The Grand Illusion

The new film from legendary underground novelist Dennis Cooper and visual artist Zac Farley. Named one of the ten best movies of 2025 by John Waters.

Set against the barren sprawl of the California desert, ROOM TEMPERATURE follows a family’s annual tradition of transforming their home into a DIY haunted house—an increasingly unhinged ritual now hijacked by the father’s obsessive vision. Hilarious, uncomfortable, and deeply strange, this is haunted-house cinema as poetic autopsy—a slow, disquieting meditation on control, longing, and the fantasies we force onto others.

“Cooper and Farley have an eye for images that creep one out, even if they don’t contain anything sinister in them necessarily.” Steve Erickson, Screen Slate

“Just when you begin hating this film, you’ll suddenly realize—huh? I love it. It’s weird, creepy, and maybe … just maybe, great.” John Waters

Twenty-third encore screening! Here’s to the chew year!

Our friends at Central Cinema are generously helping us keep the beavers gnawing away while we search for a new home. 60% of ticket sales go to our relocation fund!

In this 19th century, supernatural winter epic, a drunken applejack salesman must go from zero to hero and become North America’s greatest fur trapper by defeating hundreds of beavers.

“Starts strange, gets stranger, and yet remains resolutely adorable… embraces the defiant glee of art cinema and distills it into something so thoroughly pure and sincere that it is surely hard not to fall in love with it.” Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Alliance of Women Film Journalists

“It’s sure to develop a significant cult following with its unique mix of silent-era slapstick, animation elements, theme-park-style critter costumes, and general air of inspired absurdity.” Dennis Harvey, Variety

“Steroidally swollen with gags and smarts.” Guy Maddin

Kristen Stewart's feature-length directorial debut, shot in glorious 16mm.

Based on the beloved memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER is a raw and unflinching portrait of survival, sexuality, and self-invention. The film traces Lidia’s life from her earliest memories in the Pacific Northwest, as a promising swimmer, through fractured relationships, near-motherhood, addiction, and encounters with artistic heroes. Told as a fluid memory wash, the story transforms trauma into art, embodying Yuknavitch’s defiant voice that made her work a modern cult classic. It is not only a chronicle of a woman becoming a writer, but a visceral journey through the wreckage and resilience of a life lived against the grain.

“Kristen Stewart reveals a deft directorial hand and a distinct, languid, echoing style in her vividly made, emotionally visceral exploration of the life and times of American novelist Lidia Yuknavitch.” Christina Newland, Time Out

4/4 stars! “In partnership with Imogen Poots, who gives an astonishing performance as Lidia, Stewart boldly evokes the source material. There’s a collage aspect to the image placement, but Stewart is not afraid to be direct. This project has been years in the making. Stewart adapted the material, and you can feel her love for it.” Sheila O’Malley, RogerEbert.com

Adapted from Kahlil Joseph’s renowned video art installation, BLKNWS: TERMS & CONDITIONS is a distinctive cinematic experience that mirrors the sonic textures of a record album, weaving fiction and history in an immersive journey where the fictionalized figures of W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey join artists, musicians, Joseph’s family, and even Twitter chats, in a vision for Black consciousness.

Named one of the ten best movies of 2025 by Robert Daniels of RogerEbert.com and Manohla Dargis of The New York Times.

“…intricate, rich, and supremely ambitious.” Aisha Harris, NPR

Critic’s Pick! “Cinema needs more filmmakers like Joseph and his collaborators, artists making truly original work that emerges from a self-aware yet playful artistic vision.” Beandrea July, IndieWire

“This is a challenging, dense, and all-encompassing picture that works best when it’s allowed to wash over you. What is left on the shore after the tide of BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions recedes is imperative and also reliant on the idiosyncrasies of the viewer, leaving much to comb through before the next necessary watch.” Robert Daniels, RogerEbert.com

The new movie from Albert Birney, co-writer and director of STRAWBERRY MANSION, OBEX is an audacious, uncanny, and delightfully skewed lo-fi fantasy. Shot in striking black and white, this surreally nostalgic nightmare revisits the dawn of personal computing to reflect on the loneliness of our always-online present day.

In pre-internet 1987, Conor and his dog Sandy live a life of seclusion, lost in the slow-rendering graphics of early Macs and televisions aglow with late-night horror movie marathons. But when he begins playing OBEX, a new and mysterious, state-of-the-art computer game, he finds himself trapped in a low-tech, but high-stakes analog hellscape as the line between reality and game blurs.

“A warm yearn for simpler times, told by a distinctive cinematic voice.” Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire

“OBEX is the kind of powerfully subconscious film that works on you after you’ve finished watching it, flooding back to your mind when you hear cicadas, while you stare at a blank television or if you’re simply standing in line at the grocery store.” Robert Daniels, RogerEbert.com

Rare 35mm screenings of the Blaxploitation classic!

He’s a skip tracer, the last of the bounty hunters, living on blood money and borrowed time. Isaac Hayes is Truck Turner – a football star turned bounty hunter who’s tracking a sadistic pimp on the mean streets of Los Angeles. But when a tragic accident changes all the rules, suddenly the hunter finds himself being hunted by the city’s deadliest hired killers! Truck strikes back in a series of wild car chases, shootouts, and bone-crushing fistfights, knowing that the battles can lead to only one place: an intense struggle to the death against the brutal leader of L.A.’s crime syndicate, Harvard Blue (Yaphet Kotto).

Featuring an outstanding score by Hayes, a show stopping performance by Nichelle Nichols, and direction by Jonathan Kaplan (OVER THE EDGE), TRUCK TURNER is an explosive force that can’t be stopped!

“One of the best of the ’70s Blaxploitation films … directed with a great deal of style.” Ernest R. Dickerson, director of Juice and Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight

Winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

Anand, a 30-something city dweller compelled to spend a 10-day mourning period for his father in the rugged countryside of western India, tenderly bonds with a local farmer who is struggling to stay unmarried. As the mourning ends, forcing his return, Anand must decide the fate of his relationship born under duress.

Named one of the ten best movies of 2025 by Robert Daniels of RogerEbert.com.

In Marathi with English subtitles.

“This is a gentle beauty of a film from a filmmaker who is on his way to greatness.” Randy Myers, San Jose Mercury News

“Like the titular fruit at the center of Cactus Pears, sweetness abounds at the core of its compassionate beauty.” Robert Daniels, RogerEbert.com

“There have been many films about queer people returning to their family homes, but few with this amount of tender specificity. There is awkwardness, there is grief — there’s also so much love.” Drew Gregory, Autostraddle

50th anniversary! An erotic retelling of George Bernard Shaw’s classic play Pygmalion, acclaimed filmmaker Radley Metzger’s THE OPENING OF MISTY BEETHOVEN is widely considered to be among the greatest adult films ever made.

After a chance meeting at a Parisian adult cinema, the noted sexologist Dr. Seymour Love (Jamie Gillis) sets himself the challenge of transforming trampy streetwalker Misty Beethoven (Constance Money) into the world’s greatest lover. With the help of his friend Geraldine (Jacqueline Beudant), Love devises an erotic training program with the goal of seeing Misty crowned a “Goldenrod Girl” at publisher Lawrence Layman’s next wild party.

Shot in New York, Paris, and Rome and with an all-star cast that also includes Gloria Leonard, Terri Hall, and gay superstar Casey Donovan, THE OPENING OF MISTY BEETHOVEN is a timeless, hilarious sex comedy from one of the true masters of erotic cinema.

Courtesy of Distribpix, the Rialto Report, and Muscle Distribution. Co-presented by SECS Fest!

*No one under 18 admitted*