Metrograph

Tuesday, 25 September 1984

“One, two, Freddy’s comin’ for you…” The movie that made bedtime a source of anguish and anxiety for a generation of kids who were probably too young to be watching it, Craven’s Nightmare introduced the world to Robert Englund’s disfigured, knife glove-wielding, wisecrack-slinging Freddy Krueger, the guilty conscience of a sunny California suburb who, burned to death in the boiler room of its high school by the outraged parents of Elm Street as punishment for his many transgressions, has returned to pick off their teenaged children, one by one, by visiting them in deadly dreams. Briskly cut by editors Patrick McMahon, ACE, and Rick Shaine, ACE, Nightmare keeps the jump scares coming right up to a terrifying finale that’s the very epitome of a rude awakening.

Distributor: Park Circus

Friday, 19 September 1952

“Blowing out birthday candles. Unwrapping a candy. Feeding chickens. Dancing with the tremors of Parkinson’s. Searching for one’s namesakes across the internet. Bringing together works by moving image artists Kevin Jerome Everson, Barbara Hammer, Margaret Tait, Sarah Friedland, Wen Hui, Simone Forti, and John Smith, the seven short films across this program present an assemblage of the everyday gestures and movements of older adults, refracted across a range of moving image forms from dance for camera to experimental essay film.” —Sarah Friedland

Ninety-Three (2008) - Kevin Jerome Everson

Dance with Third Grandmother (2015) - Wen Hu

A Portrait of Ga (1952) - Margaret Tait

Home Exercises (2017) - Sarah Friedland

Being John Smith (2024) - John Smith

Sleep Walkers/Zoo Mantras (2017) - Simone Forti

Optic Nerve (1985) - Barbara Hammer

Post-screening discussion featuring filmmakers Sarah Friedland and Wen Hui on Saturday, October 18th

Saturday, 19 September 1998

Schmid spins a cracking thriller out of the real case of Karl Koch, aka “hagbard,” a West German hacker prodigy who put his talents to use for the KGB in the waning years of the Cold War, the circumstances surrounding his death in 1989 at age 23—officially ruled a suicide—continuing to stir up debate to this day. August Diehl (Inglorious Basterds, A Hidden Life), in his breakthrough role, took home Best Lead Actor at the German Film Awards for his compelling, increasingly harried performance as Koch, who we follow from revolutionary idealism into a spiral of disillusion, monomaniacal obsession, persecution complex jitters, and addiction, crumbling under the pressure applied to him by his handlers and the chickens-coming-home-to-roost consequences of his hacktivism. (And remember: just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you…)

Tuesday, 25 September 1984

“One, two, Freddy’s comin’ for you…” The movie that made bedtime a source of anguish and anxiety for a generation of kids who were probably too young to be watching it, Craven’s Nightmare introduced the world to Robert Englund’s disfigured, knife glove-wielding, wisecrack-slinging Freddy Krueger, the guilty conscience of a sunny California suburb who, burned to death in the boiler room of its high school by the outraged parents of Elm Street as punishment for his many transgressions, has returned to pick off their teenaged children, one by one, by visiting them in deadly dreams. Briskly cut by editors Patrick McMahon, ACE, and Rick Shaine, ACE, Nightmare keeps the jump scares coming right up to a terrifying finale that’s the very epitome of a rude awakening.

Distributor: Park Circus

Q&A with editors Patrick McMahon, ACE and Rick Shaine, ACE moderated by Nick Taylor of the Nick Taylor Horror Show podcast on Friday, October 24th

Wednesday, 19 September 1979

The first film in Chahine’s epochal autobiographical tetralogy, a dramatic departure from the musicals and melodramas that he’s made his name with, introduces the director’s alter ego, Yehia (Mohsen Mohieddin), as a movie-mad teenage schoolboy with aspirations of growing up to be an actor in a World War II-era Alexandria where British and Egyptian troops are bracing themselves to stave off the advancing Germans. Deftly weaving together personal and national history, Chahine produces a teeming tapestry of a film; figures found herein include blundering would-be guerrillas, the brother of a Pasha who falls in love with the Englishman he’s marked for execution, a Muslim communist facing exile with his Jewish lover, and his lover’s father, who leaves Alexandria behind for the relative peace of Palestine.

Distributor: Janus Films

Introduction by Alia Ayman on Sunday, October 19th

Tuesday, 19 September 1989

The third entry in Chahine’s autobiographical Alexandria Tetralogy finds Yehia (played, again, by Chahine himself) enjoying new international recognition but at another personal crossroads: at loggerheads with his favorite actor, Amr (Amr Abdel Gelil); unable to work due to a strike that has brought an already-in-crisis Egyptian film industry to a standstill; and preoccupied by a beguiling young actress and activist, Nadia (Youssra), whom he envisions casting in the role of Cleopatra, among other things. A funny, freewheeling, fleet-footed young man’s film from sixtysomething Chahine, who employs animated interludes, musical numbers, and other sleights of cinema in a movie that fairly vibrates with love for the medium itself.

Distributor: Janus Films

Sunday, 19 September 1982

Analogous to Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz in that it hinges on a near-death experience serving as an opportunity for taking stock of one’s life, the second film in Chahine’s autobiographical Alexandria Tetralogy opens with the director’s alter ego, Yehia—now played by Chahine himself—on the operating table before open-heart surgery in London (where Chahine had undergone the same procedure in 1973), imagining himself called upon to justify his life to date before a tribunal that takes place inside his own chest cavity. The survey of Yehia’s personal history—including a controversy-courting dalliance with a male chauffeur in the UK—offer sidelong glimpses of an all-but-disappeared cosmopolitan Alexandria of yesteryear, with Chahine’s profound affection for his vanishing hometown making this a deeply moving memory piece.

Distributor: Janus Films

Introduction by Alia Ayman on Sunday, October 19th

Sunday, 19 September 1965

Born out of a commitment to the idea that it’s never too early to introduce kids to the pleasures of movies made outside of the commercial mainstream—and the suspicion that young audiences are often more open-minded and curious than their elders when it comes to such matters—Metrograph presents the latest iteration of Art Cinema for Tots, a celebration of handcrafted, kid-friendly films that reconcile the smart and the silly. In this edition, join us up, up, up in the air, with a suite of enchanting, high-flying shorts, led off by Albert Lamorisse’s much-homaged children’s classic The Red Balloon, about a sentient balloon that trails a young boy through the streets of 1950s Paris.

The Red Balloon(Albert Lamorisse, 1965, 34 min, 35mm)

Free admission with online RSVP for children under 8 years old. Each child must be accompanied by at least one adult with a purchased ticket. Please add one 'free' ticket per child during the checkout.

Saturday, 15 July 1978

A tale you’ll know well—innocent girl presents herself as sacrifice to a cursed, freakish beast living in isolation, and learns to live with and love her captor—but turned into something very, very different in Herz’s morbid imagining. Reworking well-known source material into this dark, grimly atmospheric fable, Herz defamiliarizes it, imagining a beaked bird/snake/mammal hybrid Beast unlike any seen on screen before, and overlaying the proceedings with a heavy air of impending doom, the sense of real danger that’s missing from better-known versions, the possibility of violence looming constantly close at hand.

North American Distributor: Severin Films

All films restored by Národní filmový archiv, Prague, supported by The Czech Audiovisual Fund. Special thanks to Juraj Machálek and Lucia Petříková.

Introduction by actor Iva Janžurová on Saturday, October 25th

Friday, 19 September 1958

Chahine made his name on the international festival circuit with this brooding noirish drama, in which the director himself gives a remarkable performance as a dull-witted newspaper vendor who returns home to a squalid shack papered with pinups after putting in his hours at the titular railroad hub, his smoldering infatuation with a sexy lemonade saleswoman (Hind Rostom) building slowly to an uncontrollable conflagration that will consume them both. A work without precedent, in both formal and thematic daring, in Egyptian popular cinema. With Cairo as Seen by Chahine, a city symphony film that doubles as a self-portrait of its maker, commissioned by French television and banned in Egypt for its warts-and-all depiction of the capital city.

Distributor: Janus Films

New York theatrical premiere of the new 4K restoration by Janus Films/The Criterion Collection.

Introduction by Alia Ayman on Friday, October 17th

Monday, 08 January 1973

“The Last of the Independents” is how Charley Varrick (Walter Matthau) bills his sideline crop-dusting business; as for orchestrating meticulously planned bank robberies, his true passion and principal source of income… well, that he doesn’t advertise. A stick-up job in New Mexico lands Charley and his hothead young partner (Andrew Robinson, Dirty Harry’s “Scorpio”) the payday of a lifetime, but because the haul happens to be mob money, they also get a hulking sadist named “Molly” (Joe Don Baker) dogging their steps, out for blood. A taut thriller pitting brains against brawn, and a film which has a great deal to tell us about how the contentious Siegel viewed his relationship with the industry in which he toiled.

Distributor: Universal

Tuesday, 25 September 2012

While in the midst of preparing to make a film about the creeping encroachments into personal privacy by the post-9/11 national security apparatus, Poitras was contacted by an anonymous figure identifying himself only as “Citizen Four.” A few months later she was in Hong Kong meeting with her mysterious correspondent, none other than Edward Snowden, the former NSA subcontractor turned whistleblower, and this filmed meeting and subsequent encounters produced one of the most lauded nonfiction films of the 2010s, essential viewing for anyone concerned with the ceding of our rights to various intelligence programs in the dubious name of “safety.” “More than just an unsettling bulletin from the blurry front lines of American intelligence’s surveillance campaign. It’s a stirring, sophisticated work of cinema verité, a virtuoso feat of high-tension interview editing.” —Film Comment

Distributor: Lionsgate

Wednesday, 25 September 2019

The 1953 Iranian coup d’état that removed democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh from power, orchestrated by the CIA and the United Kingdom’s MI6, is dramatically reconsidered in this riveting investigative documentary by Amirani who, in the course of his research with co-writer and editor Walter Murch, uncovered long-unseen 16mm archival footage and documentation throwing new light on the putsch… and its repercussions more than 70 years later. Politically provocative and formally inventive, with Ralph Fiennes playing the role of MI6’s Norman Darbyshire, a key player in the backroom conspiracy. “[Murch] worked on The Conversation and The Godfather: Part II so there’s not much that he doesn’t know about conspiracy—how it leaks into a movie like the smell of drains.” —The New Yorker

Saturday, 25 September 1965

Nayla (Sanaa Gamil), the much put-upon 40-year-old wife of an upper middle-class lush (played by Chahine himself), finds her existence upended when she starts to fall for a 22-year-old working-class student, Tariq (Saif Abdelrahman), in Chahine’s masterful melodrama of forbidden love and class conflict in the period leading to the Egyptian revolution of 1952, a peerless portrait of the bourgeoisie caste of Cairo as seen, unbeknownst to themselves, in the twilight of their venal decadence, featuring luxe, frigidly elegant photography that’s drawn comparisons to the films of Douglas Sirk courtesy of formidable cinematographer Abdel-Aziz Fahmy.

Distributor: Janus Films

Wednesday, 19 September 1979

Siegel’s fifth and final teaming with star Clint Eastwood, by then an established director in his own right, is the closest an American prison break thriller ever came to the absorbing, process-driven, largely dialogue-free approach to the subject matter found in Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped. Eastwood plays the real-life Frank Morris, who, along with brothers John and Clarence Anglin (here Fred Ward and Jack Thibeau), became the only three men to have successfully escaped the confines of the federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island, the year before its 1963 closure. The FBI concluded to their satisfaction that the men had drowned in San Francisco Bay, closing the case in the year that Siegel’s film was released, though the film itself seems less than certain…

Distributor: Paramount

Thursday, 15 July 1982

Doctor Marek (Jiří Menzel) is shocked to lose his ambulance driver, Mima (Dagmar Veškrnová), to a job working as a rally driver for foreign car manufacturer Ferat, and even more shocked when he hears whispers that Ferat cars use human blood for their fuel. Beset by censors, Ferat Vampire emerged with its blood-bathed dream sequence intact, as well as with a disturbing industrial soundtrack and a piquant performance by Zdenka Procházková as Madame Ferat, a kind of Countess Elizabeth Báthory as industrialist. A satire on consumerism, a potent piece of anti-automobile propaganda, and perhaps the purest horror exercise that Herz produced.

North American Distributor: Severin Films

All films restored by Národní filmový archiv, Prague, supported by The Czech Audiovisual Fund. Special thanks to Juraj Machálek and Lucia Petříková.

Wednesday, 29 August 1990

A sleeper phenom that would become the top-grossing film of 1990, Zucker’s irresistible, poignant supernatural romance has Patrick Swayze as the titular spirit, a Manhattan banker slain in what appeared to be a random stick-up who enlists the aid of Oda Mae Brown (Whoopi Goldberg), a charlatan psychic startled to discover she’s actually the real thing, in order to inform his bereaved girlfriend, ceramic artist Molly (Demi Moore), that his killer is now out looking for her. Swayze and Moore have enough crackling chemistry to elevate potential schmaltz to the level of the sublime, aided considerably by Maurice Jarre’s swooning score (and a little help from The Righteous Brothers) as well as Goldberg’s Academy Award-winning performance, a rare custom fit for her unclassifiable comic talents. (Walter Murch, as editor, scooped a nomination of his own.)

Distributor: Paramount

Tuesday, 28 January 2003

The Fu-Ho Grand, a movie palace in Taipei, is closing its doors. Its valedictory screening: King Hu’s 1967 wuxia epic Dragon Inn, playing to a motley smattering of spectators, including two stars of Hu’s original opus, Miao Tien and Shih Chun, watching their younger selves with tears in their eyes.

Saturday, 19 September 1959

“Commissioned to create a tourism film celebrating Hanoi’s attractions, Trần Văn Thuỷ instead made Hanoi Through Whose Eyes?, a melancholic meditation on the capital, considering official narratives of ancient elegance alongside the reality of long welfare lines and neglected monuments. Trần’s essayistic visual time capsule comprises prominent intellectuals, artists, and musicians, including the blind musician Văn Vương and painter Bùi Xuân Phái. Initially censored, the film was later rehabilitated, earning critical acclaim and the state’s Golden Lotus prize. This program opens with The Fox Deserved It and The Talking Bird, two shorts from the Vietnam Animation Film Studio, where animators trained by distinguished artists created allegorical tales about anti-colonial struggle for children.” —Minh Nguyen

Tuesday, 30 September 1997

Hong Kong cinema superstars Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung play a pair of lovers living out the waning days of their relationship as expatriates in Buenos Aires. Lusty tango bars, the salsa music of the La Boca sidewalks, and a hypnotic visit to the nearby Iguazu Falls give further dimension to the tensions growing between the two. Winner of the Best Director prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, Wong’s Happy Together is a stunning display of filmmaking style and a touching story of love on the brink of dissolution.

Distributor: Janus Films

Wednesday, 19 September 2018

Annie Graham (Toni Collette) has just buried her mother, but this is only the beginning of the travails that will face the Grahams—Annie’s husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne), their 16-year-old son Peter (Alex Wolff), and their 13-year-old daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro)—in Aster’s occult horror/family tragedy, which begins its litany of punishments with an accident involving a slice of chocolate cake, a moving car, and a telephone pole, and scarcely lets up from there. The Graham home, a character in the film in its own right—as well as the adjacent treehouse where Hereditary has its nauseating climax and the meticulous dollhouse miniatures that sculptor Annie creates—were all purpose-built by production designer Grace Yun and her team, giving this film about congenital curses the hermetic quality of a closed system in which its characters are unknowingly and inescapably trapped.

Distributor: A24

Sunday, 25 September 2005

Wynn Thomas’s production design makes palpable the air of desperation in the Depression-era United States, where New Jersey boxer James J. Braddock (Russell Crowe, exuding gentle decency in the role of the former light heavyweight champ) inspires a nation with his hardscrabble rise from the depths of poverty to a shot at a title belt. A willful throwback to old-fashioned, red-blooded, meat-and-potatoes Hollywood melodrama, anchored by exceptional performances from Crowe; from Renée Zellweger, as Braddock’s squeamish but devoted wife; and from Paul Giamatti as Braddock’s friend and manager, Joe Gould.

“Cinderella Man is the story of James Braddock, a boxer, and his family. It takes place during the height of the Depression. It’s a very dramatic and emotional story. I decided to design the emotion in the story, not the reality. I wanted to take the viewer on an emotional journey, not a realistic one.” —Wynn Thomas

Distributor: Universal

Q&A by production designer Wynn Thomas moderated by Sheril Antonio, Arts Professor and Associate Dean, Tisch School of the Arts, on Sunday, October 26th

Wednesday, 19 September 2018

Annie Graham (Toni Collette) has just buried her mother, but this is only the beginning of the travails that will face the Grahams—Annie’s husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne), their 16-year-old son Peter (Alex Wolff), and their 13-year-old daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro)—in Aster’s occult horror/family tragedy, which begins its litany of punishments with an accident involving a slice of chocolate cake, a moving car, and a telephone pole, and scarcely lets up from there. The Graham home, a character in the film in its own right—as well as the adjacent treehouse where Hereditary has its nauseating climax and the meticulous dollhouse miniatures that sculptor Annie creates—were all purpose-built by production designer Grace Yun and her team, giving this film about congenital curses the hermetic quality of a closed system in which its characters are unknowingly and inescapably trapped.

Distributor: A24

Introduction by production designer Grace Yun on Saturday, October 18th

Wednesday, 25 September 1996

Inspired by a 1962 trading card series from Topps that fired a young Burton’s morbid imagination, this blackly funny special effects–heavy comedy—its stacked cast including, among others, Jack Nicholson, Martin Short, Pam Grier, Sylvia Sidney, Jerzy Skolimowski, Pierce Brosnan, and, yes, Tom Jones—bears gleeful witness to the carnage that follows a Martian landing, a massacre that only Slim Whitman’s “Indian Love Call” can bring to abatement. A festival of inspired, antic destruction, with production designer Wynn Thomas evidently having a blast playing up the excesses of mid-century Jet Age chic design and, at one point, paying homage to the famous War Room set of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.

“Mars Attacks! was based on a series of graphic comics from the 1950-60s. The challenge in designing the film was finding an approach that could pull all of the visual elements together so that there would be some consistency in the look of the film.” —Wynn Thomas

Introduction by production designer Wynn Thomas on Sunday, October 26th

Distributor: Park Circus

Thursday, 06 July 2023

Nora and Hae Sung, close childhood friends in Seoul, see their bond broken when Nora’s family emigrated from South Korea to Canada. After two decades of separation and sporadic meet-ups, they’re reunited in New York as adults (Greta Lee and Teo Yoo) for one fateful week, together confronting questions about destiny, love, fate, regret, and the irrevocable choices that shape a life in playwright Song’s tender, intimate feature debut. “Song draws you into her characters’ worlds seamlessly… In a sense it’s a time-travel movie, because even as the two characters keep moving forward, they remain inexorably tethered to the past, which means it’s also a story about everyday life.”—Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

Distributor: A24

Q&A with production designer Grace Yun moderated by IndieWire Craft Editor Sarah Shachat on Saturday, October 18th

Wednesday, 25 September 1996

Inspired by a 1962 trading card series from Topps that fired a young Burton’s morbid imagination, this blackly funny special effects–heavy comedy—its stacked cast including, among others, Jack Nicholson, Martin Short, Pam Grier, Sylvia Sidney, Jerzy Skolimowski, Pierce Brosnan, and, yes, Tom Jones—bears gleeful witness to the carnage that follows a Martian landing, a massacre that only Slim Whitman’s “Indian Love Call” can bring to abatement. A festival of inspired, antic destruction, with production designer Wynn Thomas evidently having a blast playing up the excesses of mid-century Jet Age chic design and, at one point, paying homage to the famous War Room set of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.

“Mars Attacks! was based on a series of graphic comics from the 1950-60s. The challenge in designing the film was finding an approach that could pull all of the visual elements together so that there would be some consistency in the look of the film.” —Wynn Thomas

Distributor: Park Circus

Saturday, 15 July 1972

Working from a 1929 novel by the Russian fantasist Aleksandr Grin, Herz crafted this Gothic drama about two sisters, Klára and Viktoria—both played by Iva Janžurová, in an amazing double-role performance—put at loggerheads when the sweet, vapid Klára receives both the better part of their father’s sprawling estate and the love of the man that Viktoria adores, leading the snubbed sibling to venomous thoughts of murder. A fairy tale psychodrama frequently shot from the POV of the titular cat, gradually raised to hallucinatory, fever dream heights by Luboš Fišer’s score, it’s a decadent delectation that’s been likened to live-action Aubrey Beardsley.

North American Distributor: Severin Films

All films restored by Národní filmový archiv, Prague, supported by The Czech Audiovisual Fund, with Morgiana newly restored in 4K in 2024 specifically for Severin Films' House of Psychotic Women collection. Special thanks to Juraj Machálek and Lucia Petříková.

Q&A with actor Iva Janžurová on Saturday, October 25th

Saturday, 03 January 2015

Akerman’s final film is comprised almost entirely of conversations with her mother, 86-year-old Holocaust survivor Natalia “Nelly” Akerman, who the filmmaker captures in intimate Skype conversations and domestic vignettes shot with a deceptively rough precision during visits home to Brussels, Nelly’s vitality slowly waning as the film carries on—she died soon after shooting. After Akerman’s own tragic suicide, this extraordinarily tender work takes on the character of a heart-rending goodbye, to both her mother and to her cinema, to which her “Maman” was so central.

Distributor: Icarus Films

Friday, 10 December 1982

A key text of the Hong Kong New Wave, the sophomore feature by Tam—later to become a mentor figure to a young Wong Kar-wai, whose regular art director William Chang contributes high-style work here—is a plangent portrait of teenage malaise starring Cheung as an alienated rich kid who fills empty days languorously hanging with pals Pat Ha, Kent Tong, and Cecelia Yip, a routine rudely interrupted with the arrival of a runaway member of the Japanese Red Army seeking shelter in their midst. An utterly sumptuous immersion in various shades of idyll and ennui.

Distributor: Janus Films

Wednesday, 19 September 1973

Summoning up a remarkably convincing 1930s Shanghai in the Paris of the late ’70s, Stephen’s newly restored feature debut, the seductively dreamlike, exquisitely composed Ombres de Soie, charts the shifting (and ambiguous) dynamics between two women whose lingering connection is hinted— through subtle gestural cues and privileged snippets of voice-over—to be more than just the uncomplicated bond we call “friendship.” Both an homage to 1975’s India Song, white, French Indochina–born Marguerite Duras’s narcotic depiction of the chartered life of Calcutta’s isolated European colony, and a rejoinder to it, courtesy Stephen, an ethnically Chinese child of British Hong Kong whose understanding of colonialism came from a perspective quite different from that of Duras. Screens with two shorts by Stephen, newly restored: Labyrinthe, an experimental, oneiric work dating from Stephen’s time in Canada that suggests either a cinematic meditation on cross-cultural identity, on the psychological impact of cross-cutting, or on both, in which two identically dressed women, one white, one Asian, negotiate winding, maze-like corridors, and A Very Easy Death, Stephen’s metaphor-rich, deeply compassionate contemplation of her mother’s death and its aftermath, which takes its title from the 1964 book by Simone de Beauvoir.

Labyrinthe(1973, 5min)

A Very Easy Death(1975, 8min)

Ombre de Soie(1978, 61min)

Saturday, 19 September 1959

“The first feature from Vietnam Feature Film Studio follows lovers Hoài, a guerilla fighter from the North, and Vận, a young woman from the South, during the war against the French. Their romance becomes a casualty of partition when the country is divided at the Bến Hải River. Co-directed by Nguyễn Hồng Nghi—a pioneering documentarian who worked closely with Hồ Chí Minh, who gifted him North Vietnam’s only film camera in the early 1950s—this landmark work demonstrates how Vietnamese cinema has, from its very origins, channeled national struggles through the lens of romantic relationships.” —Minh Nguyen

Thursday, 06 July 2023

Nora and Hae Sung, close childhood friends in Seoul, see their bond broken when Nora’s family emigrated from South Korea to Canada. After two decades of separation and sporadic meet-ups, they’re reunited in New York as adults (Greta Lee and Teo Yoo) for one fateful week, together confronting questions about destiny, love, fate, regret, and the irrevocable choices that shape a life in playwright Song’s tender, intimate feature debut. “Song draws you into her characters’ worlds seamlessly… In a sense it’s a time-travel movie, because even as the two characters keep moving forward, they remain inexorably tethered to the past, which means it’s also a story about everyday life.”—Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

Distributor: A24

Friday, 02 October 1992

“Mai, a young art student, is cast in a film about the War against the Americans. During production, she falls in love with the director, a former soldier. As Mai becomes infatuated with his ‘romantic past’ without truly understanding it, their relationship embodies post–Đổi-Mới Vietnam’s identity shift. Known for his candor and eccentricity, director Lưu Trọng Ninh often focuses on how today’s youth—guided by spirit, vitality, and intuition—challenge their predecessors’ values.” —Minh Nguyen

Friday, 12 February 2010

Mija (Yun Jung-hee) has been tasked with raising her troubled teenaged grandson, Jong-wook, while her daughter, Jong-wook’s single mother, works in far-off Busan. When her capacity as a caregiver is threatened by a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, Mija begins to study poetry composition at the local cultural center—first inspired by beauty in the natural world, then, when Jong-wook is mired in shameful scandal, inspired by new depths of disappointment and pain. Written specifically for Yun, a leading light of ’60s and ’70s South Korean cinema who gives an achingly vulnerable performance, Lee’s poignant, penetrating drama was awarded Best Screenplay at Cannes in 2010.

Thursday, 29 October 1981

Easily the most harrowing divorce drama ever made, Zuławski’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. Launching an investigation into the reasons for her ever-more-alarming behavior, he discovers a truth more sinister (and nauseating) than his wildest suspicions, as Zuławski’s highly-choreographed cinematic delirium and Andrzej Korzyński’s pulsating score push things light years past over-the-top. Adjani won a César for her performance, one of the most grueling ever caught on film, though later reflected that the palpable ordeal she put herself through on the movie was nearly enough to make her leave acting behind.

Distributor: Metrograph Pictures

Monday, 19 October 1981

Banned upon its original release in 1981, Andrzej Żuławski’s stunningly choreographed nightmare of a marriage unraveling is an experience unlike any other. Professional spy Mark (Sam Neill) returns to his West Berlin home to find his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani, in a role that earned her Best Actress at Cannes) insistent on a divorce. As Anna's frenzied behavior becomes ever more alarming, Mark discovers a truth far more sinister than his wildest suspicions. With its pulsating score, visceral imagery, and some of the most haunting performances ever captured on screen, Possession is cinematic delirium at its most intoxicating.

Distributor: Metrograph Pictures

Wednesday, 02 October 1985

For his first and to date only film as a director, Murch brought Dorothy Gale (Fairuza Balk, stepping into the ruby slippers of Judy Garland) back to the world created by L. Frank Baum for a film whose poster promised “Disney adventure and magic,” but in fact delivered a dark, disquieting vision of Oz, its denizens menaced by Nicol Williamson’s Nome King, Jean Marsh’s head-swapping Princess Mombi, a terrifying stop-motion animated mountain spirit, and other assorted baddies, like the fiendishly cackling Wheelers. Having the temerity to entirely reimagine such a beloved property brought Murch into conflict with studio brass, but there was only so much they could do to lighten up his bleak interpretation of Baum, resulting in a film admired by an ardent cult for its unstinting eeriness as well as ingenious art direction and use of practical effects.

Distributor: Swank Motion Pictures

Wednesday, 25 September 1963

One of the most expensive Egyptian productions of all time, underwritten by pioneering female producer Assia Dagher, Chahine’s historical epic, with an ensemble cast including Salah Zulfikar, Nadia Lutfi, Leila Fawzy, and Ahmed Mazhar in the title role, depicts the life of the 12th-century sultan Saladin, whose united Pan Arabic army would drive Christian crusaders out of Jerusalem, a figure both feared and admired by England’s Richard the Lionheart, foremost among his foes. A rejoinder to previously predominant Western depictions of the Crusades in cinema which Chahine, himself born into a Greek Catholic family, would describe as “above all a tribute to tolerance.”

Distributor: Janus Films

Sunday, 02 October 2011

Deftly moving between the stories of Joon (Paul Lee), a North Korean emigre working illegally at a gas station in Seoul, and Hyun (Yeom Hyun-joon), a young gay man financially dependent on his older lover, the lyrical, elegantly composed second film in Kim’s Things Trilogy discovers unexpected parallels in the lives of its dual protagonists—as well as that of Soon-hee (Kim Sae-byuk), Joon’s co-worker, an ethnic Korean newly arrived from China who’s forced to endure sexual harassment on the job—and in doing so offers a blistering critique of South Korean society’s brutal treatment of marginalized and alienated individuals living on its fringes. “A brave and uncompromising vision!” —Frieze

Monday, 13 October 2008

Telling the story of her life and her life in movies on the eve of her 80th year, Varda set out to follow the shoreline—that is, to follow the beaches that run through her cinema, from the Sète of her adolescence, the scene of her first feature La Pointe Courte (1955), to the California coast of her American sojourn in the ‘60s, to the French Atlantic beaches so cherished by her late husband, Jacques Demy. In speaking of beaches, Varda finds her way to speaking of the history she has lived through, the causes she has fought for, the friends she’s loved and lost, and facing the impermanence of all as she awaits the coming of high tide. “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches.” —Agnès Varda

Print courtesy of The Cinema Guild

Distributor: Janus Films

Friday, 11 July 1969

A rising political death cult entangles with personal morbidity in Herz’s deeply disturbing black comic parable, set in 1930s Prague, where Nazi ideology hangs in the air as thick as the charnel fumes over the crematorium run by the troubled Karel Kopfrkingl (Rudolf Hrušínský, in a skin-crawling performance). Adapting Ladislav Fuks’s novel with the author and utilizing the estimable talents of cinematographer Stanislav Milota, Herz connects the Czechoslovak New Wave groundswell to the legacy of German Expressionism in this macabre and harrowing work of psychological and social breakdown, banned after its 1969 debut only to re-emerge and garner deserved praise as a masterwork 20 years later, after the crumbling of the Czechoslovak communist system.

“Herz’s The Cremator is a horrible and wickedly funny political satire of the rise of fascism in Czechia right before WWII. One of the pearls of the Czechoslovak New Wave, it’s a great demonstration of how humor can be a weapon against fascism.”—Ena Sendijarević

This restoration of The Cremator was made possible by a donation from Mrs. Milada Kučerová and Mr. Eduard Kučera and was realized by Karlovy Vary IFF at the studios of UPP and Soundsquare, in cooperation with the Národní filmový archiv in Prague and the Czech Film Fund.

All films restored by Národní filmový archiv, Prague, supported by The Czech Audiovisual Fund. Special thanks to Juraj Machálek and Lucia Petříková.

Distributor: Janus Films

Sunday, 02 October 2011

Forty years after the mysterious disappearance of teenaged Harriet Vanger, the grand-uncle of the missing girl (Christopher Plummer) recruits investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) to reopen the cold case, and, after teaming with a glowering, gothy hacker, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), who’s freshly wriggled out from under the thumb of her sexually abusive legal guardian, Blomkvist’s search will uncover psychopathic CEOs, unreformed Nazi sympathizers, and a rot spreading through the highest echelons of Swedish society. In Fincher’s steady hands, Stieg Larsson’s posthumously published best-seller becomes a coolly elegant thriller made with almost surgical precision, entrancing from the viscous nightmare of its title sequence onward.

Distributor: Sony Pictures Entertainment

Thursday, 25 September 1969

Chahine’s rousing adaptation of Abdel Rahman al-Sharqawi’s renowned 1954 novel sets its scene in the rural Egypt of the early 1930s, when feudal law still dictates much of the daily life of the peasantry, here faced with immanent catastrophe when a mandate passed down by an unscrupulous pasha places new limitations on the time in which they can irrigate their fields—a fate to which one tiller of the soil, Mohamed Abu Swelam (Mahmoud El-Meliguy), valiantly resists at risk of his own life. A full-throated call for collective resistance to abuses of power, not coincidentally conceived and shot in the aftermath of the Six-Day War and Egypt’s consequent loss of Sinai and Gaza to Israel.

Distributor: Janus Films

Friday, 02 October 1981

Journalist Vân fights corruption while caught in a love triangle between her husband Đông, who runs a shady enterprise, and Phương, a Ministry inspector and her former high school crush. Director Trần Phương—who studied in the inaugural class of the People’s School of the Performing Arts and acted in revolutionary films before turning to directing—uses their tangled relationships to capture 1980s Hanoi caught between certainties. Existential and impressionistic, the film presents idealistic love as the last hope against greed and disillusionment in a rapidly modernizing Vietnam.” —Minh Nguyen

Thursday, 19 September 1974

“In the aftermath of the ‘Christmas bombing’ of Hanoi in December 1972, young Ngọc Hà (Lan Hương) searches through the city’s rubble for her missing family. Shot in neorealist style by Hải Ninh, a graduate of the first directing class of the Vietnam Cinema School, this classic wartime propaganda film was inspired by the filmmaker’s own experience sheltering with his daughter during the 12-day bombardment, and witnessing a little girl who was saved from the bombings and cared for by her neighbors—told remarkably through the rare use of a child’s voiceover.” —Minh Nguyen

Introduction by Minh Nguyen on Friday, October 17th

Tuesday, 25 September 1979

Working with the brilliant production designer Vladimír Labský, Herz constructed the world of his grim fairy tale at Prague’s Barrandov studios, from there proceeding to create a work of total (and totally mesmerizing) baroque artifice. An aimless, penniless student (Ondřej Pavelka) sets out to save a Princess (Julie Jurištová) whose life force is waning under the spell of a vampiric astrologer at the royal court, Aldobrandini (Juraj Kukura, sporting an appalling combover), who has survived for three centuries thanks to his use of the black arts. A cloak of invisibility, ashen-faced automaton-like courtiers, magic elixirs, a sinister castle filled with clockwork contraptions, and itinerant puppeteers all have a part to play in Herz’s opulent, elegant, and darkly atmospheric fable, adapted from a 1979 novel by Josef Hanzlík.

North American Distributor: Severin Films

All films restored by Národní filmový archiv, Prague, supported by The Czech Audiovisual Fund. Special thanks to Juraj Machálek and Lucia Petříková.

Saturday, 25 September 1976

The favorite younger son of a rural farming family, Ali (Ahmed Mehrez), a onetime idealist now embittered by his failures, returns from a 12-year stay in Cairo to a jubilant reception, but when his family—father Mahmoud el-Meliguy, mother Huda Sultan, elder brother Shoukry Sarhan, and nephew Hesham Selim—realize that his experience in the city has been anything but a smashing success, the reunion soon turns sour. A musical melodrama unfolding amidst the wreckage of shattered dreams, Chahine’s film, released a few years after the death of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, has frequently been interpreted as an allegory for the disillusionment felt in the unfulfilled promises of post-revolutionary Egypt, with songs by co-screenwriter (and renowned poet) Salah Jahin.

Introduction by Alia Ayman on Sunday, October 26th

Distributor: Janus Films

Saturday, 02 October 1976

A fatally ill John Wayne made his final film appearance in Siegel’s goodbye-to-all-that Western, set well after the closing of the frontier in turn-of-the-century Carson City, Nevada, where, as the film opens, celebrated gunslinger J.B. Books (Wayne) is handed a terminal cancer diagnosis by country doctor James Stewart. Worried that the window to make a name as the man who shot down J.B. Books may be closing, fame-hungry desperadoes descend on Carson City en masse, and undertaker John Carradine is soon doing a brisk business. Less an elegiac goodbye to the Old West and to the most famous of screen Westerners than a final, violent convulsion, its cast well-stocked with crusty old saddle tramps like Carradine, Richard Boone, and Hugh O’Brian.

Distributor: Paramount

Sunday, 26 December 1999

While in the midst of preparing to make a film about the creeping encroachments into personal privacy by the post-9/11 national security apparatus, Poitras was contacted by an anonymous figure identifying himself only as “Citizen Four.” A few months later she was in Hong Kong meeting with her mysterious correspondent, none other than Edward Snowden, the former NSA subcontractor turned whistleblower, and this filmed meeting and subsequent encounters produced one of the most lauded nonfiction films of the 2010s, essential viewing for anyone concerned with the ceding of our rights to various intelligence programs in the dubious name of “safety.” “More than just an unsettling bulletin from the blurry front lines of American intelligence’s surveillance campaign. It’s a stirring, sophisticated work of cinema verité, a virtuoso feat of high-tension interview editing.” —Film Comment

Distributor: Paramount

Thursday, 29 September 1983

“Hanoi journalist Vũ travels to the border town of Lạng Sơn to report on the aftermath of the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese conflict. It is his ex-girlfriend’s hometown, and returning there forces him to confront memories of abandoning her to maintain his reputation and advance his career. This hallucinatory, psychological work entwining personal and political betrayal and grief was director Đặng Nhật Minh’s breakout film. Heartbroken by his own visit to the devastated town, Đặng wrote this story before being encouraged to adapt it for the screen. Shooting amid the actual ruins—which he described as looking ‘like a giant film studio that you didn't have to stage’—the director deepens this private reckoning by appearing on-screen himself.” —Minh Nguyen

Sunday, 15 December 2019

A poetic contemplation on death, tradition, and the sacrifices made in the name of progress. Stricken with grief and solitude after losing her husband and children, the elderly Mantoa (Mary Twala Mhlongo) readies herself for death, seeking burial alongside her ancestors. However, the construction plans for a new dam near her village in Lesotho threaten to erase all she holds dear. Mosese’s stunning vision resonates as a silent call for future generations to pay attention before it’s too late. The film was chosen as Lesotho’s submission for the 93rd Academy Awards in 2020, the country’s inaugural entry in the Best Foreign Language Film category

Distributor: Dekanalog

Introduction from Alain Gomis on Saturday, February 10th

Friday, 15 May 1953

“One of the greatest of all Japanese motion pictures. Ozu’s style, now completely refined, utterly economical, creates a film that is unforgettable because it is so right, so true, and also because it demands so much from its audience. Evasions of any sort are rare in an Ozu picture, but here there are none at all. Two generations, a simple story that allows all the characters to change places, a pervading delineation of high summer, and the deceptive simplicity of the film’s style—all these combine to create a picture so Japanese and at the same time so personal, and hence so universal, that it becomes a masterpiece” —Donald Richie

Distributor: Janus Films

Thursday, 24 April 1958

A movie you could use to explain the concept of great cinema to a visiting Martian, Welles’s Hollywood homecoming after several years spent in Europe, an acrid late film noir with the seediest black-and-white cinematography you’ve ever seen, features Orson as the bigoted, booze-and-corruption-bloated police potentate Hank Quinlan and Charlton Heston as a straight-arrow Mexican special prosecutor who, on honeymoon in Quinlan’s raggedy border town, starts sniffing around one of the Captain’s dodgy investigations. Outraged by Universal’s recutting of his film behind his back, Welles fired off a 58-page memorandum to head of production Edward Muhl, unheeded at the time, but 40 years later picked up and followed as closely as possible, with extant materials, by Walter Murch, his scrubbing of credits and Henry Mancini’s score from the legendary three-and-a-half minute crane shot that opens the film only the most obvious of many alterations.

Distributor: Universal

Sunday, 02 October 1988

“Việt Linh’s 1988 classic tells the bittersweet story of a small traveling circus from Hanoi who arrive at an ethnic minority village in Vietnam’s central highlands. Through the impressionable eyes of a child, the film shows the stark contrast between reality and illusion as the villagers hope that the performers’ magic, particularly a trick making rice appear, might solve their starvation. Known for surprising audiences with bold stylistic choices, Việt Linh shot in black and white when color had become the norm, infusing the film with touches of magical realism.” —Minh Nguyen

Thursday, 28 April 2005

The second feature-length production from stop-motion studio par excellence Aardman Animation has the company’s flagship characters, eccentric inventor Wallace and his level-headed pet beagle Gromit, as they venture into humane pest-control to go after a lycanthropic rabbit whose insatiable appetite threatens to spoil the local Giant Vegetable Competition. A barmy burlesque of Hammer Horror gothic from Park and company, featuring “24-carrot” gold bullets, gonzo set pieces, and a lifesaving portion of Stinking Bishop cheese.

Distributor: Universal

Friday, 17 August 1984

Long before hacktivism and computer counterintelligence were routine news items, there was WarGames. Matthew Broderick’s teen hacker accesses what he believes is a new game called “Global Thermonuclear War” and unwittingly triggers World War III, in a twisty, tightly plotted suspenser briskly handled by director John Badham (Saturday Night Fever) that paved the way for dozens of inferior cyberthrillers.

Distributor: Park Circus