mdblist.com logo The Best Daniel Kremer Directed Movies


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100
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Love Left the Masquerade: Peter Medak's Cinema of Pretenders (2025)
Peter Medak's films toy with notions of cosplay, masquerade, gamesmanship, and how power and permission structures figure into these human diversions. His filmography includes The Ruling Class (1972), The Changeling (1980), A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1971), The Krays (1990), and others, all which capitalize on these ideas. Sanity is fragile, ephemeral, and suspended from a very thin tether in all his films. This piece gets to the bottom of why Medak centers his work on such themes, and why they carry biographical weight for him personally.
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6.3
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Charles at the Threshold (2006)
Two brainy 18-year-olds, recent high-school graduates with fine future prospects, get married and then divorce one year later at age 19. Charles, a tweed-clad "old soul," must reconcile being a teenage divorcee as he attempts to forge a relationship with a new girlfriend, a young single mother.
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8.4
/17/

A Collection of Chemicals (2009)
Eccentric, bored recent widower Si Foster, a self-proclaimed eggplant connoisseur, is lonely. His daughter Sonya was kidnapped two years prior and, for reasons unknown to her, the ransom somehow wound up never being paid. As the Fourth of July approaches, he finally gets up the nerve to contact the kidnappers and pay the ransom. He is soon reunited with her...only to find that she has accepted her captors as her new family, and has grown to love them as such. Si is clueless and inept in interacting and trying to re-establish his relationship with her. But Sonya has a few tricks up her sleeve to get him to reveal why she was seemingly abandoned two years ago...with the help of some strange cargo she has brought back home with her.
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80
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Dead Neon: The Many Faces of Lenny Bruce on Film (2023)
Lenny Bruce's depiction on film did not start or end with Bob Fosse's Lenny (1974). Through these other often offbeat cinematic incarnations, this essay piece considers how Lenny Bruce was the perfect Bob Fosse subject, and how Fosse's focus on the lives of performers invigorated his portrait of the controversial, trail-blazing comic.
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8.5
/11/

It's a Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie Point (2023)
Worlds collide in this unconventional essay film, when filmmaker, film historian, and archivist Daniel Kremer seamlessly edits Michelangelo Antonioni's legendary but controversial counterculture art film Zabriskie Point (1970) into the same narrative universe as Stanley Kramer's madcap epic comedy extravaganza It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). In creating these new sequences, Kremer comes to recognize that the exercise effortlessly draws cultural and historical parallels in twentieth-century American life that echo in present-day America. The editorial mashups weave a tangled web of social and cinematic history that root our notions of Americana in the mythology of the desert. As Kremer expounds in his narration on these often astonishing and sometimes shocking associations, his very personal ties to the subject matter become manifest.
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7.0
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45
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Ezer Kenegdo (2017)
Frictions develop when Yisroel "Izzy" Jonigkeyt, a Chassidic Jew from Crown Heights, travels to San Francisco to visit Polish-born Catholic friend Marek Wisniewski with the intent of discovering why a Bay Area art-world iconoclast named Harry Kierk seeks to destroy a lifetime's worth of his own work. As the visit progresses, Izzy and Marek discover for the first time that complex historical baggage impinges on their curious friendship and, soon, they begin to understand why Kierk is driven towards destruction. Continued encounters with Marek's vaguely anti-Semitic cousin Irek (who is their only gateway to contact Kierk) only compound these tensions.
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7.8
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55
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100
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100
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Overwhelm the Sky (2019)
Eddie Huntly, an east coast radio personality, moves to San Francisco to marry Thea, the sister of his best friend Neil, a successful entrepreneur. Shortly before Eddie's arrival, Neil is found murdered in what the police surmise was a simple mugging gone awry. As the sullen Eddie steps in as interim host of his old friend Dean's late-night talk-radio show, he obsessively makes regular visits to the forested spot where Neil's corpse was found. One such visit unleashes a chain of unpredictable events that sends Eddie snooping into the life of a sleepwalking drifter with a mysterious past.
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9.0
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Sophisticated Acquaintance (2007)
Mixing elements of narrative, experimental, pseudo-documentary and essayist cinema, Sophisticated Acquaintance tells the story of a tormented individual whose short life and long death were affected by a great many factors. Klaus Mann (John Gross), a present-day Philadelphia avatar of the real-life European author of Mephisto, lives in the shadow of his father, the eminent intellectual, novelist and Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann (Ernst Hohmann). When Klaus pens a controversial essay on "revolutionary suicide" and then acts on it, in protest of the world's selfishness, a group of his contemporaries speak up in filmed interviews about what led him down that path. It is a film about the creative process, the tragic depiction of a strained father-son relationship and, most of all, it is a film about individuality.
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7.4
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36
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90
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Raise Your Kids on Seltzer (2015)
A husband-and-wife pair of retired cult deprogrammers experience marital strife when their past catches up with them.
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8.1
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70
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A Trip to Swadades (2008)
Shot on black-and-white super-16mm, A Trip to Swadades tells the story of a 74-year-old ex-professor named Schweitzer Haas who, after many years of living away from Philadelphia, the city where he came of age, returns to visit his hermit brother Ezra who has perfected his freakish steel-trap memory. As a result, however, his apartment has become an unlivable and unsanitary place. He goes out to find some cleaning supplies, only to find himself lost in a city he no longer knows. By shear happenstance, he bumps into an old friend, a world-class cut-up, who takes him to a place of importance to their past. There, Schweitzer realizes he must reconcile with the brother he has not spoken to and has refused to understand for most of his life.
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8.1
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A Simple Game of Catch (2012)
A young woman named Emily has just arrived in New York from Pittsburgh and has recently changed her name to Chazz. Jobless, she responds to an ad involving parrot-sitting for a Manhattanite going out of town, and must weather the emotional repercussions of the humiliating thing she decides to do while cooped up house-sitting, which precipitates in her eavesdropping on the neighbors, all the while having unreciprocated conversations with the parrot.
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8.1
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70
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The Idiotmaker's Gravity Tour (2011)
Max Plugin is a jaded but flamboyant relic of the 1960s. In his teens, Max ran away to California, where he met Teschlock, a charismatic ascetic and guru renowned among a small group of young followers. At that time, when Teschlock asked Max to join him and his disciples on an ashram in India, Max declined and returned home. Now, forty years later, at age 57, Max takes a journey to India to find Teschlock's grave-site, and also himself. His adventures in India, and his Castaneda-esque experiences back home, form the heart of this very unusual road movie.
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Now, Irving Rapper (2026)
Irving Rapper is, in many ways, Hollywood's forgotten man. After getting his start as a "dialogue director" at Warner Bros. in the mid 30's, he became synonymous with the studio's "women's pictures" and rose in prominence as one of Bette Davis's most consistent collaborators, including on her biggest commercial success, Now Voyager (1942). He was a rebel who led the studio in suspensions for chronically refusing to direct the scripts handed to him by the brass, waiting instead for material that better suited his interests and thematic preoccupations. He was also one in a secretive fraternity of gay directors who had to conceal their identities and shield their private lives from potential public ruination. Daniel Kremer takes you through an unexamined and misunderstood life of a man of great artistic inclination who expressed his innermost yearnings covertly through his work in motion pictures.
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Cruel, Usual, Necessary: The Passion of Silvio Narizzano (2024)
Perhaps at first glance, the filmography of Silvio Narizzano appears unremarkable. Thanks to his sleeper hit Georgy Girl (1966), he's known largely as a "one-hit wonder" director. Upon closer inspection, however, likely no other filmmaker used cinema as effectively to exorcise personal demons in ways both ugly and beautiful. And few directors' sensibilities were more gay, both overtly and covertly. Film historian Daniel Kremer is your tour guide through an obscure, perplexing body of work heretofore ignored and often unfairly shunned. Cruel, Usual, Necessary: The Passion of Silvio Narizzano is an essay documentary of discovery.
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Clear Lines of Sight: Sidney J. Furie at Paramount (2023)
Canadian-born filmmaker Sidney J. Furie made his name with British hits like The Young Ones (1961), The Leather Boys (1964), and The Ipcress File (1965). When he arrived in Hollywood, Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra wreaked havoc on his first major studio productions. In 1968, the newly emigrated director joined a stable of cutting-edge filmmakers at Paramount Pictures, under the new leadership of Bob Evans. His films saw both a stylistic departure and a shift in thematic focus. What was behind the evolution, and which aspects unite all of Furie's films?
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The Great Ecstasy of Tree-Climber Otto, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Late Preminger (2022)
Otto Preminger wasn't only one of the most famous directors of classic Hollywood. He was a presence, a brand, and the only one who rivaled Hitchcock as the greatest showman and self-promoter of his generation. But toward the end of his career, his attempts to "get with the times" (with films like Skidoo, Tell Me That You Love Me Junie Moon, Such Good Friends, Hurry Sundown, and others) shocked, alienated, and outright repelled audiences. What happened to Otto and how can one best appreciate and enjoy those confounding later works?
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Elective Vicissitudes: The Radical Exiles of Jules Dassin (2023)
In 1968, filmmaker Jules Dassin collaborated with Ruby Dee and civil rights activist Julian Mayfield on Uptight, a "politically radical" film noir about Black revolution, framed against the April 4 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Director, producer and co-writer Dassin, a blacklisted American exile, returns to his birth country after having gone into a second exile from his adopted country Greece, then makes a film that roiled the powers that be (or "powers that were") in the U.S. government. The material so upset the FBI that they closely monitored the production up until the eve of its premiere, recruiting crew members as moles. The irony is rich, as Uptight was a remake of John Ford's The Informer (1935) and dealt with a turncoat character who engineers the assassination of a revolutionary leader. How is Uptight both an outlier (or anomaly) as well as simultaneously integral to the career of Jules Dassin?
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Jack of Three Trades: In Focus on Nicholson the Director (2024)
We all know Jack Nicholson the actor. But few know the history of Jack Nicholson the screenwriter, and especially Jack Nicholson the director. Nicholson's lifelong friend, filmmaker Henry Jaglom, reflects on the icon's behind-the-camera career, while film historian/filmmaker Daniel Kremer presents and analyzes the full scope of that history.
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The Brando Interregnum: The Decade of Marlon's Dirty Dozen 1962-1972 (2022)
Between One Eyed Jacks (1961) and The Godfather (1972), Marlon Brando appeared in twelve feature films. The actor called this period his "F*** You Years" and it was during this time that his on-set behavior hit erratic and unpredictable new heights. The qualities of the roles and the films themselves vary, but this video essay examines the historical and aesthetic profiles of this cinematic so-called "dirty dozen." Were these projects really beneath him? And what led him to this decade of perceived ignominy?
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Equinox Expressway (2022)
An experimental short, mixing 8mm, super-8, 16mm, and iPhone video. On a trek through a rare California snowfall on a highway between L.A. and San Francisco, portals and wormholes develop in the image itself, the canvas shifts, and surprises present themselves as anomalies within the frame.
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Looking to Get Out: A Comparative Analysis of the Ted Kotcheff Vision (2022)
What do the movies First Blood and Weekend at Bernie's have in common? One man with a clear and curious thematic focus, that's what. Ted Kotcheff is an auteur filmmaker. He is a director with a unifying style, a clear thematic concern, and a coherent vision of life. This video essay defines these elements with an in-depth analysis of his filmography, which also includes Wake in Fright (1971), The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), Fun with Dick and Jane (1976), North Dallas Forty (1979), and many others.
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Ammo for Shooting Clouds: John G. Avildsen Before Rocky (2022)
John G. Avildsen has only recently cemented his reputation as the "king of the underdogs," owing to his having directed both Rocky (1976) and The Karate Kid (1984). Within the last decade, a feature-length biographical documentary was released and a critical study book was published. But before Rocky, he was an astute chronicler of the counterculture, whose films possessed a rugged street aesthetic. Those early films (including Joe, Guess What We Learned in School Today, Cry Uncle, Save the Tiger, and The Stoolie) are evaluated for assuming an alternate posture on the counterculture happenings of the era.
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Survival Scars: Franklin J. Schaffner as Auteur (2023)
Franklin J. Schaffner is the man behind a great many iconic American films: Planet of the Apes (1968), Patton (1970), Papillon (1973), The Boys from Brazil (1978), and others. Though he was an often enigmatically quiet but no less confident and decisive filmmaker, seldom was he discussed as an "auteur" director, despite his Academy Award win for Best Director and many august institutions naming coveted awards for "excellence in directing" after him. Daniel Kremer takes a deep dive into Schaffner's distinguished career, examining visual and thematic tropes that render his work extremely personal and part of a vast picture.
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Cinema of the Pilpul: A Talmudic View of Early Holocaust Cinema (2023)
The most that mainstream culture knows of the Talmud is from the finale scene of Schindler's List, when Yitzchok Stern hands Oskar Schinder an engraved gold ring that reads, "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire." But how can Talmudic wisdom be additionally applied to the Holocaust, specifically how the tragedies of the Holocaust are depicted in cinema? Daniel Kremer, a film historian (and one-time observant/Chasidic Jew), takes a deep dive into both Jewish scholarship and what the cinema itself is capable of capturing, for once and for all time.
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La Vie en Gris: The Anglophone Louis Malle in Seven Pictures (2022)
Filmmaker Louis Malle worked adjacent to the French Nouvelle Vague, but was admittedly never fully part of it, cementing his reputation instead with films like Elevator to the Gallows (1958), Zazie dans le Metro (1960), and Murmur of the Heart (1971), among others. In 1978, he made his first English-language picture, the highly controversial Pretty Baby, produced by Paramount Pictures. For the next decade and a half, he continued working in the English language, mostly in the United States, with films as varied as Atlantic City (1980), My Dinner With Andre (1981), Crackers (1983), Alamo Bay (1985), Damage (1992), and Vanya on 42nd Street (1992). What distinguishes these seven Anglophone films from Malle's previous Francophone films? And when Louis Malle arrived to make pictures in America, what did he see? What did America mean to Louis Malle?
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Paralyzed Segments: Suzanne Pleshette Tangled Up in Codes (2022)
A video essay about fifties and early sixties social and sexual mores, in life and in cinema, and how these "codes" (in partnership with a production Code, capital C, which was almost antediluvian in terms of sexual politics) molded and then trapped the female performers who came up in the shadow of it all. Suzanne Pleshette is a perfect case in point.
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Even Just
Jerry, an ambulance-chasing lawyer (and 8mm film hobbyist), lapses into a deep depression after he is scammed out of his retirement savings. His intense love of W.C. Fields, of whom he does impersonations, and his commitment to both his mixed-up half-sister Karen (who is going deaf and learning sign language) is the only thing keeping him from suicide.
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Countercurrents
Traumatized by his recent divorce, lovelorn Stanley takes off cross country to San Francisco, landing at his enterprising sister Nancy's doorstep. Nancy, who makes counterculture cinema-themed t-shirts, lives in "Camille's Castle," a frozen-in-time legacy home for displaced artists and outcasts. Together, they search for the remaining scraps of San Francisco's Summer of Love, and wind up at odds with each other. Countercurrents is an aggressive tribute to the counterculture films of the late 60's, with "easter eggs" in no short supply.
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Sidney J. Furie: Fire Up the Carousel!
This full-length documentary examines the life and career of the Toronto-born filmmaker Sidney J. Furie, a journey that spans over 60 years, from Canada to London and finally to Hollywood. In the midst of the Furie's own remembrances, he directs two last personal projects, shot digitally on shoestring budgets, from the first solo scripts he has written since 1961. 'Drive Me to Vegas and Mars' is a comedy about aging and letting go, while 'Hannah Cohen' is a Holocaust-themed love story set and shot in Israel. Sidney J. Furie: Fire Up the Carousel is an intimate portrait of a unique, prolific, and quietly influential filmmaker, a man with an impressive resumé who has stood behind the camera on great films such as The Ipcress File (1965), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), The Boys in Company C (1978), The Leather Boys (1964), The Entity (1982), The Appaloosa (1966), Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), and many others.


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