January 22-28, 2021
Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (Dir. Lili Horvát, 2020)
From January 22-28, Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time will be available to stream via Acropolis Cinema and Greenwich Entertainment. Acropolis will receive 50% of all revenue. Click here to watch.
If you'd like to offer additional support, you can make a tax deductible donation to Acropolis by clicking here.
Márta Vizy (Natasa Stork) is a 39-year-old Hungarian neurosurgeon. After 20 years in the United States, she returns to Budapest for a romantic rendezvous at the Liberty Bridge with János (Viktor Bodó), a fellow doctor she met at a conference in New Jersey. Márta waits in vain, while the love of her life is nowhere to be seen. When she finally tracks him down, the bewildered man claims the two have never met.
In her second feature, following The Wednesday Child (2015), writer-director Lili Horvát evokes Sylvia Plath’s haunting villanelle “Mad Girl’s Love Song.” Preparations to Be Together For an Unknown Period of Time spins a delicate web of contrasts and silent explosions that shift the viewer’s understanding. Shot with impeccable symmetry on entrancing 35mm, it is an Orphic tale reminding us that, while the heart is an abstruse trickster, the human brain — ruling us with over 80 billion interconnected neurons — is our most complex organ. (TIFF)
One of the year's ten best films... Elusively layered, occasionally hilarious.
Amy Taubin, Artforum
Slippery, supple and sinuous, Horvát’s deliciously reworked psychological noir is a spiral staircase, polished to a glossy shine.
Jessica Kiang, Variety
Striking... a multi-layered rumination on love [and] fate... pitched somewhere between the worlds of Hitchcock and Kieslowski,
Allan Hunter, Screen Daily
Haunting and mysterious...a kind of amnesiac love story crossed with the gloomiest of Krzysztof Kieślowski movies, and bordering on existential science fiction.
Ryan Lattanzio, Indiewire
Long after my memories of this socially-distanced, WiFi-dependent TIFF have evaporated, Horvat's exquisite enigmas will still be on my mind.
Adam Nayman, The Ringer
January 29 - February 4, 2021
Just Don't Think I'll Scream (Dir. Frank Beauvais, 2019)
From January 29 - February 4, Just Don't Think I'll Scream will be available to stream via Acropolis Cinema and KimStim. Acropolis will receive 50% of all revenue.
If you'd like to offer additional support, you can make a tax deductible donation to Acropolis by clicking here.
Frank Beauvais’s intimate essay film assembles excerpts from the 400-plus films the French director watched over a four-month period of seclusion in 2016. On the soundtrack, Beauvais speaks of the breakup that led to his retreat, the estranged father with whom he bonded over cinema just before his death, and the symptoms of our current cultural climate that make pressing on an act of resistance. Beauvais’s montage—composed of both international classics and obscurities—alights upon small but specific details, reframing otherwise incidental images into an indelible and immensely moving reflection on life, love, and loss.
A highly original and personal movie memoir.
Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter
One of the hottest tickets in the 2019 Berlinale Forum... a poignant, immensely moving personal diary.
Jorge Mourinha, MUBI Notebook
Grade A. Exhibits the best kind of aesthetic innovation, namely, innovation inextricably married to the story being told.
Joe Blessing, The Playlist
A brisk, stimulating movie which concludes (correctly) that compulsive cinephilia is a rewarding parasite at the best of times.
Vadim Rizov, Filmmaker Magazine
Beauvais uses other artists’ images to express an intensely personal voice. It suggests nothing less than that a bildungsroman truest to the experience of contemporary life should be made with editing software.
Steve Erickson, The Brooklyn Rail
January 29 - February 4, 2021
Atlantis (Dir. Valentyn Vasyanovych, 2019)
From January 29 - February 4, Atlantis will be available to stream via Acropolis Cinema and Grasshopper Film. Acropolis will receive 50% of all revenue.
If you'd like to offer additional support, you can make a tax deductible donation to Acropolis by clicking here.
A prize-winner at the Venice Film Festival and Ukraine’s official selection for the 2021 Academy Awards, Atlantis is a gorgeous and visionary sci-fi drama. Eastern Ukraine, 2025. A desert unsuitable for human habitation. Water is a dear commodity brought by trucks. A Wall is being build-up on the border. Sergiy, a former soldier, is having trouble adapting to his new reality. He meets Katya while on the Black Tulip mission dedicated to exhuming the past. Together, they try to return to some sort of normal life in which they are also allowed to fall in love again.
Dark yet humanly luminous.
Deborah Young, The Hollywood Reporter
A strong piece of poetically pure art-house cinema that offers a ray of hope for humanity’s future.
Dennis Harvey, Variety
Striking... the film's use of scale to drive home to absurdity of its characters' actions sometimes calls to mind Werner Herzog’s tragicomic existentialism, as well as early silent cinema.
David Robb, Slant Magazine
Atlantis is stunning to watch. Sensitively observed and meticulously crafted. A remarkable piece of filmmaking from an exciting emerging Eastern European voice.
Nikki Baughan, Screen
With a forensic attention to detail, Vasyanovych depicts these harrowing events in stark, matter-of-fact fashion, across 28 carefully composed sequence shots that unfold with a tense, slow-burn efficiency.
Jordan Cronk, Film Comment