Now Showing
A mob enforcer (Lee Byung-hun, No Other Choice) with a sterling record of loyal service finds himself fighting for his life after sparing the life of his boss’s straying mistress (Shin Min-a) in Kim’s drum-tight neo-noir thriller, unusually grounded by both emotional stakes and a sense of real physical danger in the action set pieces, choreographed for the widescreen with much panache. Jang’s second collaboration with Kim, after The Foul King, earned him and collaborator (and Peach Present collective bandmate) Dalparan Best Music honors from the Busan Film Critics Association, responding to the composers’ sophisticated melange of samba, flamenco, solo cello, and electronic elements.
Distributor: NEON
Newly arrived in New York City from Hong Kong and unhappily reunited with boyfriend Danny Chan, Jennifer (Cherie Chung) finds a guide to this strange new world in the person of distant relation Samuel Pang, aka “Sampan” (Chow Yun-fat, at his most goofily charming)… and the prospect, possibly, of something more. A time capsule of ’80s NYC—particularly Chinatown—and a perfectly delightful blend of odd-couple romance and amiable comedy from Cheung and longtime collaborator Alex Law, who took home Best Screenplay honors at the 7th Hong Kong Film Awards for his work here. (Lowell Lo’s heartstring-tugging score was, alas, robbed.)
Distributor: Janus Films
Brecht’s adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone—concerning the title character’s rebellion against the uncle, King Creon, who has condemned her to death—is performed in its entirety in Straub and Huillet’s final film set in the ancient world, which recalls their 1975 Moses und Aron in its antiquarian setting: the ruins of a Greek theatre in Segesta, Sicily.
Distributor: Migeul Abreu Gallery
The film that made Dovzhenko’s international reputation, Arsenal depicts—in thrillingly innovative, lyric cinematic language—a 1918 episode in the Russian Civil War, a worker’s uprising at Kyiv’s Arsenal Factory, and its brutal military suppression, in the midst of fighting between Bolshevik forces and the Central Rada of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, in whose ranks Dovzhenko may have served for a time. One of a quartet of films commissioned by Soviet authorities to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution and, of the four, the most ambivalent, showing an understanding, in turns, of both the universalist, workers-of-the-world-unite Bolshevik cause and a Ukrainian nationalism rooted in soul and soil.
35mm print courtesy of the Filmoteka Narodowa, Warsaw
Distributor: Dovzhenko Center
Live musical accompaniment by Fima Chupakhin, piano & synths, and Fabio Rojas, percussion, on Sunday, October 11th
Every Tuesday, the scant elderly residents of an isolated, nearly abandoned village outside St. Petersburg push an unmanned train car along a spur off the main line that leads into town, supplying themselves and their neighbors with a week’s daily bread—a ritual that, in Dvortsevoy’s hands, appears as both a miracle of tenacity and a pointed commentary on systemic dysfunction. Screens with The Train Stop, Loznitsa’s sumptuously photographed record of sleepers in a station waiting room.
“In Loznitsa’s The Train Stop, in the middle of the night, the train doesn’t arrive. The waiting room is full of heavy sleepers, some folded over on their laps, some splayed out over the benches. What could rouse them? Maybe the answer is not a train, but a film. Consider Dvortsevoy’s similarly existential Bread Day. Sure, the rickety cart carrying the week’s delivery of bread to Township 3 of Zhikharevo barely seems to count as a train. It’s manually pushed by the pensioners who will soon argue strenuously with each other as they divvy up its contents. But their shouting is so vigorous, their insults so inventive, that questions of categorization quickly dissipate as the elderly residents, their goats in tow, battle to have the last word.” —Series curator Genevieve Yue
The Train Stop (Sergei Loznitsa, 2000, 25 mins)
Bread Day (Sergei Dvortsevoy, 1998, 55 mins)
Introduction by Genevieve Yue on Saturday, October 5th
Lean’s simple, tender, and terribly emotionally direct film, featuring never-better Noël Coward dialogue and a Rachmaninoff theme that grows insuperably sad with repetition, follows an affair between a middle-class couple (Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard) who happen to be inconveniently married to other people, their mutual love and mutual agony increasing over the course of seven meetings and departures that begin with a chance in a railway station buffet. One of the great screen romances, full stop.
“The trains are mercilessly exact in Brief Encounter—there’s only three minutes between the departures of the trains that take Laura and Alec away from each other, and they’re never late.” —Series curator Genevieve Yue
35mm print provided courtesy of the American Genre Film Archive.
Distributor: AGFA
Introduction by Genevieve Yue on Saturday, October10th
Dovzhenko’s final silent feature, which depicts a clash between reactionary landowning peasants and modernizing paupers bringing the first tractor to their corner of the Ukrainian countryside, has by now spawned nearly a century of debate: is it a propagandist paean to the collectivization project in Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, which would have catastrophic results in the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33, or, as certain Soviet censors suspected, an on-the-sly celebration of a Ukrainian folk culture grounded in an ancient connection between the peasants and the soil they’ve so long tilled, threatened with impending erasure? What is not up for question is that Earth is among the greatest of films from the silent film canon, its distinct synthesis of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Vertov making it something like a summation of what had come before it, while its lyric ode to the natural world and those that live with it in harmony blazes a trail for the Ukrainian Poetic Cinema of the future to follow.
35mm print courtesy of the Filmoteka Narodowa, Warsaw
Live musical accompaniment by Fima Chupakhin, piano & synths, and Julian Kytasty, bandura & vocals on Saturday, October 10th
“My codename is Project 2501, and I am a life form that was born in a sea of information.” In the year 2029, the world looks like a hybridization of Hong Kong, Tokyo, and New York, yielding to entropy and technocracy. Cyborg Major Kusanagi, a perfect specimen of human-brained computer engineering is on the case to track and destroy an omnipotent entity known as The Puppet Master—a hacker? a virus?—who threatens world order. Her physical and existential journey deftly detailed by Oshii’s animation, combining traditional hand-drawn cells and computer-generated graphics, creating a haunting, awe-inspiring magnum opus.
Distributor: Lionsgate
The Fu-Ho Grand, a movie palace in Taipei, is closing its doors. Its valedictory screening: King Hu’s 1967 wuxia epic Dragon Inn, playing to a motley smattering of spectators, including two stars of Hu’s original opus, Miao Tien and Shih Chun, watching their younger selves with tears in their eyes.
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
“Dear Diary: My teen-angst bullshit now has a body count.” A caustic rejoinder to John Hughes’s ’80s Brat Pack pictures, Lehmann’s savage suburban satire brought out the sociopathic side of Christian Slater’s too-cool outlaw persona, casting him as J.D., the motorcycle-riding new arrival at Ohio’s Westerburg High School who recruits Winona Ryder’s at-first pliable Veronica Chandler into his increasingly unhinged plans to humble their class’s ruling clique of three terrible popular girls named Heather. Clearly having a ball with Daniel Waters’s imminently quotable, coal-black screenplay, Ryder gives more than a few line-readings for the ages here; just try to keep “What’s your damage?” out of your vocabulary after viewing.
Distributor: Lakeshore Village Entertainment
Kurosawa’s formal genius and rare humanism are on full display in this white-knuckle thriller—source of an upcoming remake by Spike Lee—which transposes the materials of an Ed McBain novel to contemporary Japan, starring Toshiro Mifune as a rich industrialist thrown into a nerve-shredding situation after, first believing his son has been kidnapped, discovering that his chauffeur’s child was taken by accident. Boasting nigh-constant visual invention, geometric precision of framing, an inventive narrative structure, and a bevy of staggering set pieces—the train hand-off! the down-and-dirty G.I. bar!—High & Low is a virtuoso work that’s also a deeply moral one, exploring the meaning of “justice” in a society defined by vast economic disparity.
“High and Low has one of the most iconic train scenes of all time. And though it’s only one of many segments, the entire, wildly careening film has the feeling of a train in the slow-motion throes of derailment.” —Series curator Genevieve Yue
Distributor: Janus Films
Export’s terrifyingly intimate, at times downright assaultive feature debut plunges the viewer into the unraveling psyche of Anna (Susanne Widl), a photographer whose conviction that extraterrestrials called “Hyksos” are in the process of hastening civilization-wide decline leads to schizophrenic episodes—imagined in blistering montage—and a devastating crack-up with her partner, played by artist and new media theoretician Peter Weibel. “A tour de force of cinematic invention… Reveals a prodigious talent at work… Some of the most audacious and amazing experiments since Cocteau… A modern Blood of the Poet… Export brings a fresh and intelligent sensibility, characteristically self-referential.” —Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema
Distributor: Sixpack Films
Introduction by filmmaker Lynne Sachs on Saturday, October 3rd
For a very special Members Only preview at Metrograph, John Turturro and director Noah Segan join us to present their new movie, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, a compelling character study, and a mash note to the tattered fringes of the city’s outer boroughs. Like many a skilled craftsman who does finesse work with his hands, Turturro’s Harry is facing obsolescence, for Harry is an old-fashioned pickpocket in a smartphone-driven world, barely getting a dishonest day’s wage from pawnbroker buddy Steve Buscemi for his daily spoils. Harry’s luck turns—though not in the way he hopes for—when he lifts a wallet belonging to the smarmy scion of a notorious crime family (Will Price), and is forced to rely on analog street smarts to keep his loved ones safe from the resulting fallout.
Please Note: This special members only screening is general admission with no reserved seating.
Post-screening conversation with John Turturro and director Noah Segan on Monday, October 12th
It’s 1963, and different-drummer single mother Cher has decided to move from Oklahoma to smalltown Massachusetts, uprooting her two daughters, nine-year-old Kate and Catholicism-obsessed 15-year-old Rachel (Winona Ryder, who provides the narration). What follows includes JFK assassination trauma, a pregnancy scare, mother-daughter sexual competition, and one miraculous rescue, with devastating dynamic duo Cher and Ryder pushing one another to histrionic heights.
Distributor: Park Circus
Seeking source materials from which to forge a new “primal cinema,” Pasolini delved into the storehouse of mythic heritage. Taking on Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, he begins with a prologue set in prewar Italy, and goes on to defy expectation throughout, depicting Oedipus (Franco Citti), unknowingly betrothed to biological mother Silvana Mangano, as a victim of his own ignorant innocence, here far from an unambiguously positive virtue. Pasolini’s first film in color, featuring costumes and art direction that evoke an almost science fiction vision of the ancient world, and a showy role for Carmelo Bene, then-reigning bad boy of Italian stage and screen.
Distributor: Janus Films
No one wields a ’Scope frame with quite the same flexibility and dynamism as Hark, and the spectacular, Sergio Leone–inspired Once Upon a Time in China—perhaps the crucial film of the 1990s wuxia revival—shows Hark at his most flamboyant, keeping up with the human whirlwind that is Jet Li, here in the role of physician, martial artist, and 19th-century Cantonese folk hero Wong Fei-hung, who’s pitted against unscrupulous gangsters, human traffickers from the West, and his inconvenient feelings for “13th Aunt” Rosamund Kwan. Showstopping set pieces come fast and furious en route to a shoot-the-works shipboard finale; a monumental work of kinetic cinema.
Distributor: Janus Films
No one wields a ’Scope frame with quite the same flexibility and dynamism as Hark, and the spectacular, Sergio Leone–inspired Once Upon a Time in China II shows Hark at his most inspired, keeping up with the human whirlwind that is Jet Li, here returning to the role of physician, martial artist, and 19th-century Cantonese folk hero Wong Fei-hung. Traveling to Canton for a medical conference, Wong finds a city in chaos, with the anti-western White Lotus Cult seeking to snuff out foreign influence by any means necessary, and government forces—including officer Donnie Yen—resorting to violent measures against Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s republican revolutionaries. Unrelenting, utterly dazzling, pedal-to-the-metal action cinema.
Distributor: Janus Films
In Jet Li’s third outing as the legendary Wong Fei-hung, master of both inflicting pain and relieving it, Wong and Rosamund Kwan’s “13th Aunt” travel from Foshan to Beijing to meet with his father, there finding preparations underway for a colorful competition to crown a “Lion Dance King” and learning of a plot to assassinate statesman and court favorite Li Hongzhang. With leadership at home slipping into self-involved venality and foreign powers licking their chops at the prospect of dividing China up amongst themselves, Wong will have to hold the line one more time—and as one has come to expect of the series, the results are nothing short of spectacular.
Distributor: Janus Films
The fourth and final film by Kon takes place in a not-too-distant future in which therapists, using a new technology called DC Mini, are able to record the dreams of psychiatric patients. All well and good, until a raid on the lab leads to the loss of the DC Mini prototype and a bleed between the troubled subconscious images and reality, leading to a race-against-time to stop bedlam from breaking out in the streets. An admitted inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), though far more visually extravagant in its vibrant, psychedelia-inflected imaginings, which climax in a thrilling, terrifying dream apocalypse burst from Kon’s fervid imagination.
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Please check back soon for updated showtimes!
The movie that set Arnold Schwarzenegger off on his way to becoming a household name (admittedly one that Americans had difficulty pronouncing) and that introduced gym rat subculture to the wider world, Butler and Fiore’s paean to pecs follows golden boy Arnie on a collision course with Brooklyn-bred big man Lou Ferrigno, going bicep-to-bicep with the future Incredible Hulk at the 1975 Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia competitions. Nimbly constructed by editors Geof Bartz, ACE and the late Larry Silk, ACE, and finally released in theaters after two years and many a financial worry on the part of its producers, Pumping Iron is a documentary that plays like a finely tuned sports drama, with Ferrigno as affable, down-to-earth underdog and Schwarzenegger as the beaming, boisterous heavy that you can’t help but like.
Distributor: Lionsgate
I’d buy that for a dollar! For a strange few years, beginning with this runaway hit, the perverse imagination and earthy humor of Verhoeven seemed to sync up perfectly with the desires of the American multiplex-going public. In dystopian Detroit, private sector Omni Consumer Products have taken over policing and made the ultimate law enforcement machine from leftover pieces of peace officer Peter Weller—but they didn’t bank on their invention making his way up the corporate ladder of crime. A frightfully funny vision of a post-industrial cybernetic future, with Kurtwood Smith, Ronny Cox, and Muguel Ferrer an impressive trifecta of irredeemable scumbags.
Distributor: Park Circus
A precious glimpse into the creative process of the late synth-pop star, film composer, and activist Ryuichi Sakamoto, Schible’s deeply affecting film picks up with its introspective subject as he returns to music-making after having been diagnosed with cancer, channeling his new awareness of his mortality into his latest work.
Distributor: MUBI
Nearing-retirement veteran Detective Morgan Freeman and new transfer Brad Pitt track a serial killer with an advanced sense of stagecraft through a sickly, perpetually sodden city of peeling lead paint and lost souls in Fincher’s tour de force, easily one of the most stylistically influential films of the 1990s. “The look of Se7en … came out of this tight working ‘cell’ we created between David, myself, the production designer Arthur Max, and the costume designer Michael Kaplan. The four of us would meet together to discuss the art direction and visual scope of the movie, and we did several sessions like that to establish a unified plan… There was something [about Robert Frank’s photos in The Americans] that interested me, which was related to the grittiness of them, the blandness, the loneliness of a past era and the texture of death.” —Darius Khondji
Distributor: Walt Disney Studios/20th Century
A biopic of the “Red Commander of the Ukraine,” Bolshevik commander Mykola Shchors, starring Yevgeny Samoylov in the title role, Shchors was personally commissioned by Joseph Stalin himself, and its production was a fraught one for Dovzhenko, whose health suffered grievously from the make-or-break pressure he faced to toe the line. The eventual results pleased the General Secretary—Dovzhenko would be awarded his first of two Stalin Prizes in 1941—though the film endures less for its vigorous, saber-rattling hagiography than the moments of ineffable poetry with which it’s embroidered, rooted as always in a deep sense of Ukrainian cultural tradition and relish in the natural world. “As in all [Dovzhenko’s] best work, Shchors leaves in the memory burning images of death and of passionate life” —Jay Leyda
35mm print courtesy of the Filmoteka Narodowa, Warsaw
Introduction by programmer Edo Choi on Sunday, October 11th
Distributor: Dovzhenko Center
Beginning in the mid-’60s and ending with his death in 1977, Rossellini committed himself to producing a series of films, telefilms, and serial works that would together constitute a narrative of human progress and the history of ideas from aleolithic to present times. Socrates, initiating a tetralogy of works on epoch-defining thinkers, sets its scene in an Athens humbled by Sparta and increasingly irritated by the prickly, prodding philosopher in their midst, finally determined to silence him. Using out-of-vogue in-camera effects to transform an ancient Spanish village into Athens, probing scenes with his customized, remote-controlled Pancinor zoom, and employing a dirge-like electronic score by Mario Nascimbene, Rossellini gives us a singular vision of antiquity, one that’s downright avant-garde.
One breathtaking composition follows another in Scorsese’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece about social mores (and taboos) amongst New York’s viperous moneyed classes in late 19th-century New York, brought to life by an all-star lineup of craftspeople including cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, production designer Dante Ferretti, and composer Elmer Bernstein. In front of the camera there are Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer suffering beautifully as wealthy lawyer Newland Archer and Countess Ellen Olenska, the divorced pariah whom he yearns for, and Winona Ryder as Archer’s fiancée and, eventually, wife—outwardly a winsome innocent, but a cunning, cutthroat strategist where affairs of the heart are concerned. It was, Ryder stated during a recent appearance on (of all things) Hot Ones, “The role of a lifetime.”
Distributor: Sony Pictures Entertainment
Inspired by the Dostoyevsky novella of the same title, Ayoade’s noir-inflected sophomore feature gives a dead game Jesse Eisenberg not one but two juicy parts as both a mousy, long-overlooked office drone, Simon James, and his new colleague, the cocksure and charismatic James Simon, who no one other than Simon seems to notice is in fact Simon’s doppelgänger, and who briskly sets about invading every aspect of Simon’s life. The bleakly comic story of a man struggling to get the upper hand over himself, with Eisenberg, in his virtuoso double role, getting more than capable backup from a supporting cast that includes Mia Wasikowska, Wallace Shawn, and Cathy Moriarty.
Distributor: Magnolia Pictures
The third film made by Solntseva from a script by her late husband and creative collaborator, The Enchanted Desna—an intimate epic in the magic-realist vein filmed on 70mm Sovscope and boasting state-of-the-art stereophonic sound—draws on Dovzhenko’s memories of his childhood on the banks of the Desna River in Chernihiv Oblast, moving freely between pre-revolutionary bucolic idyll, the horrors of World War II, and contemporary-set scenes. Winner of a Special Jury Prize at the San Sebastián Film Festival, Jean-Luc Godard’s favorite film of 1965 and, per critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, “among the most ravishingly beautiful and poetic spectacles ever made.”
DCP courtesy of Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, scanned from a 35mm print in their collection.
Introduction by series curator Anri Vartan on Saturday, October 10th
Already a well-established presence in South Korean music, with an ability to work with equal facility in a variety of idioms (experimental, rock, folk, et. al.), Jang got his start in film composing the distinctive score for Kim’s eccentric, unpredictable, and entirely endearing underdog sports comedy, a barbed commentary on suffocating white-collar culture starring Song Kang-ho (Parasite) as mild-mannered bank clerk Dae-ho, mercilessly pushed around in the office and generally ground down by life… until he gains a new measure of self-worth by beginning to moonlight as a masked “heel” wrestler, his signature move: finding ingenious new ways to cheat in the ring.
Distributor: NEON
Markopoulos corralled together the underground’s haute monde—Taylor Mead, Gerard Malanga, Jack Smith, Gregory Battcock and, in the role of Poseidon, Andy Warhol—for his radical reinterpretation of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, in which the filmmaker can be heard on the soundtrack reciting Thoreau’s translation of the source text betwixt snatches of Bartók’s Cantata Profana. A rebel posing a direct challenge to Zeus’s absolute authority, Prometheus was a figure of fascination for Markopoulos, who saw in the outlaw Titan something of a kindred spirit. Hence his vainglorious description of The Illiac Passion: “Metamorphosis of the filmmaker. Passions of the filmmaker. Out of his breast the free flowing blood of the creation of a motion picture which depicts the passions of mankind and of everyman in general.”
Distributor: Gregory J. Markopoulos/p>
Marion Cotillard has one of her greatest roles as Ewa, a Polish Catholic immigrant newly arrived in Ellis Island, trying to find the means to free her sister from quarantine in a c. 1921 New York City that’s full of lures and snares, among them Joaquin Phoenix’s smalltime pimp and tinhorn impresario and Jeremy Renner’s Bowery illusionist. A richly textured film of disarming depths of feeling from Gray, whose beguiling closing shot resonates long after the credits roll.
“We effectively destroyed the film negative with various techniques,” said Darius Khondji, “to achieve the desired emotional aesthetic of that era.”
Distributor: Lionsgate
This sprightly interpretation of Hans Christian Anderson’s story was eyed by Disney as far back as the days of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, finally surfacing in 1989. There’s a hot crustacean band, sure, but also a keening grasp of the angst, loneliness, and longing in Anderson’s tale, encapsulated in Ariel’s dream of being “Part of Your World,” a highlight of Alan Mencken and Howard Ashman's superlative songbook.
Distributor: Walt Disney Studios/20th Century
Lower East Side native Walter Matthau wears perhaps the broadest tie in film history as a grousing Transit Authority lieutenant who gets an unlikely shot at heroism when a group of criminals take a downtown 6 train hostage and demand a million dollars from the flat-broke city. Engineered with perfect pace and verve by the underrated Sargent, with growly, jowly Matthau at his hangdog best.
“Featuring one of the grittiest New Yorkers ever seen on film: the ruddy-cheeked wino who, despite the commotion on her hijacked 6 train, sleeps through the entire ordeal.” —Series curator Genevieve Yue
Distributor: Park Circus
Introduction by Genevieve Yue and Erika Balsom, with a book signing following the screening, on Saturday, October 3rd
Too many sequels and an incalculable cultural impact later, it’s sometimes forgotten what a hot and nasty little movie Cameron’s original Terminator was, dropping peak-physique Schwarzenegger into a sleazy Los Angeles of leather bars, punk rockers, and skid rows, where he quickly proceeds to killing cops by the score and tracking down mother-to-be of humankind’s savior Linda Hamilton. Working for the very last time with budget constraints, Cameron—and FX gurus Stan Winston and Gene Warren Jr.—deliver the goods and how, in a grimy lil’ chef d’oeuvre that gave us Cyberdine, Skynet, and a whole lexicon for discussing extinction-level singularity events.
Distributor: Park Circus
As country bumpkin police sergeant Kwak Do-won investigates a series of murders that appear to be connected to a strange, sense-deranging sickness that’s going around, local villagers fix the blame on a Japanese drifter suspected of being an evil spirit in Na’s atmospheric tale of demons, shamans, exorcisms, and animated corpses, steeped in ancient east Asian folklore and Christian symbolism. A sporadically hilarious, brilliantly plotted work of insinuating, creeping terror that turns shopworn horror tropes inside out to create something entirely unpredictable and genuinely disturbing. “Korean cinema has a new genre maestro… A supremely unsettling evocation.” —The Guardian
Distributor: Walt Disney Studios/20th Century
Introduction by composer Jang Young Gyu on Saturday, October 3rd
Before scaling Brokeback Mountain, Taiwanese American director Lee made this indie breakout about Wai Tung (Winston Chao, in his film debut), a gay man happily living in Manhattan with his partner who stages a sham marriage between himself and a penniless immigrant artist from mainland China in his building (May Chin) in order to please his traditionally minded parents—only to be appalled when they insist on throwing the “newlyweds” a whopper of a wedding party. A tender, emotionally grounded, sharply observed comedy of clashing cultures that’s made all the more poignant by its function as a time capsule of ’90s NYC.
Distributor: Park Circus
Jang and Lee Byung-hoon’s propulsive score sets a fire under Na’s unrelenting man-on-the-run thriller that burns hotter with each passing minute. Debt-strapped down-on-his-luck cabbie Gu-nam (Ha Jung-woo), an ethnic Korean living and working in China, agrees to take a contract killing gig from a local gangster (Kim Yoon-seok) that will take him across the Yellow Sea and into South Korea—and in short order finds himself scrambling to keep ahead of cops, crooks, and a bevy of other characters who’d like nothing more than to see his head on a skewer. “Contains two of the most mindbogglingly choreographed, thrillingly extended pursuit scenes—one on foot and one in cars—that I’ve ever seen.” —Amy Taubin, Film Comment
Distributor: Walt Disney Studios/20th Century
In 1984, American-born, Paris-based artist Elizabeth Lennard traveled to Japan to make a film for French television about Ryuichi Sakamoto, pop star, solo artist, film actor, and film score composer. The result, shot over the course of a frenetic week, was Tokyo Melody, a mosaic work whose structure appears to have been determined by the multi-faceted nature of its subject’s creative practice: at various points we see Sakamoto snapping photographs, cruising through Tokyo on foot or via limousine, performing onstage with Yellow Magic Orchestra, pottering around his house, and in the studio for the recording of his Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia. Made not so long after his collaboration with Nagisa Ōshima on Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Lennard’s scintillating film, now in a new 4K restoration, captures a pivotal juncture in an extraordinary life.
Distributor: Janus Films
Introduction by composer Paul Grimstad on Saturday, September 26th
A program of short works, including the great-grandaddy of all train-oriented cinema, Louis Lumière’s L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat.
“The train that begins Bruce Conner’s Valse Triste also sets in motion a child’s dreaming. Like Conner’s synechdocal found footage classic A Movie, the loosely connected scenes that follow are retrieved from film history, as if to say that our dreams are made of movies, or vice versa. Wasn’t it a kind of dream to imagine, in 1896, that the Lumières’ train would tumble into the audience? Or that, in Ignacio Agüero’s One Hundred Children Waiting for the Train, the children of Lo Hermida, a working class neighborhood on the outskirts of Santiago, might one day see themselves on a real cinema screen? Or, despite the protest made by one of Harun Farocki’s young daughters—‘I don’t want to hear or see any more trains!’—the locomotive that arrives just as she and her sister drift off to sleep?” —Series curator Genevieve Yue
One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train (Ignacio Aguero, 1988, 55 mins)
L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (Louis Lumière, 1896, 1 mins)
Valse Triste (Bruce Conner, 1977, 5 mins)
Bedtime Stories: Railways (Harun Farocki, 1977, 6 mins)
Introduction by Genevieve Yue on Saturday, October 10th
Capping an incredible eight-year creative partnership with Almodóvar, repeat collaborator Carmen Maura here plays voice actress Pepa, who, abandoned by her lover, has resolved to kill herself by downing a batch of gazpacho laced with sleeping pills. That’s just the start of the orgy of unhinged behavior that makes up Almodóvar’s gaudy, cheeky screwball melodrama about Shiite terrorist cells and romance on the rocks, a camp romp celebration of emotional excess that has all the makings of an obscure cult classic, yet improbably became the highest-grossing Spanish film of all time upon release, and did its part in putting co-star Antonio Banderas on the international stage.
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
The last work of a master filmmaker who died far too young, the gentle, restrained, and terribly humane Yi Yi observes the interplay between three generations of an upper middle-class Taipei family. Comic when dealing in the foibles of its excellent ensemble cast and the mores of the urban bourgeoise, yet also possessed throughout by an air of unmistakable melancholy and lingering regret at missed opportunities, this feeling made all the deeper when one considers the great films Yang might still have produced. A work of epic length that avoids even a hint of bombast, dedicated instead to working its way into the hidden, niche spaces of everyday people’s emotional lives, it’s a film as rich and as sad as life itself.
Distributor: Janus Films