Row House Online
In a post-pandemic world, you shouldn’t have to leave your couch to watch a great movie. That’s why we’re continuing to curate great titles to offering virtual cinema. Rent new released online, and half of your ticket price comes back to Row House Cinema.
Now Through 7/31
Helsinki, 1945. The end of the war brings a new sense of artistic and social freedom for painter Tove Jansson. Modern art, dizzying parties and an open relationship with a married politician: Her unconventional life puts her at odds with her sculptor father’s strict ideals. Tove’s desire for liberty is put to the test when she meets theatre director Vivica Bandler. Her love for Vivica is electric and all-consuming but Tove begins to realize that the love she truly yearns has to be reciprocated.
As she struggles with her personal life, her creative endeavors take her in an unexpected direction. While focusing her artistic dreams on her painting, the work that started as a side project, the melancholic, haunting tales she told scared children in bomb shelters, rapidly takes on a life of its own. The exploits of the Moomins, infused with inspiration from her own life, bring Tove international fame and financial freedom. There’s a daily comic strip, a stage play and stories that continue to delight people around the world.
A young widower side steps grief, loss, and familial dysfunction when he steals his wife’s ashes and sets off on an impulsive odyssey through America’s heartland in the charming new road trip comedy, MONUMENTS.
Ted (David Sullivan) encounters a cast of eccentric characters, including his rival Howl (Javier Muñoz), who direct and misdirect him on his mission to find something he’d lost long before the death of his wife Laura (Marguerite Moreau).
MONUMENTS infuses humor and hope into a story of mourning, loss, and marriage to create one of the best feel good indie films of 2021.
Ever since she was discovered naked and near-dead decades ago, Mongia has been institutionalized, with a tendency to bite her nurses. Sent off with a documentary video assignment, three journalism students decide to interview Mongia, seeking new clues about the cold case. Intrigued and perturbed by the deranged woman’s story, the trio take their camera to the scene of the crime deep in the woods, led by the headstrong young investigator Yassmine (scream queen par excellence Yassmine Dimassi).
Grisly, frightening, and stuffed with howling thrills, the new Tunisian horror film Dachra won over both Frightfest and the Venice Film Festival and is finally making its stateside debut. Equal parts Midsommar and The Blair Witch Project, Dachra begins with a simple classroom assignment and spins through double plot twists into high-tension cannibal sorcery.
The brilliant work, personal struggles, and cultural impact of iconic American writers Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams explodes onto the screen in this innovative dual-portrait documentary. Filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland masterfully collages a wealth of archival material, including dishy talk show appearances with Dick Cavett and David Frost, with clips from some of the duo’s most memorable movie adaptions.
August 1-19
The Witches of the OrientHow does a Japanese women’s volleyball team from the late 1950s become an international sensation, feminist role models, the subject of a wildly popular comic book and a still-influential anime?
This stranger-than-fiction story is dynamically told by Julien Faraut (JOHN McENROE: IN THE REALM OF PERFECTION), with an ironic twist on the original demeaning moniker, Oriental Witches. A group of Osaka textile workers are transformed into a fiercely competitive volleyball team by their astonishingly ruthless coach whose unconventional techniques emphasize speed and aggression. A record-setting winning streak and a dramatic 1964 Tokyo Olympics triumph follow. Wonderful archival footage of the women in training and on the court, animated versions of their championship games, and moving interviews with the women today are set to a pulsating electronic score.
New York in the late 1980s and early ’90s was a moment waiting for a spark, an era looking for an identity. Then two potent subcultures found themselves on a collision course and would soon blur traditional cultural lines to create something new: skateboarding and hip hop were converging. The first was a predominantly white pastime, originally from the West Coast. The second came out of the Bronx and was a predominantly Black art form. But in a cultural Big Bang, they merged to create a street-inspired youth phenomenon that birthed a new kind of style and visual language in downtown Manhattan.
In the immersive and kaleidoscopic documentary ALL THE STREETS ARE SILENT, director Jeremy Elkin captures the artistic language that bridges hip hop, skateboarding, and street culture and paints a portrait of ’90s New York through more than 30 original interviews with skateboarders, rappers, and other musicians, graffiti artists, photographers, writers, and filmmakers, using exclusive footage and photographs from the era to bring an extraordinary time period back to life.
August 20-September 2
Hans is a self-confident man, driving across the country with his wife and two daughters by his side. His ego gets the better of him when he gets into an argument with another driver. The van driver turns out to be the wrong man to cross on the road, and sets out to teach Hans a deadly lesson. Skillfully pushing the buttons of Hans’s arrogance, a simple family road trip turns into a deadly obstacle course in this nerve-wracking, blackly comic morality tale thriller.
“The Dutch countryside has never looked as dangerous as it does in Tailgate, Lodewijk Crijns’s high-energy thriller. Here, those smooth roads become a wasteland frontier where vans can run bikers down at will and the terrain is so flat that you can’t hide from your enemy. At 80 minutes, this is lean, taut filmmaking. Gnarly set-pieces humiliate the characters while the sun shines bright in the sky. Coming mere months after the Russell Crowe vehicle Unhinged, Tailgate will appeal to more sophisticated petrol-heads who prefer the European style. It’s the Audi to Crowe’s Chevrolet.” – BP Flanagan, The Upcoming
What We Left Unfinished tells the story of five unfinished fiction feature films from the Communist era in Afghanistan (1978-1991), and the people who went to crazy lengths to make them, in a time when films were weapons, filmmakers became targets, and the dreams of constantly shifting political regimes merged with the stories told onscreen. This tight-knit group of Afghan filmmakers loved cinema enough to risk their lives for art. Despite government interference, censorship boards, scarce resources, armed opposition, and near-constant threats of arrest or even death, they made films that were subversive and, in the filmmakers’ opinions, always “true” to life. All five films – THE APRIL REVOLUTION, DOWNFALL, THE BLACK DIAMOND, WRONG WAY, and AGENT – completed principal photography before being canceled by the state or abandoned by the filmmakers. What We Left Unfinished brings together newly rediscovered and restored footage from these unfinished films with new footage shot in the same locations, and stories from behind the scenes, as told by the directors, actors and crew who worked on the films.