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Made at a moment when the demographic makeup of new immigrant arrivals to the United States had ceased for the first time to be overwhelmingly European, with ...And the Pursuit of Happiness, Malle, who’d only been a decade in the country himself, allowed his fellow transplants from an infinite variety of national and economic backgrounds to discuss their experiences in front of the camera. (Among their number: poet and future Nobel laureate Derek Walcott.) A warm, welcoming, and altogether convivial film, commissioned to celebrate the Statue of Liberty’s centennial, first seen by Cannes audiences in May and by HBO subscribers on Independence Day of 1986.
Distributor: Janus Films
Introduction by filmmaker Claire Duguet on Sunday, June 7th
Bringing the spirit of the Ealing comedy bounding into the 1980s, 78-year-old The Lavender Hill Mob director Crichton’s acerbic, side-splitting caper, its baroquely elaborate plot contorted into some kind of crazy shape by screenwriter/star/former Python John Cleese, boasts an ensemble for the ages: Cleese as a sick-of-it-all London barrister, Jamie Lee Curtis as femme fatale Wanda Gershwitz, who butters our barrister up, Kevin Kline in an Academy Award–winning turn as Wanda’s psychopathic “brother,” and Michael Palin as a stammering animal lover whose attempt to rub out a troublesome witness results in not less than three acts of canicide. A fleet farce that spins comic gold from cross-cultural misunderstandings, featuring some of the most boisterous, boorish Americans and timorous, tepid Britons in the history of cinema. Į燩/䙐Įl Palin as a stammering animal lover whose attempt to rub out a troublesome witness results in not less than three acts of canicide. A fleet farce that spins comic gold from cross-cultural misunderstandings, featuring some of the most boisterous, boorish Americans and timorous, tepid Britons in the history of cinema.
Distributor: Park Circus
Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, Shunji’s film looks ever more astonishingly prescient in its understanding of how a still-young internet would fundamentally alter youth culture. Protagonist Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara) is introduced 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—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
Q&A with director Shunji Iwai moderated by filmmaker Christopher Radcliff on Saturday, June 6th
One of a handful of female outsider artists to earn praise from the early exponents of art brut, Aloïse Corbaz—born in modest circumstances in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1886; institutionalized as a schizophrenic in 1918; and kept under psychiatric observation until her death in 1964—is portrayed here by two of the premiere European actresses of their respective generations: Isabelle Huppert, who plays Corbaz as a ruminative, searching young woman, and Delphine Seyrig, astonishingly committed as the elder artist. Produced by Paul Vecchiali, de Kermadec’s sophomore feature, newly restored by Cinémathèque Française, is an ideal introduction to an unjustly forgotten giant of post–New Wave French cinema, who in the same year of its release would serve as one of the producers on Seyrig and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce. Screens with Qui donc a rêvé?, de Kermadec's first short, undertaken shortly following an “apprenticeship” period as set photographer to the likes of Agnès Varda and Alain Resnais.
Aloïse (Liliane de Kermadec, 1975, 115 mins, DCP)
Qui donc a rêvé? (Liliane de Kermadec, 1965, 23 mins, DCP)
Restored in 4K by TF1 Studio, La Cinémathèque française and Cinémathèque suisse at Hiventy and Transperfect laboratories, from the original negatives.
Introduction by filmmaker Theda Hammel on Friday, May 15th
Newly arrived in Tokyo for university from the chilly Hokkaido countryside, shy Uzuki (pop singer Takako Matsu, in her first leading role) is faced with settling into a foreign environment, forming friendships, and negotiating everything that comes with a first crush. “Handcrafted to the extent that Iwai designed the tickets and carted 35mm prints to theaters. On the surface, an hour-long movie about a young woman moving to a new town to start university is pretty thin. On the other hand, if it’s so thin, why do you finish the film feeling like someone’s injected helium into your soul? Sometimes happy is harder than sad, and April Story manages to capture the unconquerable optimism of youth on celluloid, ready and waiting to be tasted any time you need it.” —Film Comment
Distributor: Rockwell Eyes
Q&A with director Shunji Iwai on Sunday, June 7th
Burt Lancaster gives one of his finest late-career performances as former numbers runner and aging mob lackey Lou, a rusty relic of an old Atlantic City that, in the course of Malle’s sweetly rueful film, we watch in the process of being pulled down to make way for shiny new casinos and hotels. Lou’s misty-eyed nostalgia won’t bring back the past, but when beautiful neighbor Susan Sarandon lands in some trouble, the graying gunsel sees his final shot to play the tough-guy hero. “Operates by its own laws in its own world, and it has a lovely fizziness.”—Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
Distributor: Paramount
Widely regarded as the opening salvo of independent documentary in Mainland China, Wu’s Bumming in Beijing—a portrait of broke bohemian artists scraping by in the capital city, among them future blue-chip star Zhang Dali—was shot with equipment from China Central Television (CCTV) with an eye towards inclusion in the television series People of China, but its depiction of restless youth in the time before and immediately after the Tiananmen Square massacre, not to mention its blunt depiction of a mental breakdown, proved too controversial for the small screen. A film of incalculable import: in capturing the emergence of a Chinese avant-garde, Wu in effect created a Chinese school of cinema vérité.
Chow Yun-fat and Danny Lee lead a team of strong-arm thieves specializing in jewelry store jobs, tied together by friendship and the bandit’s code of honor. There’s only one hitch: Chow is an undercover cop, playing the part of a hood for so long that only his superior knows his real identity. A landmark in Hong Kong action cinema providing a plum part to hasten Chow’s rise to celebrity, the inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, and a potent portrait of a city choking on its own corruption, it’s brisk, brooding, bloody, and brilliant moviemaking—run-and-gun cinema at its finest.
Distributor: GKIDS
Klimov’s final film, drawing upon his own experiences in the Battle of Stalingrad, is a devastating immersion into the horrors of the WWII Eastern Front as seen through the eyes of a 14-year-old Belarusian boy (Aleksey Kravchenko) who joins the partisan resistance to fight against the Nazi occupation, only to have any fantasies of battlefield glory disappear with his first exposure to the boundless brutality of total war. Approximating his panicked protagonist’s disoriented point-of-view with a wildly careening Steadicam, Klimov’s lucid yet delirious depiction of battlefield brutality has the terrible intensity and immediacy of a waking nightmare.
Distributor: Janus Films
All is not well with the Trenton family—the revelation that wife Donna (Dee Wallace) has been having an affair leaves the future of her marriage uncertain—but that seems like small potatoes when Donna and five-year-old son Tad (Danny Pintauro) find themselves trapped in her Ford Pinto by the titular rabid St. Bernard, a vehicular siege depicted with remarkable visual dynamism by cinematographer Jan de Bont. Played by four St. Bernards, a small fleet of mechanical dogs, a black Lab-Great Dane mix in St. Bernard drag, and stuntman Gary Morgan, the slavering, ravening, and seemingly unkillable Cujo—first dreamed up by Stephen King’s 1981 novel of the same name—is perhaps the screen’s most memorable canine heavy.
Distributor: Paramount
After receiving an anonymous call coming from the Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel, police inspector Peter Glebsky (Uldis Pūcītis) heads to the remote Alpine ski resort and, after an avalanche cuts it off from the world, finds himself having to contend with a highly unusual potpourri of guests and a series of inexplicable occurrences that defy his attempts at rational explanation. Based on a novel of the same name by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who together wrote the screenplay, Kromanov’s richly atmospheric amalgam of whodunit and science fiction is a film unlike any other, with good reason among the most treasured in the annals of Estonian cinema.
Distributor: AGFA
Newly restored in 4K by Deaf Crocodile in collaboration with the Estonian Film Institute and Film Archive.
Part hard-boiled crime thriller and part soft, featherweight giddiness, Fallen Angels was first conceived as a segment of Wong’s Chungking Express, then developed into a darker companion piece to his glistening pop-romantic masterpiece, the story of a hitman (Leon Lai) looking to hang up his gun, the business partner (Michelle Reis) who quietly lusts after him, and a mute troublemaker (Takeshi Kaneshiro) running amok in Hong Kong. Christopher Doyle’s cinematography has never been more woozily, blearily beautiful, nor has the Fragrant Harbor ever been put on screen with such transfixing nocturnal glamor.
Distributor: Janus Films
Alex (Jennifer Beals), an 18-year-old working-class Pittsburgher, juggles shifts welding at a steel mill and dancing at a neighborhood watering hole, but she has her sights set on finer things, namely a career in classical ballet. The razzle-dazzle blockbuster that began the decade-long box-office dominion of “high-concept” producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, set to an irresistibly toe-tapping Giorgio Moroder score.
“Adrian Lyne is to blame for the amount of haze we pumped into every shot of Maddie’s Secret, whether it was narratively motivated or not. There is a real fantasy of clutter in his production design, shafts of golden light pump through every window. To me, he is the king of sweat and dust. He brings a real refinement to the crowd-pleasing psychosexual melodrama. I went to a screening of Flashdance with the cinematographer, production designer, and composer of Maddie’s Secret before we shot the movie, and we were shocked and humbled by how much it seemed to embody every aesthetic principle we had arrived at together. A gauzy, urban fairytale with a plucky ingénue and a disco heart.” —John Early
Distributor: Paramount
Introduction by Max Lakner, cinematographer of Maddie's Secret on Saturday, May 30th
In 1979, Malle visited the small town of Glencoe, Minnesota—60 miles west of Minneapolis—to make a documentary for PBS. The project remained incomplete for six years, until he returned to explore how the community had been responding to the mounting crisis in agricultural overproduction—the farm crisis that peaked in the mid-’80s. An unfailingly respectful and unpretentious document of everyday life, of long-fostered traditions, and of unfailing Midwestern politesse in what is sometimes dismissed as “flyover country,” and of a part of the nation that then-President Reagan’s “trickle-down” economy very much failed to water.
Distributor: Janus Films
Introduction by filmmaker Claire Duguet on Sunday, June 7th
The titular twosome are childhood friends—Alice (Yū Aoi) forthcoming; Hana (Anne Suzuki), withholding—whose bond slackens when they arrive at high school and begin to discover boys, one of whom Hana bamboozles into being her boyfriend by convincing him he’s had a bout of amnesia. Developed from a series of shorts that Iwai made for KitKat chocolate bars in Japan, with a lush, wistful chamber music score by the filmmaker himself, Hana and Alice is as sprightly and light-footed as All About Lily Chou-Chou was dark and brooding, but both films are united by their experimentation with the new possibilities of digital cinematography and their rare understanding of the turbulent emotions of teenagers.
Distributor: Rockwell Eyes
Introduction by director Shunji Iwai on Sunday, June 7th
The late Chantal Akerman was only 24-years-old when she and her nearly all-female crew made the 1975 masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Over the course of three days—and a three-hour movie spell—a woman’s (Delphine Seyrig) life is not just captured, but articulated, and not with big dramatic turns, but with the repetitive, near-tedious yet hypnotically compelling natural rhythms and gestures of her every day—an every day so often devalued. She cooks and cleans, eats and bathes. Akerman’s hyper-attention to detail tells an otherwise small story, and yet, the effect is nothing short of pure, compulsively watchable spectacle.
Distributor: Janus Films
In collaboration with Brooklyn-based Jollof Films, co-founded by Senegalese artists Assane Sy and Ahmad Cissé, and their pan-African cinema club, we present a screening of Cissé’s debut feature—the first ever Malian feature made in Bambara, the filmmaker’s native language. The film is a potent drama depicting the rape of a young mute girl and, when she discovers herself pregnant following the assault, the ostracism she faces at the hands of her religiously conservative community and upwardly mobile family. A brazen challenge to the patriarchal power structure, Den Muso was censored on release and its director briefly imprisoned on specious charges—he wrote the script for his next film, 1978’s Baara, while under lock-and-key—but these attempts at suppression did little to muffle the impact of his angry, impassioned film.
Post-screening conversation with Jollof Films' Assane Sy and Ahmad Cissé on Saturday, June 6th
Mocked by his better-off peers and brutalized by his father, 12-year-old Oldřich, nicknamed “Shorty,” finds refuge in fantasy and memories of better days—but a grim reality is growing ever closer to his home, the Moravian village of Nesovice, as German occupying forces are rolled back by the advancing Soviets, and villagers scurry to cover up their acts of collaboration and compromise. Signifying a shift in representation of the wartime experience attributable to the relaxing of censorship in the years leading up to the Prague Spring of 1968, both the retreating Nazis and the liberators arriving from the east are regarded with justified apprehension by Olin in this lyrical drama, strikingly lensed by first-time cinematographer Jaromír Šofr.
Distributor: Národní filmový archiv
A contemporary of the Nouvelle Vague who marched always to the beat of his own drummer, Louis Malle was a filmmaker impossible to pin down—in the words of director Duguet: “A man in constant motion, a curious, unsettling filmmaker whose choices were sometimes controversial, who knew how to navigate between fiction and documentary, between France and the United States, between the intimate and the political.” In Louis Malle, le Révolté, Duguet looks at this most multifaceted of filmmakers from every vantage, offering invaluable and intimate insight into the work of an artist who most verily contained multitudes.
“It was such a thrill to watch Claire’s documentary about my father last summer. I watched it at home in New York with my mother, the day after it premiered at Venice, and it made me so proud, both of his legacy and to be part of it, but also of Claire and the beautiful film she made. I loved learning more about the ways in which his films connected with contemporary social and cultural issues, as well as being reminded of what an insatiably curious, kinetic person he was.” —Chloe Malle
“For me, Claire’s film about my father is a magnificent portrait in that it shows not only that he was a great artist but a man well worth knowing, and I’m very glad American movielovers, whether they know his films or not, are going to discover that important aspect of him.” —Justine Malle
Q&A with director Claire Duguet moderated by Chloe Malle on Friday, June 5th
One of the most beloved directorial debuts of the 1990s and a popular sensation in Japan and beyond, Iwai’s epistolary drama—first released in the US as When I Close My Eyes and playing here in a new 4K restoration—stars Miho Nakayama, in a dual role, as both widowed fiancée Hiroko and librarian Itsuki, a former classmate of Hiroko’s deceased lover, together keeping alive the memory of the departed in a correspondence, begun by accident, that brings many a faded memory into focus. A work of gentle melodiousness and forceful feeling, of unexpected digressions and beautifully modulated tonal shifts, and, thanks to cinematographer Noboru Shinoda’s exquisite eye for the snowy landscape of Hokkaido, of formidable pictorial beauty.
Distributor: Film Movement
The picture was scanned in 4K from the original camera negative, with color grading supervised by the director. For the sound, while based on a digital 5.1-channel mix, the center channel retains the original film audio in accordance with the director’s preference.
Q&A with director Shunji Iwai moderated by Alexander Fee, film programmer at Japan Society, on Friday, June 5th
Introduction by director Shunji Iwai on Saturday, June 6th at the 8:00pm showtime
One audacious colorist pays tribute to another in this emotionally raw biopic of Vincent Van Gogh, featuring a fanatically committed Kirk Douglas as the frustrated artist, clashing with even allies like his friend Paul Gaugin (Anthony Quinn) as he struggles to work through destitution and depression. Miklós Rózsa’s magnificent score gives expression to Van Gogh’s tormented inner state, while Minnelli, shooting his passion project on location at the actual locations of the artist’s life, gives us a cinematic analog of the painter’s searing vision of the world around him.
Distributor: Park Circus
In the years following the events of Mad Max the world has gone to hell in a handbasket, with warlords battling over a dwindling fuel supply in an unforgiving Outback landscape, but Miller’s ability to command a budget has progressed considerably, making this first sequel a considerably more ambitious piece of work, a film of epic scope, inspired set pieces, and nonstop kinetic energy. Barbarians have arrived at the gate of an all-too-rare functioning oil refinery, and the facility’s denizens could sure use some help fending off “Lord Humungus” and his men from taciturn ronin Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson)—a dangerous dude in any circumstances, and a real handful if you lay a hand on his Australian Cattle Dog companion.
Distributor: Park Circus
The first independent film released in post-Handover Hong Kong, Chan’s atmospheric shoestring-budget character study is a rough-and-ready piece of work shot on grainy leftover 35mm short ends in the city’s overcrowded subsidized housing projects. The result is a tough, pessimistic film, a portrait of a city on the brink that follows the drifting of high-school dropout and wannabe Triad tough Autumn Moon (Sam Lee, in a star-making role, opposite a largely nonprofessional cast), who sees little hope for his future or that of his home as a newly created Special Administrative Region within China. A raw, groundbreaking drama and portrait of nihilistic youth in the same vein as Rebel Without a Cause, My Own Private Idaho, and The Doom Generation, the film poses questions that remain burningly relevant as tumult engulfs Hong Kong.
Distributor: Metrograph Pictures
We’re excited to offer Metrograph Members an exclusive sneak preview of Jinsei, ahead of its theatrical release on June 5th!
Our hero (voiced by rapper ACE COOL), called by a different name in each chapter of his life, becomes a J-pop idol, an outcast, a leader, and an oracle in this hundred-year chronicle spanning the past, present, and future. Through a chance encounter with a transfer student, he trains to become an idol, starting his search for self-identity and a journey toward greatness beyond superstardom. Written, directed, edited and entirely hand-drawn by newcomer Ryuya Suzuki over 18 months, JINSEI (meaning “life” in Japanese) is an anime tour-de-force that announces Suzuki to the world as a bold new talent in independent animation.
Distributor: Greenwich Entertainment
Please Note: This special members screening is general admission with no reserved seating.
Wallace Shawn presents a very special encore screening for Metrograph members, featuring a post screening conversation with surprise guests.
Shawn co-authored the script for this darkly funny, shot-on-HD screen adaptation of his 1978 play of the same title with director Cairns, featuring Julianne Moore and Matthew Broderick as the eponymous couple, long marinated in mutual resentment, their acrimonious domestic war of attrition coming to a head over the course of the film’s 24 hour timeline and threatening mutual destruction. An unflinching, acerbic, and frequently abrasive study of a relationship in final meltdown mode, featuring an original score by Soul Coughing’s Mark Degli Anthony and a plum supporting cast that includes Julie Hagerty, Bob Balaban, and Griffin Dunne.
Please Note: This special members only screening is general admission with no reserved seating.
Post-screening conversation with Wallace Shawn and surprise guests moderated by John Early + Lucas Kane on Monday, June 1st
Jong-du (Sul Kyung-gu), just out of prison, very little reformed, and shunned by his family, finds an unlikely soulmate in the person of Gong-ju (Moon So-ri), a woman with severe cerebral palsy—and the daughter of the victim of the hit-and-run for which he was jailed—who’s kept cloistered in a meager apartment by her brother, who cares only for the government assistance she brings in. Without a place in a cruelly judgmental society, the couple increasingly take shelter in fantasy in Lee’s magical realism-inflected third feature, an enormously affecting work about love’s blossoming in the least promising of terrains.
Distributor: Film Movement
Having already exploited and exhausted every avenue of flagrant repulsiveness at a rather young age, Waters found a way to be still more objectionable by producing a full-blooded Sirkian melodrama. In her last appearance for Waters, Cookie cameos briefly as the victim of the Baltimore Foot Stomper, while the ever sublime Divine stars as Francine Fishpaw, a big-boned housewife who’s subjected to relentless humiliations by everyone in her family and social circle, believes for a brief moment she’s found redemption by way of a budding romance with arthouse drive-in impresario Tab Hunter, then finds herself facing still-deeper substrata of degradation. All of this, by the way, is very funny.
“I spent a lot of my childhood in cheap wigs. I’m sure my parents saw them as they were: ratty and synthetic. But in my imagination they were undetectable lace-fronts and I was incandescent. The way John Waters frames and lights Divine like Elizabeth Taylor (Divine’s idol), makes Polyester an almost unbearably tender movie to me. But because Divine is now playing a pious, nervewracked housewife after years of eating shit and deepthroating dead fish, it’s also a screamingly funny one. Nothing makes me cry like Billy Murray singing ‘The first good thing to happen to Francine.’” —John Early
Distributor: Park Circus
Introduction by John Early on Sunday, May 17th
Meek white-collar worker Tony Leung Ka-fai looks like defenseless fresh meat when he goes into prison on a manslaughter charge, but he survives thanks to the protection of longtime inmate Chow Yun-fat. Their friendship becomes a bastion of finer feelings in the brutal lockup, a microcosm of mercenary Hong Kong society ruled by triad gangs and crooked guards, the worst of them Roy Cheung’s skull-cracking sadist, whose final confrontation with Chow is one of the most searing expressions of revolutionary rage in all of HK cinema.
35mm print courtesy of Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research
Distributror: AGFA
Please check back soon for updated showtimes!
When a well-behaved Hong Kong high schooler (Fennie Yuen) witnesses an episode of triad gang violence and agrees to testify concerning what she’s seen, she finds herself in the crosshairs of vengeful sleaze “Brother Smart” (Roy Cheung), her only hope for salvation coming in the form of not-yet-entirely-inhuman teen hoodlum “Scar” (Terrence Fok). While hardly an endorsement of organized crime, Lam’s portrayal of the Hong Kong school system—and the pitiless adult world it ill-prepares its students to face—suggests that gangsterism begins in the classroom. The solution he offers to this state of affairs, as ever: Burn the m.f. down!
Distributor: AGFA
Elizabeth Berkley’s Nomi, a poor, street-smart young drifter with a hazy past and plenty of blonde ambition, rolls into Las Vegas with dreams of success and Versace glitz… and God help whoever gets in the way of her achieving it by any means necessary. Verhoeven glories in the crass, glossy grotesquerie of the sex-and-sin business while following Nomi’s tooth-and-nail climb to the top of the erotic cabaret scene, including submitting to the indignities of strip club owner sleaze Robert Davi, a fierce face-off with diva Gina Gershon, and athletic pool sex with bigwig Kyle MacLachlan. A defining film of 1990s America, in all its excess, glitter, and false-bottomed prosperity.
“One of the central jokes, or spiritual prompts, of Maddie’s Secret was ‘What if the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen was as cutthroat and as horny as Showgirls?’ I figured if we reached for Showgirls with no time and no money, we might land somewhere like Perfect Body, the 1997 TV movie about an anorexic gymnast that feels like it was directed by Verhoeven. What more can I say about this movie and its influence over me that I haven’t already said? I guess that, in a way, I’ve always wanted to be Elizabeth Berkley.” —John Early
Distributor: Park Circus
Pre-screening video clip by John Early
Taking its name from the polluted river that flows through Shanghai, director Lou’s hometown, the brooding Suzhou River uses the singular first-person perspective of its unseen videographer-narrator to explore the grubby underbelly of the city, observing the story of an unsuspecting motorcycle courier who finds himself snared in a kidnapping plot and murder rap. A seductive, intricately structured stylistic coup from the Sixth Generation filmmaker, drawing on influences from film noir to Vertigo (1958) while developing its own idiosyncratic and haunting visual vocabulary.
Distributor: Strand Releasing
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.
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
Demme’s riveting, skin-crawly adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel of the same name earned a prestige rarely granted to horror movies thanks to, yes, its two undeniable powerhouse central performances—Anthony Hopkins as psychopath psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter and Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling, the FBI agent trainee who has to win Lecter’s trust and consult his blighted, brilliant mind in order to stop another serial killer at large—but also by virtue of its consummate technical virtuosity. The work of Craig McKay, which earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Editing, will be studied as long as suspense thrillers are made, his climactic parallel cutting of two FBI “raids” nothing short of masterful.
Distributor: Park Circus
CGI spectacle may offer us visions of worlds beyond imagination and gravity-defying action, but pixels alone can never achieve the sheer viscous, loathsome ickiness on display in Carpenter’s free remake of the 1951 Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby classic. Rob Bottin and Stan Winston’s practical effects co-star with Kurt Russell (“I just wanna get up to my shack and get drunk”), playing a hard-bitten helicopter pilot passing the winter at an isolated Antarctic outpost with a group of researchers when they stumble across an ancient, awakened evil—one that first comes to them in the innocent guise of an orphaned sled dog. One of the bleakest films ever underwritten by an American studio!
Distributor: Universal
New to her Paris neighborhood, 10-year-old Laure impulsively tells a new friend that her name is “Mickaël” and from that pivotal point on presents as the new boy on the block—something that will call for an uneasy explanation when Mickaël’s relationship with a neighborhood girl, Lisa, starts to move beyond the strictly platonic. A tender coming-of-age drama from Sciamma, who coaxes superlative performances from Zoé Héran and Jeanne Disson; accessible—and appropriate, in its discreet handling of the material—to audiences of all ages, while distinctly adult in its emotional intelligence. “Brisk, precisely observed, and bracingly non-preachy in its examination of a very tricky subject.” —The Atlantic
Distributor: Janus Films
Malle re-teamed with actor/stage director André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, co-stars and co-authors of 1981’s My Dinner with André, for this docufiction that shows Gregory and members of his private performance workshop rehearsing David Mamet’s adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in the then-shuttered and dilapidated New Amsterdam Theater, with Shawn taking on the title role and Julianne Moore as Yelena.
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Introduction by Chloe Malle on Friday, June 5th
The first film in what has been called Kiarostami’s “Koker Trilogy,” named for the village in northern Iran where all of the films comprising it take place, Where is the Friend’s House? focuses on an eight-year-old boy, Ahmad, who, in discovering that he’s accidentally made off with a notebook belonging to a schoolmate living in a neighboring village, defies his elders by embarking on a journey to return the vital object and save his friend from potential expulsion. A hero’s odyssey in miniature, which evinces Kiarostami’s peerless ability to draw extraordinary performances from non-professional actors, his keen insight into child psychology, and his deep affection for rural Iran and its people.
Distributor: Janus Films
In 2001, filmmaker Aljafari, briefly imprisoned in his teens by the Israeli Occupation during the first Palestinian Intifada of 1989, set out on a north-to-south tour of Gaza in search of a man he’d met while behind bars, bringing along a local guide, Hasan, and a MiniDV camera with which to document his journey. Some two decades later, Aljafari revisited the footage he’d captured, and from it sprang this plaintive, lyrical travelogue, a loving record of cities, neighborhoods, and gathering places since reduced to rubble, of people whose current fates are unknown. Not a work of “nostalgia” for bygone times—incoming ordinance was a reality a quarter century ago, and the subjects of With Hasan in Gaza all seem to have their stories of savage raids and worse—but a work that brims with its maker’s affection for all that he sees and shows.
Distributor: The Cinema Guild
Q&A with director Kamal Aljafari moderated by Alia Ayman, writer, curator and co-founder of Zawya, on Friday, May 29th
Q&A with director Kamal Aljafari moderated by Yasmina Tawil, BAM programmer, on Saturday, May 30th
Introduction by director Kamal Aljafari on Sunday, May 31st