“Le Quattro Volte,” an idiosyncratic and amazing new film by Michelangelo Frammartino, is so full of surprises — nearly every shot contains a revelation, sneaky or overt, cosmic or mundane — that even to describe it is to risk giving something away.
A large part of the appeal of ''Himalaya'' comes from the breathtaking beauty of its setting, the mountainous, sparsely populated Dolpo region of Nepal. Exquisitely filmed in Cinemascope, a format whose wide frames and panoramic angles emphasize the lonely grandeur of the landscape, the movie offers an intoxicating dose of armchair tourism, like a National Geographic pictorial brought to life.
Premiering in the documentary competition at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, Alex Mar’s American Mystic is a poem of a film, following three young people in America who have chosen to make their spiritual practice the center of their lives. A pagan priestess who proudly defines herself as a witch, Morpheus has moved to the outskirts of rural California to create a pagan sanctuary on a small plot of land. Kublai, a Spiritualist medium, works on a farm in upstate New York but spends his off hours with his head in the hands of elderly women, learning to channel spirits. Chuck, a Lakota Sioux, barely scrapes by at his day job in the city, but he and his wife are raising their child with their ancestors’ way of life as their guide, taking long trips to the reservation to participate in the traditions that are still alive.
Like the 2008 Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!, Elijah Drenner’s smart, affectionate but clear-eyed history of American exploitation films combines talking heads and well-chosen clips from movies that range from now-quaint 1913 white-slavery “exposé” Traffic in Souls to the still-scurrilous Nazi sexploitation classic Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS.
Do dreams, especially the portentous kind that you cannot easily shake off, predict the future? That question is investigated in “The Edge of Dreaming,” a deeply personal film by Amy Hardie, a Scottish science documentarian whose world was shaken after she experienced a series of related nightmares.