Thursday, August 27 at 1:15pm
Dumb & Dumber
Directed by Peter Farrelly (U.S. 1994) 107 min. 35MM. With Jim Carrey, Jeff Daniels
“Released at Christmas 1994, Dumb & Dumber delighted audiences and caused most critics to react as if someone had just farted in a drawing room. Somebody had: the Farrelly Brothers. But one man’s gas is another man’s perfume. Low comedy can be done well or badly; not every poop joke is a winner. What distinguished the Farrellys was the sheer exuberance in their barrage of scatology and no-brainer gags. The sweetness of their approach became more evident in their third movie, There’s Something About Mary, but Dumb & Dumber remains their most satisfying picture. The Farrellys and the stars, Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels, are like evil toddlers smearing their food on the walls, themselves and each other. If you’re not willing to accept their invitation to revel in the joy of being a dirty kid once again, the movie probably isn’t for you. If you are, it’s idiot paradise.” – Charles Taylor, Salon
Thursday, September 3 at 1:15pm
Les rendez-vous d’Anna
Directed by Chantal Akerman (France/Belgium 1978) 127 min. DCP. With Aurore Clément, Helmut Griem, Magali Noël. French with English subtitles.
In one of Akerman’s most penetrating character studies, Anna, an accomplished filmmaker, makes her way through a series of European cities to promote her latest movie. Via a succession of eerie, exquisitely shot, brief encounters—with men and women, family and strangers—we come to see her emotional and physical detachment from the world. “More personal than might have been appreciated in 1978, Anna brings Akerman’s career-long concerns to the fore—homelessness, solitude, the child-parent relationship, the nature of sexual identity. It even riffs on itself as a (relatively) commercial movie.” –J Hoberman, The New York Times
Thursday, September 10 at 1:15pm
Ordet
Directed by Carl Th. Dreyer (Denmark 1955) 125 min. DCP. With Henrik Malberg, Emil Hass Christensen, Preben Lerdorff Rye, Hanne Aagesen. Danish with English subtitles.
A farmer’s family is torn apart by faith, sanctity, and love—one child believes he’s Jesus Christ, a second proclaims himself agnostic, and the third falls in love with a fundamentalist’s daughter. Putting the lie to the term “organized religion,” Ordet (The Word) is a challenge to simple facts and dogmatic orthodoxy. Layering multiple stories of faith and rebellion, Dreyer’s adaptation of Kaj Munk’s play quietly builds towards a shattering, miraculous climax. “The end is to enrich one’s fellow human beings by engrossing them in an emotional experience they would not otherwise encounter” (Dreyer).
Thursday, September 17 at 1:15pm
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
Directed by Preston Sturges (U.S. 1944) 101 min. 35MM. With Eddie Bracken, Betty Hutton, Diana Lynn.
Perhaps Sturges’s most censor-defying farce. “A volcanically burgeoning small-town girl gets drunk and is impregnated by one of several soldiers, she can’t remember which. Her father, her younger sister, and her devoted 4-F lover do all they can to help her out. The result is a shambles, from which they are delivered by a ‘miracle’ which entails its own cynical comments on the sanctity of law, order, parenthood, and the American home. . . . Sturges tells his story according to a sound principle. . . . In proportion to the insanity and repressiveness of the age you live in, play the age as comedy if you want to get away with it” (James Agee). Preserved by the Library of Congress.
Thursday, September 24 at 1:15pm
Hail Mary
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard (France / Switzerland 1985) 107 min. DCP. With Myriem Roussel, Thierry Rode & Juliette Binoche. French with English subtitles.
Hail Mary was condemned long before it was ever seen by the public, from Vatican City to Manhattan—anyone who attended a screening at the 1985 New York Film Festival will remember running a gauntlet of pamphleteers, prayer circles and newscasters outside Alice Tully Hall. The irony, of course, is that the film itself is far from blasphemous, but rather a glorious cinematic hymn, an attempt to reconcile spirit and flesh, science and nature. “Somehow I think we need faith, or I need faith, or I’m lacking in faith,” Godard told Katherine Dieckmann. “Therefore maybe I needed a story which is bigger than myself.” – Lincoln Center notes Screening with: The Book of Mary (Anne-Marie Miéville, 1985, 25m), a film about the broken affections between a husband and wife through the eyes of their young daughter.
Thursday, October 1 at 1:15pm
Red Eye
Directed by Wes Craven (U.S. 2005) 85 min. 35MM. With Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy, Brian Cox.
“When most people think of legendary genre director Wes Craven, they always lean towards his work in horror franchises. From the meta slasher wave that Scream kicked off, to his two genre-defining Nightmare on Elm Street films, these are certainly what he’s most known for. While Craven technically has other underseen gems like the relentlessly bleak The Hills Have Eyes or The People Under the Stairs, it’s always been interesting to me that Red Eye was never really hotly talked about within his filmography until recently, when comparisons were made to 2025’s Drop. Now, even 20 years after its release… Craven’s slick and sweat-inducing thrill ride still manages to be one of the best examples of a quick but impactful 85 minutes” (Joshua Mbonu, InSessionFilm). Playing with two films by Owen Land: Diploteratology: Bardo Follies (16mm, 7 min.) and Film in Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, etc. (16mm, 5 min.).
Thursday, October 15 at 1:15pm
Ghostbusters 2
Directed by Ivan Reitman (U.S. 1989) 102 min. 35MM. With Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver, Annie Potts, Ernie Hudson, Harold Ramis.
They’re back! Four years removed from their previous adventures, the former Ghostbusters are under a restraining order, and have fallen to hosting cult cable talk shows (Murray’s Dr. Peter Venkman) and entertaining at children’s birthday parties (Stantz and Zeddemore, played by Aykroyd and Hudson). Dana Barrett (Weaver), having broken up with Venkman, had a baby with another man, but the marriage dissolved. It is precisely 8-month-old Oscar, whose baby carriage mysteriously rolls off on its own, who prompts Dana to get in touch with the Ghostbusters to make a desperate plea for help. With a strange feeling about her co-worker’s quirky intensity, she realizes that the supernatural has once again invaded her life. Who’s she gonna call?
Thursday, October 22 at 1:15pm
No Such Thing
Directed by Hal Hartley (U.S. 2001) 103 min. 35MM. With Robert John Burke, Sarah Polley, Julie Christie, Helen Mirren.
A change of pace for the American indie stalwart Hal Hartley, this more (than the auteur’s standard) commercial feature explores the monster and fairytale genres and traditions, and leaves the customary New York locale primarily for Iceland. Its philosophical retelling of The Beauty and the Beast/Beowulf involves a suffering, heavy drinking and bad-tempered monster wishing for mortality – until he meets a young Girl-Friday at a sensationalistic TV news program; her disarming innocence proves to be transcendent.
“Hartley’s ‘Beatrice and Beast,’ miracle and monster, are equally inhuman and vulnerable, and so their fates remain inextricably bound in the film’s ambiguous conclusion. No Such Thing playfully and affectionately foregrounds its aesthetic and generic inheritance, perhaps more so than any of Hartley’s previous films, and the ambiguity it maintains to the end is evidence of an original director who is not afraid of taking risks. Like the highest forms of art, it is poetic, in the literal sense of exploring the conditions of its own making and the status of its vision. Not only Hartley admirers but anyone interested in the larger themes he addresses, and in the elastic potential of highly generic forms, should see this beautiful film.” – The Brooklyn Rail
Thursday, October 29 at 1:15pm
TERRIFIER 2
Directed by Damien Leone (U.S. 2022) 82 min. DCP. With Lauren LaVera, Elliott Fullam, Sarah Voigt.
This eagerly anticipated slasher sequel to Terrifier (2016, playing on Monday 10/26!), was an indie filmmaker’s dream: “a crowdfunded, fan-driven film with no studio backing gets a limited theatrical release and grosses approximately 2.5 million. People are packing into cars and driving for hours to see the film once, twice, or even three times. It knocked movies like Top Gun: Maverick out of the box office Top 10 in its first weekend. All of this amid reports of audience members walking out and theatres calling ambulances for fainting and vomiting patrons. What’s going on here? What’s going on is that horror fans are finally taking back the genre that they love. Horror has become fun again, and people are showing up in droves—ready to party like it’s 1989″ (Rue Morgue).
Thursday, November 5 at 1:15pm
Kristina Talking Pictures – Restoration!
Directed by Yvonne Rainer (U.S. 1976) 90 min. DCP. With Bert Barr, Frances Barth, James Barth, Blondell Cummings.
Name checking both Virginia Woolf and Jean-Luc Godard in the film’s opening segment, dancer-filmmaker Yvonne Rainer continued to experiment in her elegiac, hybrid third feature, unshackling narrative from conventional representation, using the paradoxical feminine figure of a lion tamer, Kristina (played by several women, including Rainer herself), and a disjunctive audiovisual syntax that pushes avant-garde film grammar into thrillingly novel, expressive realms. Kristina arrives from Budapest to 1970s New York City, harboring hopes of becoming a dance choreographer, as well as romantic affections for an elusive sailor named Raoul (The Metrograph). Newly restored in 4K by The Museum of Modern Art and the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation, courtesy of Zeitgeist Films in association with Kino Lorber.
“What Rainer was up to, after all, was the reinvention of melodrama as a genre, accented for the contemporary psyche.” — B. Ruby Rich