Monday, August 21 at 7pm
Werckmeister Harmonies – New 4K Restoration!
Directed by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky (Hungary/Italy/Germany/France 2000) 145 min. DCP. With Hanna Schygulla, Alfréd Járai, Gyula Pauer. Hungarian with English subtitles.
One of the major achievements of twenty-first-century cinema thus far, Béla Tarr’s mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. Adapted from a novel by the celebrated writer and frequent Tarr collaborator László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown era in an unnamed village, where, one day, a mysterious circus—complete with an enormous stuffed whale and a shadowy, demagogue-like figure known as the Prince—arrives and appears to awaken a kind of madness in the citizens, which builds inexorably toward violence and destruction. In thirty-nine of his signature long takes, engraved in ghostly black and white, Tarr conjures an apocalyptic vision of dreamlike dread and fathomless beauty.
Monday, August 28 at 7pm
The Shape of Water
Directed by Guillermo del Toro (U.S. 2017) 123 min. DCP. With Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon.
“Guillermo del Toro still believes in the magic of movies. He understands, perhaps better than anyone, that we are willing to sign over the expectation of realism if we are enraptured by the emotion of cinema. He has always produced films that work on multiple levels, but his latest, the masterful The Shape of Water, which also just won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, is one of his deepest, most complex, most rewarding, and flat-out beautiful films. It is enchanting and moving, the kind of movie you want to see again the minute it’s over.” – Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com
Monday, September 4 at 7pm
BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD
Directed by Benh Zeitlin (U.S. 2012) 93 min. DCP. With Quvenzhané Wallis, Dwight Henry Dwight Henry, Levy Easterly Levy Easterly
A primal experience of the beginning of the end of the world, Benh Zeitlin’s debut feature opens amid chaos and closes with catharsis. Beasts of the Southern Wild is, above all, a film about girlhood told through the voice, eyes, and ears of a six-year-old. It is not so much a work of magical realism as a depiction of the way the world has impressed itself on the imagination of a particular girl named Hushpuppy (a remarkably concentrated and expressive Quvenzhané Wallis). Hushpuppy lives with her father, Wink (Henry), and a ragtag bande à part in the Bathtub, a rusting, broken-down shantytown deep in the lush, bountiful Louisiana marshlands, south of the levees that these bayou dwellers rightfully scorn. How much good did such man-made defenses do New Orleans? … Indeed, the entire film hovers between the tumultuous immediacy of the present and the lyricism of a fairy tale. (Amy Taubin, Art Forum).
Monday, September 11 at 7pm
BARAKA
Ron Fricke (U.S. 1992) 96 min. DCP.
Discarding traditional documentary structures and narrative concerns, Baraka is a wordless tone poem depicting man caught between the poles of modernity and nature (Facets Program Notes).
“If man could send another Voyager to the distant stars and it can carry only one film on board, that film might be Baraka.” – Roger Ebert.
Monday, September 18 at 7pm
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Céline Sciamma (France 2019) 122 min. DCP. With Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel, Luàna Bajrami, French with English subtitles.
Passion brews quietly between an artist and her subject, until together they create a space in which it can briefly flourish, in this sumptuous eighteenth-century romance from Céline Sciamma, one of contemporary French cinema’s most acclaimed auteurs. Summoned to an isolated seaside estate on a secret assignment, Marianne (Merlant) must find a way to paint a wedding portrait of Héloïse (Adèle), who is resisting chattel marriage, by furtively observing her. What unfolds in exquisite tension is an exchange of sustained gazes in which the two women come to know each other’s gestures, expressions, and bodies with rapturous intimacy, ultimately forging a subversive creative collaboration as well as a delirious romance. Charged with a yearning that almost transcends time and space, Portrait of a Lady on Fire mines the emotional and artistic possibilities that emerge when women can freely live together and see one another in a world without men.
Monday, September 25 at 7pm
North by Northwest
Alfred Hitchcock (U.S. 1959) 136 min. 35MM. With Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Jessie Royce Landis.
A breathless ride – from the spiffy Saul Bass title sequence to the cliffhanger climax on Mount Rushmore – North by Northwest was, per screenwriter Ernest Lehman, “the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures.” Featuring an unforgettable Bernard Herrmann score, VistaVision Technicolor cinematography, an impeccable Cary Grant and a classic case of Hitchcockian mistaken identity – and also the crop duster sequence, one of Hitch’s most iconic set pieces. Asked by an admiring Truffaut about the audaciously conceived scene’s “fantasy of the absurd,” Hitchcock replied, “The fact is, I practice absurdity quite religiously!”
Monday, October 2 at 7pm
DOUBLE INDEMNITY
Billy Wilder (U.S. 1944) 106 min. 35MM. With Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Edward G. Robinson.
James M. Cain’s torrid novel had been declared too hot for Hollywood’s Production Code Administration for a decade before Wilder willed the project past the censors—mainly by casting it as a morality tale. Stanwyck accepted the challenge of her nasty role, giving a knockout performance as the seductive murderess, and MacMurray broke from years of typecasting as an affable good guy to make insurance man Walter Neff one of the screen’s most cynical anti-heroes.
Monday, October 16 at 7pm
THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY
Sergio Leone (U.S. 1967) 178 min. DCP. With Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach.
The final installment in Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is one of the most ambitiously mounted, supremely exciting and eternally influential westerns ever filmed. An enigmatic loner (Eastwood), a ruthless bounty hunter (Van Cleef) and a Mexican bandit (Wallach) fight to find a buried cache of Confederate gold amidst the violent chaos of the American Civil War. It remains one of cinema’s towering triumphs, a stylish, violent, and hugely entertaining classic backed by an unforgettable Ennio Morricone score.
“One of the monumental achievements in narrative filmmaking, Sergio Leone’s grandiose 1966 western epic is nothing less than a masterclass in movie storytelling, a dynamic testament to the sheer, invigorating uniqueness of cinema.” – Tom Huddleston, Time Out
Monday, October 23 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.
GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL
Monday, November 6 at 7pm
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. This 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.
CLOSE-UP
Monday, November 27 at 7pm
Abbas Kiarostami (Iran 1990) 98 min. DCP. With Hossain Sabzian, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Abolfazl Ahankhah. Persian with English subtitles.
Internationally revered Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has created some of the most inventive and transcendent cinema of the past thirty years, and Close-up is his most radical, brilliant work. This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event — the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf — as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves. Close-up’s universal themes and fascinating narrative knots have resonated with viewers around the world.
TOP OF PAGE