Side by Side
Directed by Christopher Kenneally (U.S. 2012) 99 min. DCP.
Keanu Reeves interviews film professionals including directors Steven Soderbergh and Martin Scorsese about the rapid transition from film to digital.
TOP OF PAGE
September 3 at 1:30pm
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Directed by Wes Anderson (U.S. 2009) 97 min. 35 MM. With George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman
Wes Anderson’s first animated film uses classic handmade stop-motion techniques to tell the story of the best selling children’s book by Roald Dahl.
TOP OF PAGE
September 6 at 2pm
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror
Directed by F.W. Murnau (Germany 1922) 84 min. With Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schröder
An unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, legendary director F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu is a key example of German Expressionist cinema and the quintessential vampire film. Silent with English intertitles.
TOP OF PAGE
September 9 at 7pm
Delicatessen
Directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (France 1991) 99 min. With Pascal Benezech, Dominique Pinon, Marie-Laure Dougnac
Years before he helmed the fourth Alien film, Jeunet made
one of the most distinctive films of the 1990s, hailed for its
grotesquely comic and touching tale of post-nuclear survival.
French with English subtitles.
TOP OF PAGE
September 10 at 1:30pm
Sherlock Jr.
Directed by Buster Keaton (U.S. 1924) 45 min. With Buster Keaton, Kathryn McGuire, Joe Keaton
Widely regarded as one of the most visually inventive silent comedies ever made, Sherlock Jr. stars Buster Keaton as a movie projectionist and amateur sleuth who dreams his way onto the big screen.
TOP OF PAGE
September 13 at 2pm
Nosferatu the Vampyre
Directed by Werner Herzog (Germany 1979) 107 min. DCP. With Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Adjani, Bruno Ganz
An homage to Murnau’s Nosferatu, Herzog’s investigation of dread aptly casts Kinski as the lustful vampire, and Ganz as the young land agent trying to lure Dracula from his castle to buy a piece of property in town. In German with English subtitles.
TOP OF PAGE
September 16 at 7pm
Baraka
Directed by Ron Fricke (U.S. 1992) 96 min.
Fricke reportedly spent five years devising this “non-verbal” feature documentary; photographed on 70mm in over 20 countries, Baraka is a journey of interconnection and transcendence. Screens with Guy Maddin’s Heart of the World on 35mm (2000, 6 min.).
TOP OF PAGE
September 17 at 1:30pm
Rear Window
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock (U.S. 1954) 114 min. 35 MM. With James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendell Corey
Hitchcock’s brilliant meditation on cinema and voyeurism binds the viewer to the perspective of photojournalist Stewart, bound to a wheelchair with a broken leg and obsessively spying on his West Village neighbors. One of the Master of Suspense’s greatest successes.
TOP OF PAGE
September 20 at 2pm
Persona
Directed by Ingmar Bergman (Sweden 1966) 84 min. With Liv Ulmann, Bibi Andersson
Bergman’s masterpiece concerns the duel of identities between a suddenly mute actress (Ullmann) and the nurse (Andersson) assigned to her care–a struggle transformed into a metaphor for the fate of language and art, in a film whose images are among the most famous in cinema. In Swedish with English subtitles.
TOP OF PAGE
September 23 at 7pm
Citizen Kane
Directed by Orson Welles (U.S. 1941) 119 min. DCP. With Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Dorothy Comingmore
Named by many as the greatest film of all time, Citizen Kane is a modernist landmark of cinematic style and storytelling. Welles and cinematographer Gregg Tolland’s chiaroscuro lighting, deep-focus cinematography and labyrinthine flashback structure imagine the monstrous hollowness of the American dream.
TOP OF PAGE
September 24 at 1:30pm
L’Age D’Or
Directed by Luis Buñuel (France 1930) 63 min. 35 MM. With Gaston Modot, Lya Lys, Max Ernst
Poetic, absurd, erotic, visionary and scandalous, L’Age d’or has inspired generations of filmmakers from Hitchcock to Monty Python. Buñuel’s obsessive cinematic imagination and the surrealism of Salvador Dalí created this withering attack on a society that elevates pious morality over sexual freedom.
Playing with:
The Seashell and the Clergyman
Directed by Germaine Dulac (France 1926) 45 min. With Alex Allin, Genica Athanasiou, Lucien Bataille
Dulac’s radical aesthetic exploration meets Antonin Artaud’s script in this elaborately Surrealist romp, wherein a mad cleric obsessed with a woman has a problem reconciling his fixation with his faith.
TOP OF PAGE
September 27 at 2pm
Fight Club
Directed by David Fincher (U.S. 1999) 139 min. With Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham Carter
In Fincher’s cult film, Edward Norton, a nameless everyman bored with his white-collar job, befriends soap salesman Brad Pitt; together they form a bare-knuckle “fight club,” a release valve necessitated by what Fincher describes as “the narcissistic ideals of what we’re supposed to be… this fraudulent idea of happiness.”
TOP OF PAGE
September 30 at 7pm
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Directed by Robert Wiene (Germany 1919) 67 min. With Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Lil Dagover
One of the greatest horror movies of the silent era, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari also probably remains the ultimate expression of narrative through set design: the film’s angled shadows and interiors reflect a chilling tale of mind control and somnambulistic murder. Silent with English intertitles.
TOP OF PAGE
October 1 at 1:30pm
Alexander Nevsky
Directed by Sergei Eisenstein (U.S.S.R. 1938) 111 min. With Nikolai Cherkassov, N.P. Ohkhlopkov, A.L. Abrikossov
Eisenstein’s first completed sound film, Nevsky was filmed on the eve of WWII, its portrayal of a 13th-century Russian hero recognizing the threat posed by Teutonic knights widely interpreted as an allegory for the Nazi menace. Eisenstein’s baroque images and Prokofiev’s thundering score set the standard for director-composer collaborations, reaching a peak in the celebrated Battle on the Ice sequence. In Russian with English subtitles.
TOP OF PAGE
October 4 at 2pm
La Jetée
Directed by Chris Marker (France 1962) 28 min. 35 MM. With Hélène Chatelain, Davos Hanich, Jacques Ledoux
Inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys, La Jetée is French auteur Chris Marker’s most famous film and his only work of pure fiction, the story of a man drawn through time by the image of a woman standing on the jetty at Orly Airport. An agonizing cry of love to a world gone by, it may also be the most romantic science-fiction film ever made. In French and German with English subtitles.
Playing with:
Twelve Monkeys
Directed by Terry Gilliam (U.S. 1995) 129 min. 35 MM. With Joseph Melito, Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe
Monty Python comedy troupe member Terry Gilliam directed this sci-fi update on La Jetée. Bruce Willis is the time traveler, sent from 2035 back to 1990, with the mission of preventing a devastating plague that will wipe out most of the Earth’s population.
TOP OF PAGE
October 8 at 1:30pm
King Kong
Directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper (U.S. 1933) 100 min. DCP. With Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot
Filmmaker Robert Armstrong sets out with heroine Fay Wray in search of “the eighth wonder of the world” in this quintessential monster movie. With fantastic special effects that entranced the Surrealists, King Kong remains, in the words of Roger Ebert, “more than a technical achievement… a curiously touching fable, something ageless and primeval.”
TOP OF PAGE
October 8 at 2pm
The Bicycle Thief
Directed by Vittorio de Sica (Italy 1948) 95 min. DCP. With Lamberto Maggiorani, Lianella Carnel, Enzo Staiola
De Sica’s neorealist depiction of the despair of postwar Italy consistently ranks among critics and filmmakers as one of the greatest films ever made. A compassionate portrait of Rome’s poverty-stricken streets, The Bicycle Thief is also a deeply humanistic tale of the bonds between a father and his young son. In Italian with English subtitles.
TOP OF PAGE
October 22 at 1:30pm
Blow-Up
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (U.K. 1966) 107 min. With David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles
Antonioni’s first English-language film and biggest commercial success sets a metaphysical mystery in the world of mid-sixties swinging London fashion. A high-profile photographer’s (Hemmings) ennui is shaken when he believes he accidentally photographed a murder involving a young woman (Redgrave) in a city park.
TOP OF PAGE
October 25 at 2pm
Life is Beautiful
Directed by Roberto Benigni (Italy 1997) 116 min. With Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi, Giorgio Cantarini
A charming but bumbling waiter, gifted with a colorful
imagination and an irresistible sense of humor, finds
his life and beloved family threatened by WWII in this
Academy Award winning film. Italian with English subtitles.
TOP OF PAGE
October 29 at 1:30pm
Mulholland Drive
Directed by David Lynch (U.S. 2001) 147 min. 35 MM. With Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring, Justin Theroux
A midnight wreck on winding Mulholland Drive opens this outlandish neo-noir. “Fashioned from the ruins of a two-hour TV pilot rejected by ABC in 1999, David Lynch’s erotic thriller careens from one violent non sequitur to another… Whatever Mulholland Drive was originally, it has become a poisonous valentine to Hollywood.” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice)