Monday, August 26 at 7pm
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)
Monday, September 2 at 7pm
Early Cinema Program
Professor Eric Faden will give a multimedia presentation on early cinema featuring shorts by Lumière, Porter, Méliès and Alice Guy.
Monday, September 9 at 7pm
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Directed by Wes Anderson (U.S. 2014) 100 min. DCP. With Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori, Saoirse Ronan, Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, Jude Law, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe, Adrian Brody, Tom Wilkinson, Jason Schwartzman, Jeff Goldblum.
Admired for his meticulously designed cinematic confections, Wes Anderson is among a small handful of contemporary American Hollywood directors whose name is known and esteemed by the 18-49 demographic. His latest creation, for which he assembled an all-star cast, depicts the adventures of a legendary concierge working at a famous European hotel between the wars, and the lobby boy who becomes his most trusted friend.
Monday, September 16 at 7pm
Fallen Angels
Wong Kar Wai (1995, Hong Kong) 99 min. DCP. With Leon Lai, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Michelle Reis. In Cantonese
with English subtitles.
Lost souls reach out for human connection amidst the glimmering night world of Hong Kong in Wong Kar Wai’s hallucinatory, neon-soaked nocturne. Originally conceived as a segment of Chungking Express only to spin off on its own woozy axis, this hyper-cool head rush plays like the dark, moody flip side to Wong’s breakout feature as it charts the subtly interlacing fates of a handful of urban loners, including a coolly detached hitman (Lai) looking to go straight, his business partner (Michelle Reis) who secretly yearns for him, and a mute delinquent (Kaneshiro) who wreaks mischief by night. Swinging between hardboiled noir and slapstick lunacy with giddy abandon, Fallen Angels is both a dizzying, dazzling city symphony and a poignant meditation on love, loss, and longing in a metropolis that never sleeps.
Monday, September 23 at 7pm
Run Lola Run
Directed by Tom Tykwer (Germany 1998) 79 min. 35MM. With Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu, Herbert Knaup. German with English subtitles.
Lola runs not for her own life but for her boyfriend, who has lost a hundred thousand marks of drug money. Tykwer’s breathless roller-coaster of a film gives flame-haired Lola three races against time, three chases through the streets of Berlin, three chances to cheat death.
Monday, September 30 at 7pm
Days of Heaven
Directed by Terrence Malick (U.S. 1978) 95 min. DCP. With Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard.
Released five years after his debut feature Badlands, Malick’s second film is a decadently illustrated tragedy whose majestic cinematography (by Nestor Almendros) earned the film universal acclaim as a visual masterpiece. Among the fertile wheat fields of the Texas Panhandle in the early 20th century, a wealthy landowner (Shepard, in his first on-screen role) falls in love with the girlfriend (Adams) of a quick-tempered farmhand (Gere). Tensions give way to greed and deception, compromising the harmony of the natural environment that fuels the film’s atmosphere of grace and lyricism.
Monday, October 7 at 7pm
Casablanca
Directed by Michael Curtiz (U.S. 1942) 102 min. DCP. With Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Paul Henreid.
Boasting a stellar cast, this iconic American film is renowned for its “impudent wit and doomed romanticism, all of it held together by voluptuously emotional anti-fascist sentiment”(David Denby, The New Yorker). Coming up on a century after its release, Casablanca maintains its status as one of the best loved films in the history of American cinema.
Monday, October 21 at 7pm
The Searchers
John Ford (U.S. 1956) 119 min. DCP. With John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles.
John Ford’s 1956 epic Western is a captivity narrative mixed with a revenge tale, as former Confederate soldier John Wayne returns briefly to his family before setting out for years in search of a niece abducted by Comanches. Arguably Ford’s greatest work, and subject of imitations and homages from Star Wars to Taxi Driver, The Searchers’ Monument Valley setting and early VistaVision Technicolor cinematography demand the big screen.
Monday, October 28 at 7pm
WAR OF THE WORLDS – RADIO DRAMA!
Orson Welles (U.S. 1938) Approx 60 min.
The legendary mass panic caused by Welles’ transmission about alien invasion has been questioned – just how many (or few) of the 12 million Americans listening, when Welles and his actors interrupted the regular programming to “report” the invasion, were truly gripped by fear, has likely been hyped. Nevertheless, this controversial moment in broadcasting history is fascinating, and a justly infamous work by one of American media’s most ingenious, mischievous and creative artists.
Monday, November 11 at 7pm
The Social Network
David Fincher (U.S. 2010) 121 min. DCP. With Andrew Garfield, Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake, Rooney Mara.
From the director of iconic psychological thrillers including Fight Club (1999), Seven (1995) and Zodiac (2007), comes this story about the founders of Facebook, the social networking website that arguably changed the course of the 21st century. 2024 ENFS 130 Student Choice!
Monday, November 18 at 7pm
Ringu
Directed by Hideo Nakata (Japan 1998) 96 min. DCP. With Nanako Matsushima, Miki Nakatani, Yûko Takeuchi. Japanese with English subtitles.
In this J-Horror classic, a television journalist investigates an urban legend about a cursed VHS tape that murders the viewer seven days after they watch it. The highest grossing Japanese horror movie in history still manages to shred nerves with its quiet, phantasmic elegance; it’s the only VHS fetish movie to inspire an entire subgenre, as well as dozens of remakes and rip-offs. Criminally absent from theaters since its original theatrical release in 1998, the time is now for Ringu to terrify the world. Again. Restoration courtesy of Arrow Films and the American Genre Film Archive.
Monday, December 3 at 7pm
The Thin Blue Line
Directed by Errol Morris (U.S. 1988) 103 min. 35MM.
Arguably one of the most influential films of the last 50 years, The Thin Blue Line is a seminal true-crime document. Formal and stylistic inventiveness pulse through the film, which investigates the circumstances around the murder of Dallas police officer Robert Wood and the subsequent sentencing of two men for their alleged involvement. For the film’s screening in Errol Morris’s 1999 MoMA retrospective, curator Josh Siegel wrote, “The film marked a significant advance in Morris’s distinctive style: letting people tell their sides of the story, and artfully illustrating their accounts with dramatic reenactments, fetishistic close-ups of the telling detail, old movie clips, a hypnotic musical soundtrack by Philip Glass, forensic photographs, family-album snapshots, newspaper clippings, and court documents” (MOMA notes).