Now Showing
The seemingly disparate sensibilities of sentimentalist Steven Spielberg and chilly ironist Stanley Kubrick, who left this science fiction Pinocchio story unrealized at the time of his death, here achieve an unexpected harmony. Haley Joel Osment plays a robot child abandoned by his adopted parents to the cruel (if astonishingly realized) outside world, in a film that finds Spielberg at his most challenging and most poignant. “One of the most poetic and haunting allegories about the cinema that I can think of... It’s also the most philosophical film in Kubrick’s canon, the most intelligent in Spielberg’s.” —Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader
Distributor: Park Circus
Incredibly prescient in its understanding of how a still-young internet would fundamentally alter youth culture, Shunji’s film introduces Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara) in an ice field, the landscape gradually obscured by accreting chat room messages. Alienated from classmates and his old friend Shusuke (Shugo Oshinari), Yuichi retreats into his relationship with the songs of goth-inflected pop act Lily Chou-Chou—created for the film, with vocals by Salyu, though the three-piece reformed for the movie’s 10th anniversary—whose music can do nothing to stop the bloody, hormone-fueled reckoning ahead. A clangorous collision of tradition and ultramodernity, innovative in its understanding of digital cinematography as a new medium with new rules.
Distributor: Film Movement
Twenty-two years after emerging from the bush with his psychotropic, hallucinatory vision of the Vietnam War by way of Joseph Conrad and the lens of visionary cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, Coppola went upriver one more time on the hunt for his elusive masterwork. The result, featuring a full 49 minutes of previously unseen footage—including a languid visit to a French plantation stuck outside of time—wasn’t a “recut” so much as a new movie, richer, stranger, and more psychedelic than ever before. A film that exists in the ghastly hangover of two imperialist sprees.
35mm IB-Technicolor print courtesy of Peter Conheim/Cinema Preservation Alliance
Distributor: Rialto Pictures
At the moment Anna’s (Nicole Kidman) husband, Sean, dies while jogging in Central Park, a child is born. Ten years later, as Anna has just accepted a marriage proposal from boyfriend Joseph (Danny Huston), that child slips into her apartment and informs her that he is Sean, returned. So begins Glazer’s eerie, utterly unpredictable, and controversial drama, which boasts a screenplay co-written by longtime Buñuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière; a rich, fully orchestrated score from composer Alexandre Desplat; daringly underexposed cinematography by the late, great Harris Savides, which helps create the film’s atmosphere of endless emotional winter; and Kidman at her icy best.
Distributor: Park Circus
Fassbinder gives us the weekend getaway from hell in this suffocating chamber drama, in which unhappily and unfaithfully married couple Gerhard and Ariane Christ (Alexander Allerson and Margit Carstensen), intending to escape one another and their bitter disabled daughter, Angela (Andrea Schober), wind up in a family reunion, with lovers Anna Karina and Ulli Lommel in tow, at their country manse, where a vengeful Angela maneuvers the assembled parties into a round of the eponymous guessing game, designed to sow dissension and inflict maximum psychological torment. “More original and daring than anything I’ve yet to see by filmmakers who call themselves avant-garde… A mysterious comedy of deliberate elegance… Camp lyricism of such density it becomes a lethal weapon.” —The New York Times
Distributor: Janus FIlms
Hu singlehandedly revolutionized the wuxia film with this critical and popular sensation, employing silky smooth ’Scope cinematography inspired by Chinese scroll painting, kinetic camera movement, gravity-defying action choreography, and meticulous period production design, all melded into a fist-and-sword tale that gives pride of place to female fighters. Come Drink with Me established 19-year-old dancer-cum-actress Cheng Pei-pei firmly in the pantheon of international action stars playing Golden Swallow, a general’s daughter tasked with rescuing her brother from the clutches of bandits, one of cinema’s greatest personifications of the martial arts, managing to take on all opponents with several breathtaking bounds.
Distributor: Celestial Pictures
Three years before Harry Callahan cleaned up San Francisco with his hand-cannon, Arizona deputy Walt Coogan (Clint Eastwood) brought his particular brand of cowboy justice to a lawless NYC in Coogan’s Bluff, which opens with our hero touching down in the Big, Rotten Apple with orders to extradite LSD-fueled killer James Ringerman (Don Stroud) back to the southwest, a seemingly straightforward mission that will eventually lead Coogan through a pool hall brawl, close encounters with the counterculture (including parodic psych rock act “The Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel”), and a hell-bent-for-leather motorcycle chase through Fort Tryon Park. The first of five collaborations between Eastwood and Siegel and, per Quentin Tarantino, “a trial run for the next 20 years of action cinema.”
U.S. premiere of new 4K restoration
Distributor: Universal
Richard Gere flees the factory floors of Chicago for the wheat fields of the Texas panhandle with his girlfriend (Brooke Adams) and kid sister (Linda Manz) in tow, only to find himself in a love triangle with gentleman farmer Sam Shepard. The second American film shot by master-of-light DP Néstor Almendros, much of it seen in the gorgeous gloaming hour, Malick’s lush, mythic vision is granted a touching naivete through Manz’s improvised, child’s-eye-view narration.
Distributor: Paramount
One of the first films from Mainland China to explore queer life, Zhang’s film revolves around a young gay writer who, pinched by police during a night raid in a Beijing park, recounts his troubled childhood, sexual awakening, and ongoing search for love to an interrogating officer in an extended interview that takes on an unmistakably sexually charged character. A sumptuously shot film about forbidden desire and the erotics of power, anchored by Si Han and Hu Jun’s nuanced central performances as the detainee and questioner. “Beats Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour, Fassbinder’s Querelle, and even Todd Haynes’s Poison as the most Genet-esque movie ever made.” —Tony Rayns, Sight & Sound
Distributor: Fortissimo Films
Altman’s whodunit, set over a weekend of outdoor sport and lavish dinners at a c. 1932 English country estate, features a peerless ensemble cast (Helen Mirren, Alan Bates, Maggie Smith, and many, many more) coming together to portray the upstairs-downstairs array of guests and servants in an arthouse hit that evokes the spirits of both Agatha Christie’s manor house mysteries and Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game. The sharp, acid screenplay comes courtesy Julian Fellowes, who would continue to dissect the English class system in Downtown Abbey.
Distributor: Universal
In a near-future Tokyo, two rambunctious high school pals with graduation—and uncertain-at-best prospects—on the near horizon reckon with the fallout of a prank played on their principal and the daily looming threat of a catastrophic earthquake. The fiction feature debut by Sora (Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus), lauded upon its premiere at last year’s Venice International Film Festival, is at once a poignant, delicately modulated coming-of-age drama of foundering friendship and a cutting cautionary tale concerning the incursion of surveillance technology into all aspects of everyday life, intelligently employing its schoolyard setting as a microcosm of Japanese society and its rankling socio-political and environmental anxieties.
A Film Movement release
Q&A with director Neo Sora moderated by writer/critic Carlos Valladares on Friday, September 12th
Q&A with director Neo Sora moderated by writer/critic Devika Girish and Saturday, September 13th
Introduction by director Neo Sora on Sunday, September 14th
Months after D-Day but still a long way from the fall of Berlin, in autumn of 1944, a squad of US troops from the 95th Infantry Division—including sullen, submachine gun-toting supersoldier Steve McQueen, Bobby Darin, James Coburn, and Bob Newhart—face a trial by fire when tasked with holding off a company of Germans for 48 hours, until crucial reinforcements can be mustered. Siegel and McQueen were far from becoming fast friends during the sweltering summertime shoot of Hell Is For Heroes, but the rancid off-camera vibes were here turned to good use, and ultimately McQueen’s kill-crazy Pvt. John Reese fits in quite nicely with the gallery of antisocial odd men out who populate Siegel’s work.
Distributor: Paramount
Recently divorced sad sack Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), working as a personal letter writer for strangers in a Los Angeles of the not-too-distant future, discovers a new sense of purpose after acquiring an AI virtual assistant who speaks with the voice of Scarlett Johansson, with whom he soon becomes helplessly besotted. An ingenious, wryly witty, and genuinely heartbreaking high concept work, from an original Jonze screenplay, anchored by Phoenix’s graceful, vulnerable performance. “A movie you want to reach out and caress.”—The New York Times
Distributor: Park Circus
Zar Amir took home a Best Actress Award from the 2022 Cannes Film Festival for her steely performance in Abbasi’s nerve-rattling thriller, in which she plays a Tehran journalist, Arezoo Rahimi, investigating the story of an at-large serial murderer in the holy city of Mashhad who has been preying on the city’s streetwalkers. Based on the real case of “Spider Killer” Saeed Hanaei, who framed his rampage as a moral crusade, Abbasi’s film is interested not only in the psychology of its culprit but in the everyday misogyny of the society that nurtured him in its bosom—and, it might be mentioned, almost destroyed Amir’s career—a chauvinism that is gallingly apparent in the course of Rahimi’s research into the case.
Distributor: Utopia
Q&A with Zar Amir moderated by Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh on Saturday, September 27th
Timothy and Stephen Quays’ first live-action feature, a free adaptation of Jakob von Gunten, the 1909 Bildungsroman by Swiss author Robert Walser, is a troubling work of oneiric cinema that garnered comparisons to early David Lynch. A young Mark Rylance plays Jakob who, newly arrived at a school for servants run by siblings Johannes and Lisa Benjamenta (Gottfried John and Alice Krige), revolts against a curriculum that teaches total bowing and scraping self-abnegation, a rebellion that eventually leads him to odd erotic entanglements and the tangled catacombs underneath the Institute… “A luxuriant, uncanny evensong that itches like a decomposing sweater… Every cranny is soft with autumnal rot and dead-factory dust. Shooting in the silveriest black-and-white, the Quays break movie rules by the fistful, demanding we experience the film as a mood.”—SPIN
Distributor: Park Circus
It’s trouble in paradise when lovers Alain Delon and Romy Schneider’s poolside idyll at a St. Tropez villa is interrupted by the arrival of her ex, Maurice Ronet, and his rapidly maturing daughter, Jane Birkin. Beautiful people, ravishing landscapes, and quite a bit of ugly behavior add up to make one of the most cherished of French thrillers, where no amount of time in the water will serve to wash this quartet clean. “Icily erotic! Seething passion and emotional chaos lie beneath the symbolically placid surface of the villa’s swimming pool, which becomes the site for both seduction and violent revenge.”—Dave Kehr, The New York Times
Distributor: Rialto Pictures
A taboo-buster in multiple regards from Kwan, Hong Kong’s first openly gay filmmaker of note, Lan Yu treads dangerous ground in both its explicit reference to the Tiananmen Square massacre and its focus on the powerful erotic frissons that develop between two men in the period around the bloodbath. Adapted from the samizdat queer novel Beijing Comrades, also known as Someone Likes Lan, serially published online by an anonymous author in 1996, Lan Yu is an aching, full-bodied melodrama that sensitively limns the touch-and-go relationship between an influential businessman with a horror of emotional attachment (Hu Jun) and the skint architecture student (Liu Ye) he struggles to keep at a distance… at first. Showered with plaudits at Taiwan’s Golden Horse film awards, including a win for editor William Chang, a crucial Wong Kar-wai collaborator. “Masterly… Among the strongest of the wave of gay-themed Chinese features from the late-20th and early-21st century.” —The Guardian
Neon Genesis Evangelion creator Anno’s live-action feature debut, based on a novel by Ryū Murakami, the stylistically exuberant Love & Pop centers on Tokyo schoolgirl Hiromi (Asumi Miwa) and her three friends, all of whom have begun earning extra spending cash by going on dates with older men for pay. Over the course of a single summer day spent in the streets, shops, and love hotels of Shibuya, Hiromi tries to hustle her way to ¥128,000 before the mall closes in hopes of getting her hands on a topaz ring that’s caught her eye. A cutting commentary on acquisitiveness run amok, and a prescient look at coming of age in Japan at the precipice of a new, pixel-drenched century, shot almost entirely on consumer-grade handheld digital cameras.
Distributor: GKIDS
Ryuichi Sakamoto composed his first original score for Ōshima’s lacerating World War II-set drama, in which the musician also starred, in his film acting debut, as Captain Yonoi, the Bushidō code-obsessed commandant of a Japanese POW camp in occupied Java who enters into a war of wills with unbreakable tow-headed South African internee Maj. Jack Celliers (David Bowie), his obsession with Celliers developing a distinctive element of romantic and sexual yearning. Also providing the first big-screen dramatic role for young comic actor “Beat” Takeshi Kitano, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence was greeted by many a skeptical critical notice on its initial release, but with the passage of time Ōshima’s hypnotic and ultimately heartbreaking film has attracted an ardent cult.
Distributor: Janus Films
On the lookout for a “Forgotten Man” to complete a high society scavenger hunt, heiress Alice Bullock (Carole Lombard) scoops up scruffy vagabond William Powell from an East River Hooverville and installs him as butler in the Fifth Avenue manor where she lives with her plutocrat father (bullfrog-voiced Eugene Pallette) and kin in La Cava’s laugh-a-minute lampoon of the idle rich, a downright Shakespearean comedy of confused identity that’s among the most enduring of ’30s screwballs. Not a supporting role is wasted, with standouts including Alice Brady as the scatterbrained matriarch of the Bullock clan and Mischa Auer as her poet protégé “Carlo,” who, per critic Dave Kehr, “assumes the role of the intelligentsia under late capitalism by imitating a gorilla.”
Distributor: Universal
Tarkovsky’s penultimate film, and his first shot outside the USSR, channels the filmmaker’s own sense of displacement into the story of a homesick Russian poet (Oleg Yankovsky)—in Italy to do research on 18th-century Russian expatriate composer Pavel Sosnovsky—who becomes fixated on the messianic ambitions of a holy fool, Domenico (Erland Josephson), whom he encounters when visiting the Tuscan countryside, which is filmed by DP Giuseppe Lanci as a melancholy, sodden dreamscape in which our protagonist finds echoes of the distant homeland. “Delicate, selectively desaturated tones give the impression of a film simultaneously monochromatic and in color… [If] not Tarkovsky’s most personal film, it is arguably his most self-reflexive.” —J. Hoberman, The New York Times
Distributor: Kino Lorber
Wenger’s acidically funny, consistently unpredictable feature debut is a bittersweet satire starring Albrecht Schuch (All Quiet on the Western Front), in a role taking full advantage of his gift for physical comedy and capacity for pathos. As Matthias, the CEO and public face of Vienna-based rent-a-friend agency My Companion, his commitment to being the perfect professional shapeshifter, malleable to the needs of his clients, begins to take a toll on his relationship with girlfriend Sophia (Julia Franz Richter) and, eventually, his own psychic integrity. A stinging send-up of a hustle-driven contemporary culture that preaches micromanaged self-optimization and the reduction of interpersonal relationships to “emotional labor,” made with a scrupulous eye for the telling detail and an unfaltering sense of compassion.
An Oscilloscope Laboratories release.
Q&A with director Bernhard Wenger and actor Albrecht Schuch moderated by film critic Tomris Laffly on Friday, September 19th
Q&A with director Bernhard Wenger and actor Albrecht Schuch moderated by film critic and curator Murtada Elfadl on Saturday, September 20th and Sunday, September 21st (12:00pm)
Q&A with director Bernhard Wenger and actor Albrecht Schuch moderated by film critic Joey Magidson on Sunday, September 21st (6:45pm)
A distillation of a single 12-hour interview in a room at the Chelsea Hotel with the charismatic Jason Holliday (“real” name Aaron Payne), a gay, African American cabaret dancer, part-time hustler, and full-time raconteur, Portrait of Jason grows from a moving, fascinating monologue testimonial to something still thornier and deeper, both a confrontational standoff between Holliday and filmmakers Clarke and Carl Lee, poking holes in their subject’s storytelling, and an inquiry into issues around representation and the privileged gaze of the camera that upends many still-prevalent assumptions in documentary filmmaking. “Transfixing, troubling, immensely powerful… a rocket ship into the future of gay liberation.” —Mark Harris, Film Comment
Distributor: Kino Lorber
Please check back soon for updated showtimes!
British butler Marmaduke Ruggles (Charles Laughton), gambled away by aristocrat owner Roland Young over a Paris poker table to nouveau riche hick Charlie Ruggles (purely coincidental), suddenly finds himself in the backwater of Red Gap, Washington State, reckoning with the novel concept of “freedom” after a lifetime of meek vassalage. Among the most charming of 1930s American comedies, and one of the most touching, with Laughton’s recitation of the Gettysburg Address an immensely moving monument to the nation’s oft-forgotten aspirational ideals and the promise it extends to the arriving immigrant.
Distributor: Universal
After the Polish government banned his 1972 film, The Devil, Possession director Żuławski bounced back with a new start in France and a critical and commercial success with That Most Important Thing: Love, a turbulent, tragicomic depiction of the plight of an aging actress starring Romy Schneider as Nadine Chevalier, a once-acclaimed thespian now reduced to starring in softcore, striving to defend her dignity from foppish impresario husband Jacques Dutronc, snooping photographer Fabio Testi, and has-been theater director Klaus Kinski. “A descent into a burlesque theater world, with characters and settings that recall the decadent Europe of George Grosz… Żuławski’s fluid, roving camera… accompanied by Georges Delerue’s full-throated score, is so attentive to every pang, twinge, or slightest hint of agony that it seems to expose the characters’ every nerve.” —Film Comment
Distributor: Rialto Pictures
Suffused in sorrow and creeping paranoia, Coppola’s Palme d’Or-winning follow-up to The Godfather stars Gene Hackman as Harry Caul, a solitary, guilt-gnawed San Francisco surveillance expert drawn into a murder mystery when one of his for-hire gigs has him eavesdropping on a tête-à-tête with particularly sinister implications. A deliciously downbeat existential thriller made by a leading man and director at the peak of their respective powers, featuring innovative, immersive sound design by the prodigiously gifted Walter Murch and a supporting cast that includes Teri Garr, John Cazale, Frederic Forrest, and the youngest Harrison Ford you’ve ever seen.
Distributor: Rialto Pictures
Park’s twisty, kinky, divinely decadent period thriller, set in a Japanese-occupied 1930s Korea that’s imagined with baroque flourish by set designer Ryu Seong-hee, follows hired handmaiden Kim Tae-ri as she enters the service of shut-in heiress Kim Min-hee and her elderly, dictatorial uncle, while at the same time pursuing an underhanded agenda unknown to her new master and mistress—until, that is, the women concoct a plan of their own to take care of the men who have been manipulating and controlling them. An ingeniously structured work whose interlocking narratives and tricky perspectival shifts, handled with apparent ease, make for an acerbic, comic, and often sultry spin on the old-dark-house mystery, taut with thrilling turnabouts and and SM restraints.
Distributor: Amazon Studios
The film that established Sautet’s fruitful creative partnerships with Schneider, actor Michel Piccoli, and screenwriter Jean-Loup Dabadie, and an audience favorite that won him the coveted Prix Louis-Delluc to boot, The Things of Life is a potent melodrama of unusual stylistic and structural verve, a film of twisted metal and fractured perceptions that opens with Piccoli’s Pierre, a renowned Paris architect, having a gruesome high-speed motorway wipeout in his Alfa Romeo, then, via free-associative flashback, showing the edge-of-eternity reflections that flicker through Pierre’s semi-conscious mind, most of these concerning his relationships with his wife (Léa Massari) and his doting but exhausted mistress (Schneider), who would go on to make four more films with the director.
Distributor: Rialto Pictures
Lucas’s visually stunning debut feature, co-written by Walter Murch—who also oversaw its dazzlingly dense sound montage, mixed on a state-of-the-art KEM deck freshly imported from Germany by Francis Ford Coppola—takes place in a bleak galaxy that’s far, far, far away from that of Star Wars and all its swashbuckling brio, an oppressively pristine 25th-century future where humanity has been medicated into submission and chemically neutered to maximize work output. (Sound familiar?) With Robert Duvall as the titular dissident who goes off his meds and promptly becomes a love vigilante… much to the dismay of the android police programmed to keep the rabble in line.
Zar Amir stars opposite Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Luàna Bajrami in Singh and Musteata’s audacious mid-length tragicomedy. Narrated by Vicky Krieps and shot in strikingly stark black and white, it sets its scene in a world where kisses are punishable by death and slaps to the face are a regular part of social intercourse. In this dystopia, unhappily married Angine (Amir) finds herself flirting with catastrophe as her deepening infatuation with salesgirl Malaise (Bajrami) threatens to put both of them in danger of terrible reprisals. A small miracle of narrative compression and tonal balance, now being adapted by its directors into a full-length feature after premiering at Telluride and enjoying a lauded festival run.
Q&A with Natalie Musteata, Alexandre Singh and Zar Amir moderated by Columbia University Professor Annette Insdorf on Saturday, September 27th