streaming premieres
suspended time
Interpersonal tensions, neuroses, and nostalgia flare in the countryside cottage where two out-of-touch brothers and their respective girlfriends have congregated to wait out the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. With Olivier Assayas himself providing narration and the drama—low-key but wry and deep-rooted—unfolding in his own family home in the Chevreuse Valley, this Berlinale competition selection finds its maker operating in a notably personal and contagiously ruminative mode. A film, funny and moving in turn, about the blistering friction of cabin fever and the ghosts that linger around the scenes of childhood memories.
Streaming premiere Sunday, February 1
NEW STREAMING SERIES AND TITLES
CELEBRATING BLACK HISTORY
“White kids graduated into an industry, we graduated into a desert,” decries Sankofa (1993) director Haile Gerima in Spirits of Rebellion, Zeinabu Irene Davis’s vital portrait of the LA Rebellion filmmaking collective, which was forged at UCLA. Spanning five decades of filmmaking here in the US and in Africa, this robust collection—which includes Davis’s documentary—evidences the tenacity and potent, variegated colors of Black cinema’s desert blooms—from landmark works by Bill Gunn and Bill Duke through to previously hard-to-see gems like Chameleon Street and fearless contemporary genre-benders, among them the Nollywood riffs of Nigeria’s Abba Makama, Black Mother, and The Inheritance.
LORE
Cate Shortland followed her moody and startling feature debut, Somersault (2004), with another bruising story of a teen girl expelled from home—in this case, by history in the making. Abandoned by her high-level Nazi parents in the wake of Hitler’s death, the eponymous Lore (Saskia Rosendahl), together with her four younger siblings, flees the family home in Bavaria, commencing a darkly revelatory cross-country journey.
Joining Women’s Work
IN THEATER CROSSOver
amos poe and no wave cinema
When a loosely defined guerrilla art movement called No Wave coalesced in the gutted Lower East Side of the late 1970s and ’80s, Amos Poe, arguably the first punk filmmaker, was immediately identified as one of its leading lights. In the aftermath of his death on Christmas Day, 2025, this collection showcases Poe’s electric, grungily glamorous work, both behind the camera and in front of it. Made in collaboration with a who’s who of downtown icons, including Debbie Harry, John Lurie, and Cookie Mueller, these are passion-over-polish films born of a vanished NYC—one of Max’s Kansas City and the Mudd Club, of cheap rents, crumbling brick, fatalistic attitudes cribbed from Nouvelle Vague films, and gnawing urban anomie, set to some the hippest music ever recorded in these United States
Short Films by Ugo Bienvenu
A diplomat’s son whose early years were divided between Chad, Guatemala, Mexico, and Paris, Ugo Bienvenu, who studied at Gobelins and CalArts, has developed a practice encompassing animation, illustration, music videos, commercial work, and graphic novels. His first animated feature, Arco—produced under the auspices of Remembers, the animation studio he founded with Félix de Givry in 2018—premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, where it won a host of admirers, before then going on to pick up the top prize at Annecy. As Arco gears up for the awards season, Metrograph presents four of Bienvenu’s early works as a director and producer: spanning sci-fi, surrealism, and domestic malaise, they demonstrate his affinity for the unsettling.