Now Showing
Of the many, many film adaptations of the beloved Alice books, none so wholly enters into the proto-surrealist spirit of Lewis Carroll’s abundant imagination as Švankmajer’s feature filmmaking debut—completed after more than two decades of producing short works—which “strips away all sweetness and light” [New York Times] from the source material to cast its heroine/narrator (Kristýna Kohoutová, the lone human performer here) adrift in a troubling subterranean dreamscape, an overstuffed cabinet of curiosities containing maniacal tea parties, stuffed rabbits and socks that move with minds of their own, and an apoplectically angry Queen of Hearts.
Distributor: Park Circus
Imitation is the sincerest form of parody in Bozzetto’s silly symphony send-up of Fantasia, comprised of six segments scored to tunes by Debussy, Dvorak, Ravel, Sibelius, Stravinsky, and Vivaldi. Witness a new civilization spring into being from the residue in a soda pop bottle left behind by space travelers, an aging satyr struggle to recapture the vitality of his distant youth, a telling of the Adam and Eve story that’s miles away from anything ever taught in Sunday school, and many other churlish and cheeky delights besides in this, the best-known work from a maestro of animated anarchy, newly restored and celebrating its 50th anniversary.
US premiere of new 2K restoration
Distributor: GKIDS
Barnet’s first film shot in the Sovcolor process is unsurprisingly one of his most visually glorious works, a lyrical musical comedy that unfurls an idyllic, Bruegel-esque canvas of collective farming in the Ukrainian countryside. Upon seeing Bountiful Summer, an enraptured Jacques Rivette proclaimed, “Eisenstein apart... Barnet must be considered the best Soviet filmmaker.” While the film’s narrative, surrounding petty romantic and productive rivalries on the kolkhoz, strikes all the obligatory state propagandistic notes, as Rivette argued, “Barnet’s outlook on the world, on the Soviet universe, is one of innocence, but not of an innocent.”
35mm print courtesy of Austrian Filmmuseum
One screening only!
Introduction by The Theater of the Matters on Saturday, April 4th
Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, Lakhdar-Hamina’s impassioned anti-imperialist film-in-six-chapters travels from 1939 to the outset of the Algerian War of Independence in 1954 alongside Ahmed (Yorgo Voyagis), the son of a rural village ravaged by drought and famine, as he evolves from passive acceptance of his people’s lot to active participation in the burgeoning revolutionary movement. “I tried to recount, with dignity and nobility, this uprising that then became the Algerian Revolution, an uprising not only against the coloniser, but against a certain human condition.” —Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina
Distributor: Janus Films
Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Image Retrouvée and L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratories. Restoration funded by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna – to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema.
Introduction by Madeleine Dobie, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, on Sunday, April 5th
Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart come together in perfect disharmony as a fiftysomething French actress and her twentysomething American personal assistant, cooped up together at a house in the Swiss Alps while La Binoche rehearses a return to the serious-minded stage. A meditation on the changing entertainment industry, and as such a sort-of companion piece to Assayas’s Irma Vep, the sensual and swooningly cerebral Clouds of Sils Maria functions as a meditation on both actresses’ careers, on generational schisms, and on the relationship between “pop” and “art” performance.
Distributor: IFC Films
The story of Luke Jackson (Paul Newman), an inmate at a tough-as-nails Southern jail who gains the respect of his fellows on the chain gang thanks to his unflappable demeanor and refusal to bow to the authority of warden Strother Martin, struck a chord with the anti-establishment counterculture of the late ’60s, and made Rosenberg’s hard-hitting prison picture a palpable hit. Van Fleet, playing Luke’s ailing mother—and his motive for attempting to escape the pen—brings a marvelous poignancy to her part, one of many invaluable contributions from a peerless supporting cast that includes George Kennedy, Harry Dean Stanton, and Dennis Hopper.
When a terrorist wreaks havoc on the capital metropolis of a populated and terraformed Mars, it’s up to the bounty hunters of the spaceship Bebop to stop this mysterious foe, a quest that draws back the curtain on a conspiracy to unleash a “nanomachine” plague. Shiho Takeuchi designs the city of the future, a riot of vernacular styles, while composer Yoko Kanno adds an equally eclectic score.
Distributor: Sony Pictures Entertainment
A program of short works from some of the finest creative minds in Czechoslovak animation. Includes Karel Zeman’s Inspiration, a dialogue-free film featuring glass figurines of characters drawn from commedia dell’arte; Jan Švankmajer’s Dimensions of Dialogue, which no less a personage than Terry Gilliam called one of the 10 best animated films of all time; Jiří Barta’s A Ballad about Green Wood, inspired by the Legend of Vesna, a well-known piece of Slavic folklore; Břetislav Pojar’s Romance, which combines puppet and rarely utilized “pin screen” animation (most familiar from the prologue to Orson Welles’s The Trial); Michaela Pavlatova’s Reci Reci Reci, nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film; and Hermína Týrlová and František Sádek’s immediately postwar The Revolt of the Toys, in which the playthings of the title unite in pursuit of a Nazi soldier (!).
Inspiration (Karel Zeman, 1949, 8 mins)
Dimensions of Dialogue (Jan Švankmajer, 1982, 11 mins)
A Ballad about Green Wood (Jiří Barta, 1983, 11 mins)
Romance (Břetislav Pojar, 1962, 14 mins)
Reci Reci Reci (Michaela Pavlatova, 1991, 8 mins)
The Revolt of the Toys (Hermína Týrlová, František Sádek, 1947, 14 mins)
Distributor: Národní filmový archiv and Janus Films
Müller’s crisp, surreally lucid black-and-white photography and Neil Young’s beautifully damaged electric guitar score are but two of the standout elements that make up Jarmusch’s sui generis, visionary Western, in which timid accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp) comes west from Cleveland for work only to be wounded, set on the lam, and eventually led by a cryptic guide named Nobody (Gary Farmer) on a spiritual journey through a landscape peopled with eccentrics and grotesques. One of the crucial American films of the 1990s.
Distributor: Janus Films
The Philadelphia Orchestra, following the hand of conductor Leopold Stokowski, performs selections from Bach, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Beethoven, and other giants, each accompanied by animated vignettes—most famously the mischievous Mickey Mouse vehicle “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”—to create a prodigious spectacle of music, color, and visual wit. The work of over 1,000 artists and technicians, teeming with individuated characters and pictorial invention, its “Fantasound” recording process a forerunner of surround sound to come, so undeniable was Disney’s coup de cinema as a feat of imagination and engineering that Yasujirō Ozu, who saw a seized print while working as a government censor in Singapore during World War II, would reportedly proclaim: “Watching Fantasia made me suspect we were going to lose the war.”
Distributor: Walt Disney Studios/20th Century
In 1957, Frankenstein director James Whale, a prominent figure in Hollywood’s expatriate “English Colony” as well as of Tinseltown’s gay demimonde, was found dead by suicide in the pool of his Pacific Palisades home. Condon’s lauded period drama, like the 1995 Christopher Bram novel Father of Frankenstein that it adapts, imagines the final days of Whale (McKellen, in an Academy Award–nominated role), sifting through his unhappy memories, battling worsening health, sparring with his longtime housemaid, Hanna (Lynn Redgrave), and pining hopelessly after the dashing gardener, Clayton (Brendan Fraser), who gives him a last taste of the transports of love, unrequited though it may be. “[McKellen’s] reported to have glimpsed a bit of himself in the proud, reticent Whale, and from the evidence on the screen, imaginative transference between actor and part was complete. McKellen is hypnotic in this part, lending an absolute authority and dignity to even the most absurd of Whale’s struttings and posturings.” —Jonathan Lethem
Distributor: HereMedia
Screening license courtesy of HereTV
Please Note: This special screening is general admission with no reserved seating.
Introduction by Sir Ian McKellen on Sunday, April 5th
Retro-futurist Czech fantasist Zeman, who counts Terry Gilliam and Wes Anderson among his many admirers, took on the work of science fiction pioneer Jules Verne for the third time in this giddily, gorgeous undersea adventure film whose singular and seductive visual style, combining live-action, animation, and Méliès-esque handmade effects, approximates the look of the intricately hatched line engravings illustrating the original editions of Verne’s work. “Sustains the Victorian tone, with its delight in the magic of science, that makes Verne seems so playfully archaic.”—Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
Distributor: Janus Films
Gong Li commandingly inhabits the title role, that of a beautiful country girl sold into a potentially calamitous marriage with the notoriously sadistic owner of a silk-dyeing mill (Li Wei) in 1920s rural China, in Zhang’s erotically charged, controversy-courting adaptation of a novel by Liu Heng, made in eye-popping three-strip Technicolor that might cause Douglas Sirk himself to blush. (The equipment needed for the process found its way to the PRC after being discarded by US labs.) “The ending of Ju Dou is as lurid and melodramatic as anything conceived by Poe or filmed by Buñuel, and it exhibits justice completely untempered by mercy… [The photography] a brilliance not seen in Hollywood films since the golden age of the MGM musicals.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The digital restoration was effected at Hiventy Laboratory (Paris) by IMPEX Films with the support of ARTE, France.
Distributor: Film Movement
Paris artist Juliette Binoche looks for love with a series of sweet and sour partners in Denis’s very free, disarmingly comic, and occasionally staggeringly sleazy adaptation of Roland Barthes’s unadaptable A Lover’s Discourse, a rare (and raw) depiction of female desire undiminished by middle age that watches La Binoche bouncing between married mutt Xavier Beauvois, over-the-top actor Nicolas Duvauchelle, hairdresser Paul Blain, and sweet but commitment-shy Alex Descas. “A very simple story of enormous complexity.”—Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Distributor: IFC Films
A genre-bending explosion of pure cinematic effervescence pairing Binoche and Denis Lavant, both at the beginnings of storied careers. Binoche plays the gamine mistress of a superannuated Paris gangster (Michel Piccoli), while Lavant stars as a street hustler who becomes ensorcelled of her, with his propulsive, thrashing dance/sprint set to David Bowie’s “Modern Love” surely one of the most exhilarating passages in all of French cinema. Equally indebted to the rebellious spirit of the Nouvelle Vague and the swooning romanticism of Frank Borzage, Carax’s film pits young love against venal age, with a stolen virus hanging in the balance—the relevance to the then-raging AIDS crisis is not coincidental.
Distributor: Janus Films
Mann’s big-screen adaptation of the hit ’80s television series—famously pitched as “MTV Cops”—on which he was executive producer updates the show’s unbuttoned Miami Chic for the mid-aughts, replete with a massive opening needle drop of a Jay-Z and Linkin Park collabo. Sleazy sexy Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx are detectives Crockett and Tubbs, salsa dancing, gliding through the city’s elegant freeways and across Biscayne Bay, loving hard and shooting straight when the time comes. It’s unlikely we’ll get a blockbuster this hot ever again.
Distributor: Universal
A stylish and seductive submersion into the techno-scored neon nightlife of Taipei, Hou’s much-misunderstood marvel stars Shu Qi (The Assassin) as an aimless bar hostess drifting away from her blowhard boyfriend and towards Jack Kao’s suave, sensitive gangster. Structured as a flashback to the then-present from the then-future of 2011, it’s a transfixing trance-out of a movie, drenched in club lights, ecstatic endorphin-rush exhilaration, and a nagging undercurrent of ennui. Hou and longtime cinematographer Lee here break from their familiar pattern of elegantly composed long shot long takes to create something both more intimate and hectic, a film whose shallow-focus images, jittery camerawork, and cramped locations evoke both the claustrophobic character of Taiwan’s capital city and, in Lee’s words, “the feeling of youth.”
Distributor: Metrograph Pictures
Dedicated skewerers of every aspect of English society, in this, their irresistibly quotable medieval farce, the Pythons aimed their satirical lance at nothing less than the foundational myths of Albion, following Graham Chapman’s King Arthur and his Round Table-mates on a quest for the Cup of Christ that takes them through back-talking peasantry, impossibly rude Frenchmen, the Knights of Ni, throat-ripping rabbits and ankle-biting quadruple amputees, the eager nubiles of Castle Anthrax, and finally to the perilous pass of the Bridge of Death. Though critically divisive on its release, Elvis liked it so much he bought his own print to run on repeat. In this, as in so much else, the passage of time has vindicated the King.
Distributor: AGFA
Miyazaki’s jaw-dropping second feature is a film of astonishing imagination and imagistic grandeur, a fantasia that lays its scene years after a devastating global war, in the Valley of the Wind, a seaside kingdom spared from the touch of a creeping, all-devouring poisonous jungle thanks to the protection of its insect protectors and Princess Nausicaä, leader of the human population. Brave and good at heart, Nausicaä ventures to understand the terrible wrong that has occurred, and her mission will lead her through danger, discovery, and scenes of unforgettable otherworldly magnificence.
English dubbed version will screen on Saturday, April 4th
Original Japanese language version with English subtitles will screen on Friday, April 10th
Distributor: GKIDS
Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax—the story of a middle-aged middle manager who, after becoming a casualty of downsizing, embarks on a particularly violent job hunt—finds an ideal interpreter in Park, no stranger to generous gore, who relocates the action to contemporary South Korea, with Lee Byung-hun as his down-on-his-luck lead. A wicked comedy made with an unerringly steady hand, and a cutting commentary on the corporate rat race that tacitly encourages those locked in its maze to gnaw one another to pieces for survival. “Starts out like an Ealing comedy-type caper then somehow morphs into something else: a portrait of family dysfunction, fragile masculinity and the breadwinner crisis; and the state of the nation itself… A deadpan note of knockabout black comedy is never entirely absent.” —The Guardian
Distributor: NEON
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
Somebody owes Lee Marvin money, and until they pay up, heads are going to get kicked in. Boorman’s crisp, brutal, and possibly metaphysical adaptation of one of Donald Westlake’s Parker novels utilizes a bevy of innovative and ingenious editing and narrative techniques to follow Marvin’s professional criminal on his rounds through a candy-colored Los Angeles. The definitive ’60s crime film.
Distributor: Park Circus
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
Please check back soon for updated showtimes!
Gong Li’s acting debut was also the first feature from director and Li’s longtime-collaborator-to-be Zhang, a film that established both filmmaker and star as leading figures of Chinese Fifth Generation cinema when it took home the Golden Bear from the 38th annual Berlin International Film Festival. Based on the serially published novel of the same name by Nobel laureate Mo Yan, Red Sorghum takes place in a village in rural Shandong during the Second Sino-Japanese War, where Jiu’er (Li), a poor village girl condemned to an arranged marriage with the aged, leprosy-stricken owner of a sorghum wine distillery, finds solace in the arms of a dashing Jiang Wen while the world around them burns. “The sort of scenic, romantic, violent, symbolic melodrama that flowered in the early years of the cinema. There is a strength in the simplicity of this story, in the almost fairy-tale quality of its images and the shocking suddenness of its violence, that Hollywood in its sophistication has lost.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
35mm print courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Distributor: Xi'an Film Studio
In filming Shakespeare’s blood-soaked Richard III—an ambitious Machiavellian and tyrant in the Bard’s telling—director Loncraine, lead McKellan, and production designer Tony Burrough took their cues from the ascendant totalitarian states and ideologues of the 1930s, from Mussolini’s Italy to Stalin’s USSR to the British Union of Fascists (BUF) headed by Oswald Mosley. (Loncraine’s intention, as stated, was to “mesh the 20th century imagery and the 16th century dialogue.”) A sleek and seductively sinister piece of work, true to the spirit of its source but never hamstrung by obligation to perfect fidelity, with McKellen outstanding as the oleaginous, chain-smoking Richard (a World War I veteran, like a certain Mr. Hitler), and Annette Bening in fine fettle as foil Queen Elizabeth.
Distributor: Park Circus
Please Note: This special screening is general admission with no reserved seating.
Q&A with Sir Ian McKellen moderated by film director Bill Condon on Sunday, April 5th
Based on José Luandino Vieira’s novella about the harrowing abuses faced by prisoners during the battle for Angolan independence, Maldoror’s landmark film—set at the height of the conflict in 1961—follows a woman, Maria (Elisa Andrade), as she searches for her husband, Domingos, a revolutionary who’s fallen into the hands of brutally repressive Portuguese colonial officials. (The film’s title refers to a neighborhood in Luanda that housed one of the most infamous Portuguese prisons.) Co-written with Maldoror’s husband, Mário Pinto de Andrade, a leading figure in the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), shot largely with non-professionals, and radical in its attention to a distinctly female experience of revolutionary struggle.
Distributor: Janus Films
Restored in 4K by Cineteca di Bologna and The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project at L’Image Retrouvée (Paris) from the 35mm original negatives, in association with Éditions René Chateau and the family of Sarah Maldoror. Funding provided by Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.
Introduction by writer and artist Yasmine Seale on Saturday, April 11th
Country kid Shuisheng (Wang Xiao Xiao) arrives in bustling c. 1930 Shanghai with the address of a relative, Tang (Li Baotian), provided by his uncle… but what uncle doesn’t know is that Tang is a high-ranking member of the Triad gangs, introducing 14-year-old Shuisheng to the illicit pleasures of life in the underworld as well as to capricious, jaded nightclub singer Xiao Jinbao (Gong Li), whose rocky love affair with a rising star in the organization Shuisheng bears witness to. The seventh collaboration between Zhang and Li, here exuding tawdry contamination and hidden pathos, and their last until 2006’s Curse of the Golden Flower, Shanghai Triad is a sumptuously styled tale of corruption and eventual redemption in flight from the sordid allure of a fallen city.
Distributor: Rialto Pictures
Tarkovsky’s stunning, haunted sepia-toned sci-fi masterpiece follows a scientist and a writer who, living in a broken-down totalitarian dystopia, recruit the help of a “Stalker”—a kind of post-apocalyptic Sherpa—to guide them on a voyage of self-discovery, passing through the bleak, otherworldly Zone in hopes of finding therein a haven that will fulfill their secret desires. An enigmatic, austere, and utterly immersive experience that combines religious allegory and political prophesy, and has kept cinephiles debating its meaning for some 45 years.
Distributor: Janus Films
Still in mourning—some more obviously than others—a year after their father’s funeral, three estranged brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman, also one of the film’s screenwriters) set off on a “spiritual journey” across India, discovering, along with the almost otherworldly beauty of the subcontinent’s northeastern countryside, that it’s not so easy to pencil enlightenment into a tightly scheduled itinerary. A wryly funny and bittersweet film, meandering but never purposeless, about burdensome baggage both literal and emotional, reflecting Anderson’s deep affection for the movies of Satyajit Ray, the music of the Kinks, and for everyone he puts in front of his camera.
Distributor: Walt Disney Studios/20th Century
Shooting the story of Christ with non-actors against the rugged landscapes of southern Italy, in a style simultaneously suggesting Quattrocento painting and contemporary cinéma vérité, Pasolini stripped the Gospel down to its core, in the process rediscovering the radical thought at the heart of the Nazarene’s teachings. The result is a film that drew praise from both doctrinaire Marxists and the Vatican newspaper, its soundtrack a patchwork of songs of faith from traditions ranging from Bach to the Jewish “Kol Nidre” to American blues.
Distributor: Compass Films
Jodorowsky’s follow-up to his mother of all midnight movies, El Topo, is even wilder and more extravagantly imaginative that its predecessor, a surreal, sacrilegious allegory in which the writer-director stars as a mysterious figure called “The Alchemist” who, after recruiting a band of followers and subjecting them to a series of bizarre mystical rites, sets out on a journey to the titular mountain, on a mission to topple the gods who dwell there from their thrones. An existential epic on the Cecil B. DeMille scale for the psychedelic set, in which Jodorowsky is given free rein to realize his most fantastic imaginings.
Distributor: ABKCO Music & Records Inc.
Keanu Reeves’s cubicle drone/hacker Neo gets a rude awakening, discovering that the real world he knows is a shared hallucination and that humankind are being harvested for bioelectricity by their machine overlords. A watershed movie, not only for the popularization of Hong Kong “wire fu” fighting techniques imported by choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, but for the flexible red pill and blue pill metaphor it introduced, adopted by paranoiacs of all political affiliations.
Distributor: Park Circus
The late, lamented Robert Duvall turns in a performance of marvelously pared-down simplicity and intense focus in the film that Westlake considered the finest adaptation of one of the “Parker” novels he wrote under the pseudonym Richard Stark. Parker carries the sobriquet “Earl Macklin” here—Duvall’s role—but all of the crisp plotting and hard edges of Westlake/Stark’s prose find a cinematic equivalent in this grubby, unsentimental tale of independent operators pitted against the overwhelming manpower of a corporatized crime syndicate. Featuring an ensemble cast that brings together ’40s and ‘50s noir veterans (Robert Ryan, Emile Meyer, Timothy Carey, Elisha Cook Jr.) with idiosyncratic actors of then-more recent vintage, like Joe Don Baker and Karen Black, The Outfit represents the American crime thriller at its tough, taciturn best.
Distributor: Park Circus
Opening with a bravura studio lot crane shot that’s the first of its several references to Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, The Player is a poison pen letter to Hollywood from Altman—like Welles, a perennial outsider—in which executive Tim Robbins finds himself the target of a disgruntled screenwriter with a score to settle. A stinging satire of the industrial moviemaking system run by studio apparatchiks insensate to art and fixated on profitable formula, Altman’s black comedy was—ironically—his greatest popular success since the ’70s, clearing the path for his return to directing films on a large-canvas scale.
Distributor: Janus Films
The first external co-production by Studio Ghibli, Academy Award-winning minimalist animator Dudok de Wit’s dialogue-free first feature applies ravishing visuals to the deceptively simple story of a man stranded alone on a desert island whose attempts to escape via a handmade raft are foiled time and again by a massive sea turtle. “A desert island film about succumbing rather than just surviving… A precise and elegant fable, which uses magical realism to wind its elements together… Astonishingly moving.”—Sight and Sound
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
The subject of homage by Scott Walker, Last Action Hero (1993), Woody Allen, and countless other artists and artworks, Bergman’s film—with its indelible image of weary knight Max von Sydow seated for a match of chess with Death himself—is the quintessential arthouse blockbuster of the ’50s, the grandly gloomy tale of a Crusader’s return, after 10 fruitless and disillusioning years fighting in the Holy Land, to his native Sweden, only to find his home decimated by the black plague and himself forced to do battle with an opponent that his sword alone is useless against. A passion play that finds the existential quandary of postwar Europe in the continent’s medieval past, and a work of baleful beauty and disarming humanity.
Distributor: Janus Films
In the title role of a hard-headed, pregnant country woman whose search for justice after her husband takes a beating at the hands of their village’s short-tempered head man sends her on an arduous journey through a labyrinth of bureaucracy, Gong Li leads a cast almost entirely comprised of nonprofessionals—real rural Chinese, the veracity of their performances at times assured by the use of hidden cameras—in this unusual look at life contemporary China from Zhang, who’d made his name through lavish period films. “[Li] emerges as a figure of astonishing fortitude… Zhang’s keen and universal view of human nature raises his work far above its own visual beauty and into the realm of timeless storytelling… Weave[s] its dramatic spell while providing a clear, detailed picture of the way China works.” —The New York Times
35mm print courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Distributor: Sil-Metropole
An outbreak of mysterious murders has Yokohama in the chill grip of fear, and only one man, private eye Maiku Hama (Masatoshi Nagase)—here in his final Hiyashi-helmed adventure, newly restored for the trilogy’s 30th anniversary—can bring the killing to a stop… that is, if mounting evidence pointing to him as the culprit doesn’t land him in the stir first. Something like a postmodern Japanese spin on the giallo thriller, replete with dream-logic plot twists and telekinesis, the climactic Hama whodunnit is easily the bleakest film in the trilogy, though not without its leavening moments of gallows humor, and features bravura work from Nagase, tasked with playing not one but two key roles.
A Kani Releasing release
Fabulously shot in Sovcolor, this marvelous period melodrama whisks the viewer back to the turn-of-the-century Russian Empire as Ivan Maximovich (Stanislav Chekan), an unemployed carnival wrestler, arrives in Odessa and shortly thereafter meets the aspiring clown Durov (Aleksandr Mikhaylov) on his way to joining the local circus. The pair of artists become fast friends and comrades-in-art in the face of the exploitative abuses of the outfit’s tyrannical ringmaster—a clear Tsarist stand-in, but also perhaps, for Barnet, a cipher for the arbitrary authoritarian whims of Stalinism. “One doesn’t have to be stupid to dislike Barnet’s film,” wrote one Jean-Luc Godard, “but one does have to have a heart of stone.”
35mm print courtesy of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research
Introduction by programmer Edo Choi on Saturday, April 4th
This screening will be presented with live subtitles.
One screening only!
The first entry in Kieślowski’s “Three Colors” trilogy—his final artistic statement before his early death and one of three great success stories of ’90s arthouse cinema—is a film as somber as its name implies, a cool, cobalt-shaded study in loss and abjection starring Juliette Binoche (who won a Best Actress prize at Cannes for her stinging, stricken performance) as a recent widow who has shut herself off from life in response to her still-raw emotional devastation, only to be pulled back towards the perils of fellow-feeling by a former lover and a budding friendship with a neighbor. “Indisputably the work of a master.”—Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader
Distributor: Janus Films
The final installment in Kieślowki’s trilogy and indeed his final feature, a magisterial exploration of the operations of chance and fate that earned Kieślowski an Academy Award nomination for Best Director, stars the luminous Irène Jacob as a University of Geneva student and sometimes runway model whose chance encounter with a misanthropic retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant), now devoting his idle hours to eavesdropping on his neighbors, is the first of a series of unexpected encounters and connections that brings the triptych full circle. “Somehow both playful and laden with gnomic seriousness… A highly wrought, intensely controlled, and self-aware creation… Utterly distinctive and absorbing.” —The Guardian
Distributor: Janus Films
Literally and figuratively the lightest of Kieslowski’s “Three Colors” trilogy, White stars Zbigniew Zamachowski as a Polish immigrant in Paris who hires a fellow expatriate to smuggle him back home to his native Warsaw after French wife Julie Delpy divorces him and frames him up for the incineration of his own hair salon. A wicked comedy about Eastern and Western Europe, men and women, sex and love, affection and acrimony… and also an incisive allegorical commentary on the galloping corruption of a post-communist Poland still struggling to find its foothold in the European Union.
Distributor: Janus Films
Described by one viewer, quoted in Nathan Lee’s legendary Village Voice rave, as like “[being] stuck in a filing cabinet for three hours,” Fincher’s obsessively detailed period procedural recounts the facts of the still-unsolved Zodiac killings that shocked the San Francisco Bay area in the late ’60s, and the ongoing efforts of three men—Chronicle employees Robert Graysmith and Paul Avery (Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr.) and SFPD Inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo)—to crack the case years after the trail has gone cold. Fincher’s distanced objective mise en scène has never been more perfectly matched to a subject, and the crystalline clarity of cinematographer Harris Savides’s images only serves to intensify the disquieting uncertainty hovering over most everything we see, or think we see, transpiring.
Distributor: Paramount