Browse Movies : IFC Films : 2017 : NR

Henry and Dianne are on the verge of settling down but are tempted to stray. After a wild single night on the town, the couple discovers they are capable of surprising things.

Citizen Jane: Battle for the City is a story about our global urban future, in which nearly three-fourths of the world’s population will live in cities by the end of this century. It’s also a story about America’s recent urban past, in which bureaucratic, “top down” approaches to building cities have dramatically clashed with grassroots, “bottom up” approaches. The film brings us back mid-century, on the eve of the battles for the heart and soul of American cities, about to be routed by cataclysmically destructive Urban Renewal and highway projects.

The film details the revolutionary thinking of Jane Jacobs, and the origins of her magisterial 1961 treatise The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she singlehandedly undercuts her era’s orthodox model of city planning, exemplified by the massive Urban Renewal projects of New York’s “Master Builder,” Robert Moses. Jacobs and Moses figure centrally in our story as archetypes of the “bottom up” and the “top down” vision for cities.

They also figure as two larger-than-life personalities: Jacobs—a journalist with provincial origins, no formal training in city planning, and scarce institutional authority—seems at first glance to share little in common with Robert Moses, the upper class, high prince of government and urban theory fully ensconced in New York’s halls of power and privilege. Yet both reveal themselves to be master tacticians who, in the middle of the 20th century, became locked in an epic struggle over the fate of the city.

On a June night in 1912, eight people—a mother, father, their four children, and two guests—were murdered by an axe-wielding killer in the sleepy town of Villisca, Iowa, a case that remains unsolved to this day. 104 years later, Caleb (Robert Adamson) and Denny (Jarrett Sleeper), two friends who share an interest in ghost hunting, along with Jess (Alex Frnka), the new girl in school who’s already got a reputation, sneak into the house where the infamous bloodbath occurred in hopes of recording paranormal activity. What the trio encounters is far more horrifying than anything they could have imagined. A century after the shocking crime that put Villisca on the map, a supernatural force is waiting to write the next chapter in the home’s bloody history.

Director Alexandre O. Philippe pulls back the curtain on the making and influence of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho's cinematic game changer, breaking it down frame by frame and unpacking Hitchcock’s dense web of allusions and double meanings.

The documentary takes viewers into the warzone of ISIS-occupied Syria, where a band of anonymous activists known as Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently wage a counteroffensive against the terrorist group’s campaign of propaganda and misinformation. Armed with video cameras, these intrepid citizen journalists risk their lives to spread the truth about life under ISIS.