Directed and co-written by acclaimed actress Noémie Merlant (Portrait of a Lady on Fire), The Balconettes is her audacious second feature. Co-scripted with Céline Sciamma, it melds comedy, horror, thriller in a genre-smashing good time! 

The story is set in a heat wave that brings a Marseille neighborhood to the boil, where three roommates gleefully meddle in the lives of their neighbors from their balcony. Until a late night drink turns into a bloody affair…

Linda Linda Linda is celebrating a 20th anniversary with a brand new 4K restoration via our friends at GKIDS! 

For Kei, Kyoko, and Nozomi, their dream of playing the final high school concert together is dashed when their lead vocalist quits the band. Desperate, they recruit the very first person they see: Korean exchange student Son, played by Doona Bae (The Host, Broker), whose comprehension of Japanese is limited at best. It’s a race against time as the group struggles to learn three songs in three days for the festival’s rock concert.

Linda Linda Linda is an effervescent, tenderhearted snapshot of youth about the unparalleled joy of jamming out with your friends. The soundtrack fuses bangers from iconic Japanese bands The Blue Hearts and Base Ball Bear with original music composed by James Iha of the Smashing Pumpkins. The beloved classic from Nobuhiro Yamashita (Ghost Cat Anzu) is acknowledged by many as one of the greatest Japanese films of the 21st century. 

The final film in our Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema series is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1998 masterwork After Life!

In After Life, the recently deceased arrive at a waystation between this world and the next. Their task? To choose a single memory from their lives to take with them into eternity. A small team of counselors helps each soul re-create that memory on film, allowing them to move on—leaving everything else behind.

With a mix of actors and real interviews, After Life blurs the line between fiction and documentary, imagination and memory. The result is a quietly transcendent film that contemplates the meaning of life not through grand events, but through small, deeply human moments.

Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema is a curated 12-film trip through the evolution of Japan—from the quiet post-war resilience of the 1940s all the way to the radical reinventions of the 1990s. Each Monday this July-September, we will explore a new facet of this incredible nation’s cinematic journey throughout the 20th century! All films will be presented in their original Japanese language with English subtitles!

You asked. You manifested it. Only you are to blame. Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales is coming back for a one-night-only descent into madness, messiah complexes, and post-apocalyptic SoCal chaos as part of our In Defense Of…series courtesy of our founder and Executive Director Logan Crow! And as a fun bonus, we are screening the rarely-seen Cannes Cut of the film!

A delirious, genre-melting fever dream from the director of Donnie Darko, this sci-fi satire is part dystopian epic, part musical, part political prophecy—and 100% unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Set in a fractured near-future America (or was it 2008?), the film stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a paranoid action star with amnesia, Sarah Michelle Gellar as a porn star turned media mogul, and Seann William Scott as…twins?

Infamously booed at Cannes and boasting a cool 41% on Rotten Tomatoes, Southland Tales has since earned a devoted cult following for its audacity, ambition, and total refusal to color inside the lines. Love it, hate it, or leave the theater slightly altered—this is a film that demands to be experienced loud, big, and with other humans asking, “Wait, was that Justin Timberlake lip-syncing The Killers?”