afterwords by Kassovitz
Behind-the-scenes photos
Trailers
PLUS: An essay by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau and a 2006 appreciation by filmmaker Costa-Gavras
BFI Releases

A young woman named France (Mireille Perrier) returns to Cameroon to visit the former colonial outpost she grew up in during the last days of French rule. Upon arrival, she recalls her childhood in Mindif. The only child of a sole white family, the Dalens, France forms a strong connection with their ‘houseboy’ Protée (Isaach de Bankolé). A quiet and observant child but still too innocent to fully understand the simmering sexual and racial tensions in the adults around her, France finds her idyl shattered when a plane full of strangers makes an emergency landing nearby.
Extras:
Audio commentary by film scholar and critic Kate Rennebohm
Claire Denis à propos de Chocolat (2023, 18 mins): Claire Denis discusses Chocolat and its new restoration
Claire Denis in Conversation (2019, 49 mins): the filmmaker looks back over her career
Childhood Memories (Mary Martins, 2018, 4 mins): a multilayered autobiographical animation exploring memories of a childhood visit to Lagos, Nigeria
Original theatrical trailer
Reply