Kino Lorber

Leading distributor of international, documentary, independent and classic films dedicated to cinematic excellence in our theatrical and home video releases.

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In Hold Me Tight, Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread, Bergman Island) gives another riveting performance as Clarisse, a woman on the run from her family for reasons that aren’t immediately clear. Widely renowned as one of France’s great contemporary actors but less well-known in North America for his equally impressive work behind the camera, Mathieu Amalric’s sixth feature as director is his most ambitious to date. This virtuosic, daringly fluid portrait of a woman in crisis alternates between Clarisse’s adventures on…

The inimitable Kathleen Collins's second film tells the story of two remarkable people, married and hurtling toward a crossroads in their lives: Sara Rogers, a Black professor of philosophy, is embarking on an intellectual quest just as her painter husband, Victor, sets off on an exploration of joy. Victor decides to rent a country house away from the city, but the couple’s summer idyll becomes complicated by his involvement with a younger model. One of the very first fictional features…

“Remember when we talked about being alone in the world?” Sara is a genderfluid blue-collar worker who lives as her male birth identity Robson by day while caring for her religious grandmother in Sobradinho, a small town in the northeast of Brazil. Daniel, who teaches in a police academy in southern metropolis Curitiba, has been placed on unpaid leave after a violent incident that’s all over the news. The only thing holding him together is his online romance with Sara,…

The pseudonymous Agnes was a pioneering transgender woman who participated in an infamous gender health study conducted at UCLA in the 1960s. Her clever use of the study to gain access to gender-affirming healthcare led to her status as a fascinating and celebrated figure in trans history. In this innovative cinematic exercise that blends fiction and nonfiction, director Chase Joynt (No Ordinary Man) uses Agnes’s story, along with others unearthed in long-shelved case files, to widen the frame through which…

Liked reviews

Wife of a Spy

Wife of a Spy

★★★★½

Really interesting how the digital filmmaking here sits in contrast to its use of classical techniques (i.e. blocking, backlights, very set bound). It's a tension wherein the digital textures re-inforce and -double the whole theme of the constructed nature of images and identity. Everybody's caught up in and pushing against another's story (e.g. the nation's, the military's, a spy's, a wife's). Of course, the real centre of this is Satoko and Yusaka's mutual efforts to insert or remove her from…

Slalom

Slalom

★★★½

on its initial surface, Slalom seems to take the main route of a typical sports drama. rigorous training, negative encouragement, and jealous schoolmates thicken the pressure to win ski races and the distantly simmering, uneasy maternal relationship. but it glides and slips to other territories, wrapped up in its wintry weather and saddled by the continuous snowfall, where abuse materialises at the hands of the trainer. for some of us craving for appreciation and attention we endlessly look for, it's…

The coldest and most unforgiving movie about skiing this side of “Downhill Racer” — and just as fascinated by the loneliness of bombing down the slopes with the world at your back — Charlène Favier’s “Slalom” is a familiar story of sexual abuse, but one told with such bracing intensity that it snaps across your face like a blast of cold mountain air. From the opening moments of her debut feature, Favier pivots between powerlessness and control with the same…

Bill Traylor was born a slave in 1853 on a cotton gin plantation outside Montgomery Alabama with seventeen other slaves. During the final days of the civil war, Traylor saw the Union army destroying local infrastructure and crops which was effective but to a fault since Southerners further detested the Union. The Northern troops weren’t there to liberate the slaves, they just wanted to restore the Union. Finally, after the War, Traylor’s family was freed from bondage but thrust into…