Now Showing
Alongside his more touted multi-character panoramas, Altman also had a fondness for small-scale dramas investigating the complexities of female psychology, and of these none is greater than the ineffable 3 Women, which finds Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Janice Rule thrown together at a health spa in the California desert that caters to the elderly. As time passes, personas become increasingly permeable, and the proceedings feel like something conceived in a dream—which, indeed, the movie was!
Distributor: Walt Disney Studios/20th Century
Two slices of life from Europe entre deux guerres, and two compact masterpieces. Renoir’s featurette fragment, based on a Guy de Maupassant short story and only edited 10 years after its shoot came to a premature end, evokes the disappeared world of Belle Époque France—the world of Renoir’s father, the painter Pierre-Auguste—by describing an afternoon’s outing for two young shirt-chasers, a middle-aged Paris shopkeeper, and the shopkeeper’s susceptible-to-flattery wife and daughter. People on Sunday, made by a supergroup brain trust of future cinematic luminaries including Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Robert Siodmak, and Edgar G. Ulmer, follows a quintet of Berliners through a weekend of walks along the Wannsee, domestic squabbles, and frisky flirtation. Modest in ambition, yet they contain the world in miniature.
A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir, 1946, 41 mins)
People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, 1930, 74 mins)
Distributor: Janus Films
Linklater’s ongoing, decades-spanning story of a love affair through its many ups and downs begins here, with a chance encounter on a train between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, the American Jesse and the French Céline, who together will pass a day and night in Vienna full of spirited, sparkling conversation and a slowly dawning attraction, all depicted with an ambling, uninflected naturalism. A wistful, winning, and quietly impassioned portrait of young love as it begins to bloom.
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Güney, a stubbornly individualistic, rabble-rousing talent whose cinema stirred together Kurdish/Turkish folklore and aspects of the Western into a potent and highly politicized compound, took on the lead role in this lyrical yet naturalistic breakthrough work, strikingly lensed in black-and-white widescreen, about an impoverished Anatolian villager, Seyyit, who swears revenge upon learning that a wealthy landowner has been pitching woo to his lover (Nebahat Çehre) with the intention of taking her as his wife. An ideal introduction to a larger-than-life figure described by J. Hoberman as “something like Clint Eastwood, James Dean, and Che Guevara combined,” and affectionately nicknamed “the Ugly King” by his adoring public.
Distributor: Güney Filmcilik
A hot-shot to the heart, pop masterpiece Chungking Express tells the stories of two lovelorn cops (Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung) and the women who baffle them (Brigitte Lin and Faye Wong, who contributes a Cantopop cover of The Cranberries’ “Dreams”), its bifurcated structure suggesting the A- and B-sides of a 45. Wong’s international breakthrough introduced new audiences to his rich, sensorial brand of filmmaking, inviting one to disappear into, sink into, live inside, a voluptuary world bigger and brighter than our own—but just as heartbreaking.
Distributor: Janus FIlms
Shot in the environs of Lake Annecy, Claire’s Knee—the fifth entry in Rohmer’s series of Six Moral Tales—concerns a cultured, soon-to-be-wed diplomat (Jean-Claude Brialy) who develops a consuming obsession with the knee of an acquaintance’s daughter, a fetish which in Rohmer’s hands takes on the character of an almost religious quest. With the always wonderful Béatrice Romand, making her first appearance in Rohmer’s stock company.
Distributor: Janus Films
Los Angeles cabbie Max Durocher (Jamie Foxx) is in for the toughest fare of his working life when he picks up one Vincent (Tom Cruise, natty in charcoal gray sharkskin suit), a jazz enthusiast and professional hitman who quite firmly insists that his driver accompany him on his evening’s rounds, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. Shooting LA exteriors after dark with a then-state-of-the-art Sony F-900 digital camera, Mann gave his film a wholly distinctive texture—combining expressionistic smear with a new ability to pick up detail that would be lost on celluloid—and initiated a quiet revolution in low-light cinematography. A drum-tight character-based thriller, and the only film in which you can see Tom Cruise saying: “Yo, homie… Is that my briefcase?”
Distributor: Paramount
A quartet of city slicker businessman buddies (Jon Voight, Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox and, in a star-making role, Burt Reynolds) leave Atlanta to head into the Georgia backwoods for what’s meant to be a little weekend canoe trip… and stumble headlong instead into the hidden horrors lurking in the old Southland. The trial-by-fire endurance test that they’ll pass through makes for pure, pulse-pounding cinema, with at least three scenes—the “Dueling Banjos” gas station stop, Beatty’s “Squeal like a pig!” humiliation, and the white-water rapids set piece—that rank above the most remembered in ’70s American cinema.
Distributor: Park Circus
Sixteen years after starring in Yuen Woo-ping’s Drunken Master, the film that cemented its star’s place as the clown prince of martial arts cinema, Jackie Chan returned to the role of bibulous warrior Wong Fei-hung (aka “Freddie Wong”) with Lau in the director’s chair, the result nothing less than a masterclass in breathless kung-fu action. Fei-hung faces off against a shadowy syndicate siphoning precious artifacts out of the Chinese Mainland—and jabberjaw stepmother Anita Mui—in this bonanza of stunning set piece after stunning set piece, climaxing in a 20-minute grand finale that is one of the pinnacles of go-for-broke Hong Kong moviemaking. (After watching it, a cowed Roger Ebert opined, “It may not be possible to film a better fight scene.” We concur.)
Distributor: Park Circus
Expanding his segment of the same name in the horror anthology film Three… Extremes, Chan’s Dumplings tells the deliciously deviant tale of ex-soap star Mrs. Li (Miriam Yeung) who, her looks fading and husband Tony Leung Ka-fai’s eye wandering, begins supplementing her diet with a special preparation of the eponymous foodstuff that uses the flesh of unborn fetuses for filling. Christopher Doyle’s photography, along with the work of production designer Yee Chung-man, provide an elegant setting to this baleful, bleak fable described by its director as a “post-feminist horror movie,” a work that may or may not have exercised its influence on a little picture called The Substance.
Distribution: Wi Distribution
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
Iosseliani’s debut feature—winner of the FIPRESCI Award at Cannes—follows newly minted oenologists Nico and Otar, just out of winemaking school, as they head to work at an agricultural cooperative in Tbilisi, there to have their first intimate experiences of the opposite sex… as well as their introduction to the corruption bred by stifling bureaucracy and arbitrarily imposed production quotas. A stinging satire of Soviet-style economic planning and its unintended consequences smuggled within a pseudo-documentary depiction of the Georgian wine industry, and a deeply personal film about youth for the first time facing up to the full measure of adult negligence and corruption.
New 4K restoration commissioned by Pastorale Productions.
Distributor: The Cinema Guild
Inroduction by programmer Edo Choi on Sunday, August 16th
Having relocated to France in 1982, Iosseliani wasted no time in showing the world he hadn’t left his singular gifts behind upon leaving Georgia, taking home the Special Jury Prize at the 41st Venice International Film Festival for this puckish panoramic comedy about dizzying reversals of fortune and everyday acts of larceny, petty and otherwise. Terrorists, chanteuses, antique dealers, police inspectors, street walkers, and street sweepers all have a part to play in this farcical fable located at the intersection of Dickens and Tati, which follows the circulation of two precious objects—a Limoges porcelain dinner service and a portrait of a Belle Époque–era aristocratic beauty—as they’re passed from one pair of hands to another, and up and down the socioeconomic hierarchy, in Paris’s 13th arrondissement. Co-written with regular Polanski collaborator Gérard Brach, and featuring a very fresh-faced Mathieu Amalric in his very first film role.
Distributor: Les Films du Losange
The movie whose runaway success singlehandedly landed Carolco in the ranks of legit Tinseltown players, Kotcheff’s taut adaptation of David Morrell’s 1972 novel of the same name introduces Sylvester Stallone as burnt-out Vietnam vet John Rambo, in the words of critic J. Hoberman, a combination of “super-grunt, Green Beret, hippie protester, VC guerilla, righteous outlaw [and] Hollywood Freedom Fighter.” Arriving in the town of Hope, Washington State, after paying his respects to an old army buddy who’s died from the lingering effects of Agent Orange exposure, Rambo is escorted to the city limits by hard-ass local sheriff Brian Dennehy who, with this slight, unwittingly lights the fuse on a human stick of dynamite. As Colonel Trautman (Richard Crenna), Rambo’s old superior officer, says upon arriving in Hope to prevent a slaughter: “I didn’t come to save Rambo from you. I came to save you from Rambo.”
Distributor: Rialto Pictures
Shot quickly in and around Paris during a production break on Rohmer’s Le Rayon Vert, this breezy, witty film traces the exploits of two young women—one an ethnology student from the city, the other an unsophisticated aspiring artist from the country. Reinette and Mirabelle (played by Joëlle Miquel and Jessica Forde) become instant friends upon meeting in the first of four vignettes that make up the film (“The Blue Hour”), and in their first two days together, they decide to become roommates in Paris. Throughout the three remaining stories, they encounter many of the inevitable characters of a modern city: the impossible waiter (“The Waiter”), the Metro-station hustler (“The Beggar, the Kleptomaniac and the Hustler”), and the snooty gallery owner (“Selling the Painting”). A Metrograph Pictures release
Two brothers in a modern Japanese suburb go on strike to bring their parents to their knees and achieve their cherished dream: owning a television set for watching sumo matches. While borrowing from his own classic I Was Born, But… (1932), Ozu turns in a decidedly contemporary, family-friendly satire of a pop-culture colonized country seen in lively Agfacolor, which also functions as the single best showcase for the master’s fondness for fart jokes.
Distributor: Janus Films
Hopkins reprises his role from 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs as psychiatrist-turned-cannibal serial killer Hannibal Lecter in Scott’s follow-up, a gristly fairy tale that finds FBI special agent Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore, ably taking on the role originated by Jodie Foster) racing against time to find to catch up with her old foil before he’s located by Mason R. Verger (Gary Oldman), a sadistic scion of enormous wealth who, after years earlier being grotesquely mutilated by Lecter, has dedicated the entirety of his power and influence towards a terrible and extravagant dream of vengeance. Unidentified in promotional materials and unbilled until the film’s closing credits, wholly unrecognizable under a prosthetic mask, and stripped of almost every expressive tool an actor traditionally relies upon to practice their craft, Oldman offers up an indelible portrayal of utter and absolute human corruption.
Distributor: Park Circus
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
Fourteen long sequence shots arranged in reverse chronology take us on a journey from hell to heaven, from nightmarish violence to connubial bliss. In a BDSM club evocatively called Club Rectum, Pierre (Albert Dupontel) dashes in the face of a man who’s just broken the arm of his friend, Marcus (Vincent Cassel), and is preparing to rape him. From this memorable cold open, we see the events leading up to this bloody denouement—an evening that begins (or ends, as it were) as an innocent outing by the two friends and Marcus’s girlfriend, Alex (Monica Bellucci). Not a film to leave the viewer indifferent, to put it very mildly, featuring a positively punitive, bowel-churning soundtrack by Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter.
Distributor: Altered Innocence
Having proven himself a reliable hitmaker through the 1980s with Flashdance, 9½ Weeks, and Fatal Attraction, Lyne took an excursion into troubling new territory with this headlong plunge into the damaged psyche of Vietnam veteran Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins) who, haunted by his wartime experience and the death of a son, finds his drab daily life in c. 1975 New York City increasingly infringed on by nightmarish hallucinations—disturbing visions that suggest something more than run-of-the-mill PTSD. A nerve-fraying, phantasmagoric, wholly immersive waking nightmare that dangles its protagonist—and we, the audience—over a yawning abyss of horror. “Both a highly effective stream-of-consciousness puzzle thriller offering the viewer not one but many ‘solutions’ and an emotionally persuasive statement about the plight of many American vets.” —Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Distributor: Rialto Pictures
The alpha and omega of conspiracy films, Stone’s deliriously entertaining cinematic inquest stars Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney who came to find the circumstances of the 35th US president’s assassination more than a little fishy and got to digging around. Gary Oldman, as “patsy” Lee Harvey Oswald, stands out in a supporting cast teeming with familiar faces, including Tommy Lee Jones swishing it up as Louisiana businessman Clay Shaw, Brian Doyle-Murray as Jack Ruby, Donald Sutherland as whistleblower “Mr. X,” and Garrison himself as Justice Earl Warren. “A knockout. Part history book, part comic book, the movie rushes toward judgment for three breathless hours, lassoing facts and factoids by the thousands, then bundling them together into an incendiary device that would frag any viewer's complacency… Tip-top tabloid journalism. In its bravura and breadth, JFK is seditiously enthralling; in its craft, wondrously complex.” —Richard Corliss, Time
Distributor: Warner Bros.
A cinematic Molotov cocktail that was the first onscreen description of life (and death) in Paris’s banlieue housing projects that many French filmgoers had ever seen, La Haine depicts three armed and angry slum kids—Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé, and Saïd Taghmaoui—who, following days of rioting after the police’s savage beating of a young man, hit the city streets like ticking time bombs. A breakneck Steadicam journey through the concrete jungles of the suburbs, given an almost lunar desolation by the film’s black-and-white photography, La Haine is a propulsive, volatile, and visceral landmark of ’90s French cinema.
Distributor: Janus Films
Novelist Giovanni Pontano (Marcello Mastroianni) is the toast of the Italian literary scene, but smothered by the trappings of success. His misery weighs heavily on his wife, Lidia (Jeanne Moreau), already carrying her own cargo of existential anguish. In the course of a day and a night—spent at a hospital sickroom, a book launch, a nightclub, and a party at an industrialist’s villa, where Giovanni flirts extensively with the host’s daughter, Valentina (Monica Vitti)—the couple must come to terms with the extinction of the love that once existed between them… or not? A film steeped in despair but thrilling in its adventurous, architectonic use of the cinematic medium, from its opening credits—an avant-jazz/musique concrète overture accompanying the industrialized Milanese cityscape—to its beguiling final scene.
Distributor: Rialto Pictures
A film in which sound, often off-screen, enriches the image, and carries enormous, frequently tragic implications: the tinkling shatter of a glass of white wine seen precipitously perched on an upright piano, the sound of an open palm crossing a young woman’s cheek, the clatter of a cash register drawer. “When a sound can replace an image,” Bresson writes in his Notes on the Cinematographer, “cut the image or neutralize it.” In Jean-Louis Ughetto, he found a simpatico—and amply gifted—accomplice.
“In L’Argent I sense an unconditional surrender to despair and disgust. One can hardly argue that contemporary humanity does not deserve its full quotient of despair and disgust. And it is not even a matter of this social system or that. The rottenness seems to have plunged very deeply into the universal psyche. The artist, however is still obligated to search for order amid the chaos, for beauty amid the ugliness, for truth amid the falsehoods, and, above all, for hope amid the despair… That a filmmaker can lift us to these levels of contemplation and speculation is proof enough of that filmmaker’s greatness” —Andrew Sarris
Distributor: Janus Films
An early and enormous artistic triumph of the French New Wave, Chabrol’s quietly class-conscious film records the dreams, dramas, and self-deceptions of a quartet of young Parisian girls working at an appliance shop, among them Bernadette Lafont and Stéphane Audran. A study of the social habits of the petite bourgeoisie, set against indubitably authentic locations seen in crisp black-and-white courtesy DP Henri Decaë, which develops into a melancholy cautionary tale on the risks of romantic illusion.
Distributor: Janus Films
Tam, perhaps the Hong Kong New Wave’s most daring cine-modernist and a crucial influence on Wong Kar-wai, teams with DP Christopher Doyle for a high-style “heroic bloodshed” melodrama starring Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Kenny Bee, and Joey Wong as three friends bound together by ties both criminal and romantic. With shamelessly pulpy plotting, a synth-heavy score, luxuriously expressionistic imagery, and a climactic bloodbath for the ages, My Heart Is That Eternal Rose exists somewhere at the intersection between Wong’s cinema of longing and John Woo’s cinema of wrathful vengeance. One of the unheralded masterworks of Hong Kong filmmaking.
A Kani Releasing release
Coming-of-age, Eustache-style: the director followed up The Mother and the Whore with an intimate drama based on his childhood, about a boy’s awkward, provincial adolescence in the south of France. This unsentimental, elegantly somber, visually driven film about sexual self-discovery and the passage of time was gorgeously photographed by the legendary Nestor Almendros. Eustache’s only other feature-length narrative film other than The Mother and the Whore, it owns a rightful place next to that film as a true masterpiece.
Distributor: Janus Films
Set in the hardscrabble South London of the filmmaker’s own youth and dedicated—in a more than slightly ambivalent gesture—to the memory of his father, Gary Oldman’s disarmingly raw debut as writer/director/producer flings us into a working-class family’s lives of profane squabbling and substance abuse as lived in the pressure cooker of a council estate flat: tyrannical father Ray (Ray Winstone); long-suffering wife, Val (Kathy Burke); Val’s junkie brother, Billy (Charlie Creed-Miles); Val’s mother and grandmother (Oldman’s sister, billed as Laila Morse, and Edna Doré); and the couple’s young daughter, who has no choice but to soak in the ambient trauma of her surroundings. “Unflinching and observant… There is humor in it, and tender insight… We sense Oldman’s ability to understand, if not forgive.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
De Palma’s twisted twist on Hitchcock’s Vertigo stars Cliff Robertson as a wealthy New Orleans real-estate developer still mourning the loss of his beloved wife (Dead Ringers’ Genevieve Bujold) and daughter years after their abductions until, on a visit to Florence, he encounters her exact double. (In addition to Hitch, screenwriter Paul Schrader drew inspiration from Dante and his infatuation with muse Beatrice.) With lusciously gauzy cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond, a richly romantic score by Hitch regular Bernard Herrmann, and Big Easy Baroque location shooting, this is moviemaking as ultrarich confection, a swooning transport “to a more romantic era… and the simple, touching pleasures denied the audience by the current antiromantic spirit of the movies” [Richard Schickel].
Distributor: Sony Pictures Entertainment
A program of the inspired early shorts that established Iosseliani at the forefront of a new, rising generation of Georgian filmmakers. Featuring Akvarel, in which a quarreling working-class couple experience a revelation at an art exhibition; Sapovnela, in which an old man who tends exquisite flower gardens in the hills around Mtskheta sees his life’s work threatened by the arrival of a new road; April, in which a young couple find their happiness dwindling as their comfort increases upon moving into a brand new, squeaky clean housing development, and Tudzhi (Cast Iron), a documentary description of life in an ironworks that singles out individuals on the factory floor not as symbols of thrumming Soviet industrial might, but as human beings.
Akvarel (Otar Iosseliani, 1958, 10 mins)
Sapovnela (Song About a Flower) (Otar Iosseliani, 1959, 18 mins)
April (Otar Iosseliani, 1962, 46 mins)
Tudzhi (Cast Iron) (Otar Iosseliani, 1963, 20 mins)
Distributor: Les Films du Losange
Adapting Blake Nelson’s Y.A. novel of the same name, Van Sant renders the youth gathering place of the skate park a voluptuous dreamscape with the help of cinematographers Chris Doyle and Rain Kathy Li. Teenaged skate rat Alex—Gabe Nevins, leading a largely amateur cast recruited via MySpace—finds himself a prime suspect in the death of a security guard, silently carrying a crushing burden of knowledge through his daily rounds, a contrast to the gravity-defying liberation he finds carving it up at “Paranoid Park.”
Distributor: mk2 Films
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
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again…” Hitchcock was still a newly arrived UK import when this gothic thriller/romance, based on the novel of the same title by Daphne du Maurier, took Outstanding Production (later “Best Picture”) honors at the Academy Awards. Joan Fontaine stars as a terribly self-conscious young woman, never identified by name, who becomes enamored with a saturnine, aristocratic widower, Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier, fresh from Wuthering Heights)—and, once she’s been taken as his bride, obsessed with his late wife’s phantom presence in their home on the Cornwall coast. A marvel of directorial assurance that turns the screws with poise and panache.
Walt Disney Studios/20th Century
Sippy’s sprawling “curry Western,” blown up to 70mm for first-run distribution and shot over the course of two-and-a-half years in the rugged hills around the city of Ramanagara, was one of the most ambitious undertakings in Bollywood history: star-studded (including a young Amjad Khan giving a villainous dacoit for the ages), with earworm tunes courtesy legendary writing team Salim-Javed and composer R.D. Burman. India’s all-time box-office champion for nearly 20 years, having logged a storied unbroken five-year run at Mumbai’s Minerva cinema, this ripping yarn about a former lawman (Sanjeev Kumar) recruiting two petty crooks (Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra) to help him bring down a beastly bandit who’s terrorizing the village of Ramgarh can now be seen with its astonishing original ending, censored on initial release, restored.
Restored by Film Heritage Foundation at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with Sippy Films.
Distributor: Sippy Ltd.
Introduction by film critic Siddhant Adlakha on Wednesday, August 19th
Enthralling, haunting, hypnotic, enigmatic, visually stunning, and overwhelmingly emotional, Tarkovsky’s slow sci-fi epic—based on Polish author Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel of the same name—follows psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) on a voyage to a space station that’s orbiting the planet Solaris, where he’s been sent to investigate curious hallucinations amongst members of the research team manning it, only, upon arriving, to encounter his late wife, dead ten years, waiting for him… or at least something that looks and acts exactly like her. A singular odyssey into outer and inner space, posing questions about the nature of love and humanity that linger long after its celebrated final shot.
Distributor: Janus Films
From money laundering to influence peddling, casino gambling to dabbling in controversial politics, the life of Serge Alexandre, aka Stavisky, flashes before our eyes and we see the making and unmaking of the theatrically charming con artist who used turn-of-the-century France as his playground. Resnais’s biographical drama features the late Jean-Paul Belmondo, in one of his greatest roles, as the eponymous swindler, a real-life adventurer whose 1934 death remains a mystery to this day; Anny Duperey, as his wife; a standout Charles Boyer, in his penultimate performance, as his nobleman friend; and music by Stephen Sondheim, contributing his only full-length film score.
“Shot by the great Sacha Vierny, Resnais’s cult classic set in the 1930s is a visually intriguing riddle within a riddle. Saint Laurent designed the clothes for Anny Duperey, playing Stavisky’s glamorous and enigmatic wife.” —David Campany, Creative Director, International Center of Photography
Distributor: Rialto Pictures
Japanese milk-truck drivers (Tsutomu Yamazaki and Ken Watanabe) team up with the owner of a run-down roadside food stall (Nobuko Miyamoto, in the title role) to help her kick up her noodle-making game a notch in Itami’s brash, bawdy, knee-slapping “ramen Western,” a paean to the simple pleasures to be found at the kitchen table and in the boudoir.
Distributor: Janus Films
Introduction by chef and author Natasha Pickowicz on Saturday, June 20th
Drawing inspiration from the gristly exploits of South Korean serial killer Yoo Young-chul, Na’s astonishingly assured directorial debut stars Ha Jung-woo as a sadistic killer, Ji Yeong-min, and Kim Yoon-seok as Joong-ho, an ex-detective with a checkered past now running a prostitution ring. After helplessly watching his stable of employees disappear and dwindle, Joong-ho sets out to find the sicko responsible—and in the course of a sleepless night of cat and mouse, finds he has to contend not only with the killer’s calculating intelligence and red herring misleads, but with an incompetent police force and a thicket of bureaucratic barriers that seem to have been erected with the specific purpose of allowing the guilty to get away clean. Winner of Best Actor, Best Film, and Best Director at Korea’s Grand Bell Awards, The Chaser is both a precision-tuned white-knuckle thriller and an agonized exploration of insoluble moral conundrums.
Distributor: IFC Films
The city of Chicago plays an oppressively glum Gotham in Nolan, Christian Bale, and Gary Oldman’s second Batman outing, a film of Langian architectural oppression that pits Bruce Wayne’s alter ego against Heath Ledger’s anarchic Clown Prince of Crime, with Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon the voice of law-and-order in an increasingly Bedlam-like city. Though Oldman may be known for his chameleonic transformations as an actor and his ability to comfortably occupy the skin of vastly different characters, he would in interviews cite Gordon as the character he’d played who is closest to himself: “A good sense of right and wrong… Family man. Just a regular geezer.”
Distributor: Park Circus
A lush vampire romance with sex and style to spare, much of it provided by stars Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie as a couple of posh, centuries-old nightclubbing New York bloodsuckers who, when one begins to show the first signs of aging, recruit assistance from Susan Sarandon’s geriatrics researcher, then find themselves in a very, very attractive throuple. Yes, that’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” artists Bauhaus in a brief cameo.
“Twenty years after Belle de Jour, Saint Laurent once again dressed Catherine Deneuve, for Tony Scott’s cult 1980s tale of elegant vampires. Her shoulder pads, lipstick, and veils defined an era.” —David Campany, Creative Director, International Center of Photography
Distributor: Park Circus
Inspired by the adventures of the foundling Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling’s 1894 collection of the same name, The Jungle Book—the final animated Disney feature to be overseen in its production by Uncle Walt—would become one of the studio’s biggest hits, thanks in no small part to its exceptional confluence of vocal talent (yes, that’s George Sanders as the suavely sinister Bengal tiger Shere Khan) and unforgettable songbook, including perennial favorites “The Bare Necessities” and “I Wanna Be Like You (The Monkey Song),” the latter volcanically belted out by none other than jump blues howler extraordinaire Louis Prima. Brisk, breezy, and simply buckets of fun.
Distributor: Walt Disney Studios/20th Century
Winner of the Golden Bear at the 59th Berlin International Film Festival, Llosa’s formidable sophomore feature focuses on Fausta (Magaly Solier, in a performance nearly free of dialogue), the only daughter of an aged Indigenous Peruvian woman who, following her mother’s death, must negotiate arrangements for her burial as well as negotiate the smothering legacy of trauma that her parent, horribly misused during the Shining Path terrorist insurgencies of the 1980s and ’90s, has left behind with her child even after herself departing this mortal coil. “Littered with unforgettable images of incongruity, destruction, and, finally, healing” [The Village Voice], The Milk of Sorrow is an exquisitely shot study in inherited injury guarded like a precious heirloom, a work of tragic magic realism.
Distributor: WandaVision
A surreal nocturnal animated odyssey from Yuasa, the mad genius behind Mind Game, rendered in a frenetic, galaxy-brained, endlessly morphing style. The Night is Short, Walk on Girl follows a mysterious high schooler known only as The Girl with Black Hair through the streets of Kyoto’s famed Ponto-Cho party district, drinking middle-aged salarymen under the table when she’s not mixing with barflies, obsessive collectors, and guerilla theater performers, all the while oblivious to the efforts of a fellow student who has been creating increasingly fantastic and contrived reasons to run into her in a gambit to win her love. A comic fable of fleeting youthful passions, as lived out through one mad, unforgettable night.
Distributor: GKIDS
Having enjoyed a palpable international hit with his Abre Los Ojos—picked up for an American remake, under the title Vanilla Sky, by Tom Cruise—Amenábar made his English-language debut with The Others, a dolorous, deftly directed Old Dark House chiller set in the immediate aftermath of World War II, about a devoutly religious Englishwoman (Nicole Kidman, superb) living in a remote home in the Channel Island with her two young, severely photosensitive children and the strange goings-on that begin shortly after she takes on a trio of new servants. “Elegant… Creates more tension from atmosphere alone than most other horror films do from vats full of fake blood.” —The Times of London
Distributor: Rialto Pictures
Gia (Gela Kandelaki), a timpanist in the Tbilisi Philharmonic, has made a science of getting to work just on time to hit his lone cue and then dashing out the door, so as to leave the rest of his hours open for sweet-talking women and carousing with pals. A marvelous character study of an open-handed, incurably impulsive young man infected by the bustling, on-the-go energy of the city around him, and a film that careens along with the same freewheeling spontaneity displayed by its protagonist. Screens with Georgian Ancient Songs, which Iosseliani described thusly: “It’s a film about Georgian traditional polyphony. Georgian songs are always sung in one, two, three or even four voices. It’s a story about how these songs are structured. And at the same time we show what life was like in the old days. The official reaction to the film was one of indignation. I managed to steal a print of the film and keep it safe.”
Georgian Ancient Songs (Otar Ioseliani, 1969, 20 mins)
Once Upon a Time There Once Was a Singing Blackbird (Otar Iosseliani, 1971, 78 mins)
New 4K restoration commissioned by Pastorale Productions.
Distributor: The Cinema Guild. Les Films du Losange
Inroduction by programmer Edo Choi on Sunday, August 16th
A pair of films from Moss, a master of first-person documentary and longtime Professor at Harvard’s Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, who will join Metrograph for the screening. Riverdogs is Moss’s lyrical, beautifully photographed account of a 35-day trek down the Colorado River, a paean to youth, the natural world, and a fleeting moment in the increasingly distant past. In his confessional The Tourist, Moss meditates—with a wry sense of humor—on the early years of his marriage, his failed attempts to start a family with his new wife, and the daily vicissitudes of professional life as an itinerant freelance cameraman.
The Tourist (Robb Moss, 1991, 60 mins)
Riverdogs (Robb Moss, 1982, 32 mins)
Q&A with filmmaker Robb Moss moderated by filmmaker Jeff Reichert on Saturday, August 15th
Dress up becomes a matter of fevered fixation in Hitchcock’s utterly intoxicating thriller, in which ex-cop-cum-snoop-for-hire Scottie Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart) sets out on a routine job tailing the mysterious Madeline (Kim Novak), an old pal’s wife—and soon finds himself in the center of a whirlpool of romantic obsession and supernatural quandaries, speeding towards a tragic denouement. Perennially on the short list of the greatest films of all time, Hitchcock’s film of death, desire, and doppelgangers—a key inspiration haunting every frame of Chantal Akerman's La Captive—has lost none of its ability to simultaneously seduce and repel. “One of the landmarks—not merely of the movies, but of 20th-century art.”—Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
Distributor: Universal
Having fled into the Outback after their father has a psychotic episode that threatens their very lives, two Sydney-bred adolescent siblings (Jenny Agutter and Luc Roeg, the director’s son) meet an Aboriginal teenager (David Gulpilil, in his debut role) on his traditional “walkabout”—a rite-of-passage journey, undertaken in solitude—who aids them in adjusting to the apparently harsh, unforgiving landscape around them, a landscape that, as Walkabout progresses, is heavily romanticised, revealing an Edenic splendor lurking beneath its sun-baked surface. A foundational text of the Australian New Wave and a film of genuinely awe-striking natural beauty, shot by cinematographer-turned-director Roeg himself.
Distributor: Janus Films
Raised in colonial French Africa until the age of 13, Denis would return to the continent in her cinema time and again, making it the scene of some of her richest and most redolent works. Here, Isabelle Huppert plays the manager of a coffee plantation in an unnamed country on the verge of civil war, trying to hang on until harvest time as the auguries of impending chaos gather on every side, and soldiers—many of them children, hence the film’s dedication “Aux intrepides petites marmailles”—roam the landscape. “Simultaneously poetic, dramatic, and realistic… Altogether stunning.”—Los Angeles Times
Distributor: The Festival Agency