Coming Soon
Wednesday, 06 October 2004
A sort-of sequel to Wong’s Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love, the ’60s-set 2046 revisits Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s Chow, now a suave science-fiction writer, to chronicle his various affairs with women (including Faye Wong, Zhang Ziyi, and Gong Li), acting as distractions now that his true love, Mrs. Chen (Maggie Cheung, seen in flashback), has disappeared. Intercutting scenes from Chow’s footloose life—several of these taking place on subsequent Christmas Eves—with scenes from his novel-in-progress, set in the titular year, it’s a film of voluptuous melancholy.
Distributor: Universal
Sunday, 13 October 1963
For the grand occasion of his 300th film role, star Kazuo Hasegawa revisited material that had been a hit for him back in 1935’s Yukinojō henge, here playing both Yamitarō, a cynical thief who provides a running commentary on the events of the film, and Yukitarō, an onnagata (female impersonator) in the kabuki theater who coolly plots his revenge on the men responsible for his parents’ deaths. Ichikawa, who co-wrote the screenplay with wife Natto Wada, renders this late Edo era-set period thriller through jaw-dropping widescreen compositions and delirious color, this rush of pure cinema grounded by Hasegawa’s remarkable, genderfluid performance(s).
Distributor: Janus Films
Sunday, 12 June 1955
A quintet of contemplative short dispatches from the provinces of Sicily that forswear the explanatory narration then de rigeur in documentary—so much the better for viewers to give themselves over to the often hypnotic rhythms of ancient traditions which De Seta found surviving intact in the mid-20th century. Featuring Golden Parable, which depicts the frantic activity of harvesters in Sicily’s flaxen wheat fields; Sea Countrymen and Sulphur Mines, respectively condensed days in the life of a community of tuna fishermen and colliers; Islands of Fire, a lyric portrait of life on a seaside village in the anticipation and aftermath of a volcanic eruption; and Easter in Sicily, in which Christ’s execution and resurrection is festively enacted for the camera.
Parabola d'oro / Golden Parable (1955, 11')
Contadini del mare / Sea Countrymen (1955, 11')
Isole di fuoco / Islands of Fire (1955, 11')
Surfarara / Sulphur Mines (1955, 11')
Pasqua in Sicilia / Easter in Sicily (1955, 10')
Restored by the Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.
Distributor: Janus Films
Thursday, 01 May 1969
An exuberant hodgepodge, mixed-media artist Toshio Matsumoto’s crazy-quilt first feature—he would describe its structure as something like picking up the pieces of a mirror after dropping it on the floor—transposes the Oedipus story to the intersection of Shinjuku’s hippie and “gay boy” subcultures as Eddie (played by the androgynous entertainer Peter) parlays an affair with a local drug dealer into the position of madame at the Club Genet, much to the chagrin of Leda (Osamu Ogasawara), longtime holder of that title. Adding to the general air of giddy artifice and avant-garde experimentation are performances by Zero Jigen and Genpei Akasegawa, two Fluxus-adjacent street theater groups then prominent in Tokyo’s anything-goes underground art scene.
Wednesday, 12 June 1996
Incubated in a ’80s DIY underground of ’zine trading, left-of-the-dial college radio stations, independent labels, and basement shows, what came to be marketed as “grunge” and later “alternative rock” was built to endure just about anything except the catastrophe of world-conquering, arena-filling success. Pray’s Hype! explores, with a wry sense of irony and an obvious affection for the music and musicians depicted, what happens when a corporate feeding frenzy ascends on scenes in which eschewing of the trappings of rock stardom and never selling out have traditionally been points of pride—that is, when it’s not pummeling you with peak-of-powers performances by Nivana, Mudhoney, The Gits, The Melvins, and many more. “Offers a fond chronology of Seattle’s many interconnected bands… Revealingly chronicles the process whereby [a] loud, ragged music evolved from pure, angry excitement into something so easy to sell.” —The New York Times
Distributor: AGFA
Saturday, 12 June 1948
Arriving in the Florida Keys off-season on the eve of a hurricane to fulfill the request of a deceased war buddy, WWII vet Frank McCloud (Humphrey Bogart) pays a visit to his pal’s grieving widow (Lauren Bacall) and her father (Lionel Barrymore) at the hotel owned by the latter, and soon finds himself not only having to endure the battering of the storm but the deadly serious threats of a quintet of Chicago gangsters led by a brutish Edward G. Robinson who, with moll Claire Trevor in tow, hold the hotelier and friends hostage. A film drenched in putrid atmosphere and literally drenched by lashing sheets of rain, tight as a drum, tense as a Mexican standoff, and just about as nasty as postwar film noir gets.
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Friday, 12 June 1998
Irresponsible tabloid sleaze or righteous rabble-rousing exposé? Many things have been said about the films of Broomfield generally, and Kurt & Courtney in particular, but no one has ever called his muckraking documentary about the turbulent beginnings and tragic end of the relationship between Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love “boring.” A plunge into the seedy, dopesick underbelly of the then-still-booming Pacific Northwest rock scene, including a visit with Eldon “El Duce” Hoke, porcine drummer/vocalist of The Mentors, that follows the trails of the various accusations and instigations that cropped up following the discovery of Cobain’s body at 171 Lake Washington Blvd. E in Seattle.
Distributor: Nick Broomfield
Friday, 11 February 1955
Perhaps Ophuls’s supreme cinematic spectacle, his first in widescreen and color, and his final film before his early death at age 54, which makes one yearn to see what else he might have yet been able to do. This Technicolor dazzler dramatizes with great panache and intelligence the life of the infamous nineteenth-century courtesan (Martine Carol), who has been reduced to working as a circus attraction for ringmaster Peter Ustinov, nightly reliving her famous affairs with Franz Liszt and Bavaria’s King Leopold I, which are realized in opulent, garish storybook flashbacks.
Distributor: Janus Films
Monday, 26 August 1991
Weaving grainy black-and-white behind-the-scenes footage with sumptuous full color concert sequences, Madonna: Truth or Dare juxtaposes Madonna’s highly stylized and meticulously executed stage performances with the dizzying chaos of her life on the road (as well as offering glimpses of her baffling relationship with then-beau Warren Beatty, looking sheepish whenever caught on camera.) The highest grossing feature-length documentary of all time upon its release, Madonna: Truth or Dare is a crucial film for generations of the LGBTQ community, exhibiting a degree of honesty and non-judgment toward sexuality rarely seen in mass-market entertainment of the time. It also contains a very funny scene of Madge dunking on Kevin Costner, poster boy for a very different strain of ’90s pop culture.
Distributor: Paramount
Wednesday, 28 June 2006
Mann’s big-screen adaptation of the hit ’80s television series—famously pitched as “MTV Cops”—on which he was executive producer updates the show’s unbuttoned Miami Chic for the mid-aughts, replete with a massive opening needle drop of a Jay-Z and Linkin Park collabo. Sleazy sexy Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx are detectives Crockett and Tubbs, salsa dancing, gliding through the city’s elegant freeways and across Biscayne Bay, loving hard and shooting straight when the time comes. It’s unlikely we’ll get a blockbuster this hot ever again.
Distributor: Universal
Monday, 19 September 2016
Kidnapped and stuffed in a hole without explanation, when Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) is suddenly let loose on the streets after 15 years, he’s stone-cold pissed off. Winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes and an international pop phenomenon, Oldboy was a revenge thriller unlike anything seen before, featuring passages of pure bravura filmmaking (that one-shot hallway donnybrook!) and surreal sicko humor that’ll put you off of sushi for a while.
Distributor: NEON
Thursday, 29 October 1981
Żuławski’s one-of-a-kind genre pastiche has spy Sam Neill returning to his Berlin home from a mission abroad to discover that wife Isabelle Adjani wants suddenly to split up.
Presented in 4K Restoration
Friday, 08 November 2002
Anderson went small and Adam Sandler went serious, and the results were the best work either of them have ever done, a heartfelt little love story inspired by the real-life tale of California’s Pudding Man, starring Sandler as rage-o-holic Barry Egan, Emma Watson as the girl who calms him down, and an unforgettable performance from Philip Seymour “ShutShutShutShutShutUp” Hoffman playing the mattress-monger heavy.
Distributor: Park Circus
Tuesday, 19 April 1994
Reichardt’s deeply assured, darkly comic feature debut, predating her turn to focusing on stories set in the American northwest, takes place in southern Florida, the scene of the director’s own early life. Lisa Bowman plays Cozy, an ennui-plagued housewife who sees her chance to escape a suffocating existence when she falls in with a no-account stoner named Lee (Larry Fessenden) and the two hit the road together, in a film that Reichardt calls “a road movie without the road, a love story without the love, and a crime story without the crime.”
Distributor: Oscilloscope Pictures
Thursday, 12 June 1986
Desired by men, pampered by her indulgent pimp (Jean Sorel), and beloved by her fellow working girls plying their trade in the streets around Les Halles, Rosa “La Rose” (Marianne Basler) has little to complain of in life until tragedy strikes on the eve of her twentieth birthday—this in the form of a love-at-first-sight encounter with Julien (Pierre Cosso), a young worker whose burning ardor will shake her out of the comfortable place she’s found in the ecosystem of “the milieu.” A sparkling new restoration of Vecchiali’s exquisitely controlled melodrama, entirely of its moment in its depiction of 1980s Paris while also infused with the lyrical, freewheeling spirit of the ’30s French cinema that its director was a passionate advocate for.
Restoration courtesy of Radiance Films and the American Genre Film Archive.
Distributor: AGFA
Thursday, 05 May 1983
De Palma’s ultraviolent, ultra-quotable, ultra-colorful, ultra-everything remake of Howard Hawks’s gangster classic is the crass, visually loud flipside to the sober, muted The Godfather, a massively deranged and gleefully disreputable tale of the rise and plunging downfall of a Cuban immigrant turned Miami drug kingpin. Al Pacino throws himself into the title role with the fury of an angry Rottweiler, while Michelle Pfeiffer glowers gorgeously in her breakthrough role as his trophy wife. Featuring cinema’s second most shocking shower scene, a script by Oliver Stone, and a surging soundtrack by Giorgio Moroder, Scarface might just be the film of the Reagan ’80s.
Please note: The screening on Friday, July 11th will be presented on DCP
Distributor: Universal
Saturday, 13 June 1992
Crowe and company started shooting Singles, his genial, light-touch comedy about the romantic flounderings of a group of scruffy Seattle twentysomethings—the cast includes Bridget Fonda, Matt Dillon, Kyra Sedgwick, and Campbell Scott—in May of 1991, a few months before a little album called Nevermind shot to the top of charts and stayed there, sending every A&R man in America scrambling to book flights to the Pacific Northwest with dreams of digging up the next “grunge” sensation. The result is a remarkable document of a provincial, laid-back, somewhat inbred scene seconds away from being bathed in the blinding media spotlight, featuring cameos by a number of soon-to-be-superstars (Alice in Chains, Soundgarden and, playing Dillon’s Citizen Dick band members, Pearl Jam) and a loaded soundtrack boasting two of Paul Westerberg’s finest post-Replacements songs.
Distributor: Park Circus
Tuesday, 15 July 1958
The Rat Pack have their first big-screen outing in small-town Indiana in this adaptation of James Jones’s novel of postwar comedown and disillusion, with Frank Sinatra as ex-GI Dave Hirsch, returning to his sleepy Ohio River hometown where he’ll move between the upstanding world inhabited by his jeweler brother (Arthur Kennedy) and school teacher girlfriend (Martha Hyer), and the party on the other side of the tracks overseen by laid-back gambler Alabama (Dean Martin) and Ginny (Shirley MacLaine), the doting low-class dame who followed Dave into town from Chicago. Reaches heights of cinematic elation in its fairground-by-night climax, and depths of real tragedy in its aftermath. One of the greatest American films of the 1950s.
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Tuesday, 21 July 1981
The inaugural film of Rohmer’s “Comedies and Proverbs” cycle, The Aviator’s Wife is a fleecy farce of romantic overanalysis that finds the director exploring the possibilities of handheld camerawork in following a narrative expression of the opening epigraph: “It is impossible to think of nothing.” A young man sees his girlfriend’s ex leaving her apartment one early morning, and his imagination is off to the races, as stars Philippe Marlaud and Marie Rivière introduce a younger, less perfectly articulate type of Rohmer character than those of the “Moral Tales.” A Metrograph Pictures release.
Wednesday, 20 February 2019
Matthew McConaughey is Moondog, an ageless, unreconstructed party animal/poet barely balancing the demands of a family that includes fed-up well-to-do wife Isla Fisher, living his life in a booze-soaked, blunt-scented Margaritaville of the Mind, struggling with his new novel, and knocking around the Florida Keys with a menagerie of eccentrics that includes Snoop Dogg, Martin Lawrence, a hilarious Zac Efron and, naturally, Jimmy Buffett. An amiably rambling, impeccably vibe-y shaggy-dog comedy from Korine.
Distributor: NEON
Friday, 27 October 2000
Winner of the Golden Lion at Venice and banned in Iran, dissident director Panahi’s shattering drama brings together the stories of several women—two escaped convicts, a girl in need of an abortion, the new mother of a baby girl—to make the compelling case that, for women living under the suffocating strictures of the Islamic Republic, the experience of incarceration is ultimately inescapable. “A stinging, tautly structured indictment of Iranian society told through its women’s eyes.”—Wesley Morris, The Boston Globe
35mm print courtesy of Yale Film Archive
Distributor: Tamasa Distribution
Friday, 12 June 1998
After a detour into the high heady heyday of Sunset Strip hair metal in the second film of her essential social history of rock ’n’ roll in southern California, Spheeris returned to the hardcore punk roots of her first Decline, embedding herself among various groups of gutter punks, ranging in age from their teen to mid-twenties, communally squatting in abandoned real estate in the drabber corners of Greater Los Angeles. The surge of insurgent creative energy in the 1981 Decline has long since dissipated in Part III, leaving behind only a residue of anti-social nihilism and self-loathing—none of the bands seen performing at a Corona-area gig here can make a claim for lasting artistic significance—but Spheeris’s fondness for her subjects remains, making for a surprisingly endearing group portrait of deeply damaged kids eking out something like a life in Dead End America.
Distributor: Avatar Films
Sunday, 01 October 2017
Baker’s extraordinarily humane drama about the tenacity and resourcefulness of youth and lives lived at the fringes of destitution depicts the events of a single summer for unemployed, increasingly desperate single mother (Bria Vinaite), her vivacious six-year-old daughter (Brooklynn Prince), and other residents of “The Magic Castle”—a grotty week-by-week budget motel located just a few highway exits from the family-friendly fantasia of Disney World, overseen by outwardly gruff but tender-hearted manager Bobby (Willem Dafoe, at the peak of his artistry). “To balance joy and desperation as gracefully as Mr. Baker does—to interweave giddiness and heartbreak—is no easy feat.”—The New York Times
Distributor: A24
Sunday, 29 September 1963
Visconti, a committed communist with a taste for lavish luxury who also happened to be a titled Count of the Milanese aristocracy, depicts the overtaking of the class into which he was born by an ascendant bourgeoisie in his opulent adaptation—shot in the colors of burnished old gold by DP Giuseppe Rotunno—of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s posthumously published novel of the same name, set in c.1860 Sicily, starring a regal Burt Lancaster as Don Fabrizio Corbera, the down-on-his-luck Prince of Salina, and Alain Delon as his hotheaded, opportunistic nephew, a blue blood who’s thrown himself behind the cause of Giuseppe Garibaldi and his redshirts in fighting for a new, unified Italy that finally proves no more egalitarian than the old one. “Casts an intelligent spell—intelligent and rapturous… Everything comes to us physically. Visconti suggests Don Fabrizio’s thoughts and feelings by the sweep and texture of his life… Full of marvellous, fluid set-piece sequences.” —Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
Distributor: Janus Films
Wednesday, 15 February 1995
Panahi’s mentor Abbas Kiarostami scripted this, his warm, utterly endearing feature debut and Cannes festival Camera d’Or winner, whose title tributes Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon. It’s Persian New Year, and seven-year-old Razieh begs her mother for money to buy a lucky goldfish. This simple task proves less easy than it would seem, however, as Razieh repeatedly loses her funds and finds misadventures, her wandering the streets of Tehran seen in real time, where even minor incidents take on major import from the perspective of a beguiled, curious child.
Distributor: Janus Films
Tuesday, 13 June 2017
In which Janey-E, noticing that “husband” Dougie Jones has become considerably more fit and trim since his mysterious episode—in fact, his replacement with an amnesiac FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper—rediscovers the joys of the matrimonial bed. In Twin Peaks, Richard Horne continues on his violent spree; the Sheriff’s department, with help from an ailing Log Lady, continue to attempt to decipher a trail of cryptic clues, auguries, and warnings (“There’s fire where you’re going”); and an unhinged Audrey Horne relentlessly henpecks her meek husband, Charlie, demanding he assist in helping her find her missing lover. FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole’s team, who’ve been investigating a savage and wholly inexplicable (double?) murder in Buckhorn, South Dakota, discover a tattoo on the arm of one of the decedents, coordinates that point them towards Twin Peaks, Washington State.
Tuesday, 13 June 2017
In which FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper appears where last we left him, trapped now for 25 years in the Black Lodge, while his psychopathic, stringy-haired doppelgänger leaves a trail of destruction behind him on our terrestrial plane. Escaping the Lodge following a visit to a fortress-like structure towering over a wine-colored sea, Cooper returns to Earth in the body of a second manufactured doppelgänger, or tulpa, called Dougie Jones, a corrupt and debt-riddled employee of the Lucky 7 Insurance agency in Las Vegas, whom he replaces while Jones is shacked up with an escort named Jade. Jade, finding “Jones” (in fact Cooper) disoriented and incoherent, lacking all memory of his identity and the basic niceties of human interaction, drops the seeming idiot at a nearby casino, where he promptly wins 30 megajackpots in a row.
Introduction by Sound and Music Supervisor, Dean Hurley on Saturday, July 5th
Tuesday, 13 June 2017
In which the amnesiac Dale Cooper, having assumed the place of unscrupulous Las Vegas insurance agent Dougie Jones, disarms with his guilelessness all those who would wish ill will upon Jones as payback for his misdeeds or cover-up for their own, while Cooper’s homicidal doppelgänger, having survived an attempt on his life, is reunited with his equally bloodthirsty son, Richard Horne. James Hurley gives a moving performance at the Road House outside of Twin Peaks, and learns of an unusual vision experienced by his cockney co-worker at Great Northern security, Freddie, who will defend James from the attack of a jealous husband with a most unusual strength-enhancing glove. At a local dive, Sarah Palmer, long a confirmed drunk, teaches a rude trucker a lesson he won’t soon forget, or in fact live to remember. The Log Lady, feeling death’s chill, calls Deputy Chief Hawk to bid him goodbye: “My log is turning gold. The wind is moaning.”.
Tuesday, 13 June 2017
In which Dale Cooper’s doppelgänger sends his own son, Richard Horne, to a dreadful death by electrocution before heading for Twin Peaks, there to be shot down by fast-acting receptionist Lucy Moran, his corpse unleashing an orb inhabited by the corrupting spirit of BOB which will subsequently be pummeled into submission by Freddie, a cockney lad who followed a beckoning dream to Twin Peaks, here fulfilling his predestined purpose. The real Cooper, freshly awakened from a coma induced by sticking a fork in an electrical socket, his long-absent memory restored, arrives shortly thereafter, thence to be transported back in time to the night of the murder of Laura Palmer, which brought him to Twin Peaks so many years ago. Preventing the murder and causing a disturbance in the timeline, Cooper eventually finds himself at a diner in Odessa, Texas, where he encounters a waitress who is the spitting image of Palmer. Believing her to be the missing girl, now in middle age, he drives her to the Palmer home in Twin Peaks for a happy family reunion, but our misguided Perceval has not found his Grail. “What… year is it?”
Introduction by Sound and Music Supervisor Dean Hurley on Sunday, July 6th
Tuesday, 13 June 2017
In which an amnesiac FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, having taken the place on Earth of one Dougie Jones, returns to “his” suburban “home” and “wife,” Janey-E, with the proceeds of 30 megajackpots, and attempts to adjust to Jones’s routine at Lucky 7 Insurance as organized crime figures conspire to punish an oblivious Cooper for Jones’s past transgressions. In Twin Peaks, Deputy Chief Hawk and Sheriff Frank Truman—filling in for ailing brother Frank—work on following a lead phoned in by an ailing Log Lady, while Richard Horne, son of Audrey Horne and Cooper’s evil double, spiraling into depravity and addiction, kills a child in a hit-and-run. Further afield FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole and agents Albert Rosenfield and Tammy Rosenfield investigate reports of a sighting of Cooper—the aforementioned doppelgänger—in South Dakota, eventually linking up with his former assistant, the heretofore unseen Diane.
Tuesday, 13 June 2017
In which Deputy Chief Hawk and Sheriff Frank Truman puzzle over clues as to the location of the long-missing FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, while Cooper’s wicked doppelgänger appears to be killed in a shootout in South Dakota with criminal associate Ray Monroe. In White Sands, New Mexico, 1945, the first atomic bomb is detonated. Eleven years later two disheveled woodsmen emerge from the New Mexico desert to violently occupy a local radio station, from which they broadcast the cryptic phrase: “This is the water and this is the well. Drink full and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes and dark within.” A creature, part insect, part bullfrog, freshly hatched from an egg, crawls down the throat of a sleeping young woman. Nine Inch Nails perform. Back in Twin Peaks, Jerry Horne is convinced that his foot is talking.
Pre-screening conversation with Sound and Music Supervisor Dean Hurley on his creative collaboration with David Lynch on Saturday, July 5th
Monday, 12 June 2017
Elliptical, evasive, ingenious in how it deviously ratchets up tension through withholding information, and unrelenting in its sense of queasily mounting anxiety—the fraught soundscapes designed by Jonny Greenwood deserve no small credit here—Ramsay’s tightly wound, at-times absolutely terrifying film stars Joaquin Phoenix as “Joe,” a mercenary hired to bring back the kidnapped underage daughter (Ekaterina Samsonov) of a state senator and inflict maximum damage on the responsible parties as he does so. “Ramsay’s film is not about people; instead it uses them and their bodies to explore American systems of power, and the abuse that develops within. The political, monetary, and sexual forces that cause people to act are on display here, as are the physical consequences of said actions, with all emotion and psychology removed.” —Film Comment
Distributor: Amazon Studios