Tuesday, August 26 at 7pm
In the Mood for Love – 25th Anniversary Screening!
Directed by Wong Kar Wai (Hong Kong, 2000) 98 min. DCP. With Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Maggie Cheung Man-yuk. In Cantonese, Shanghainese with English subtitles
Hong Kong, 1962: Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk) move into neighboring apartments on the same day. Their encounters are formal and polite — until a discovery about their spouses creates an intimate bond between them. At once delicately mannered and visually extravagant, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love is a masterful evocation of romantic longing and fleeting moments. With its aching musical soundtrack and exquisitely abstract cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin, this film has been a major stylistic influence on the past 25 years of cinema. Playing with the rarely screened short In the Mood for Love 2001 (9 min.), which had only screened during Wong Kar Wai’s masterclass at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival – and now thanks to Janus Films is available in wide release for the first time!
Tuesday, September 2 at 7pm
The Seed of the Sacred Fig – Exclusive Area Screening!
Directed by Mohammad Rasoulof (Iran, France, Germany 2024) 167 min. DCP. With Misagh Zareh, Soheila Golestani, Mahsa Rostami, Setareh Maleki. Farsi with English subtitles.
A target of Iran’s hardline conservative government for his films’ criticism of the state, director Mohammad Rasoulof fled his home country to avoid an eight-year prison sentence, though he hadn’t finished editing his latest film yet. His searing drama The Seed of the Sacred Fig won a Special Prize from the jury and three other awards on its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. The film is every bit as urgent and gripping as its real-life backstory would portend: longtime government worker Iman (Zareh) has just received a major promotion to the role of judge’s investigator, to the hopeful delight of his wife Najmeh (Golestani); at the same moment, a series of student protests against the government have exploded in the streets, stoking the sympathies of their independent-minded daughters Rezvan (Rostami) and Sana (Maleki). The growing wedge between progressive children and traditional parents intensifies through a series of unsettling events that put Iman’s future in jeopardy. Both paranoia thriller and domestic drama, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is above all an epic of anti-patriarchal political conviction (New York Film Festival notes).
“An anguished cry from the heart of Mohammad Rasoulof… while Iran will never, ever submit his deeply unsettling latest masterwork for the Best International Feature Oscar — often the only harbinger of anti-establishment Middle Eastern films making their way to the U.S. — this searing domestic thriller deserves the widest audience possible. With the brutal 2022 killing of Mahsa Amini by government hands as his launching point, Rasoulof crafts an extraordinarily gripping allegory about the corrupting costs of power and the suppression of women under a religious patriarchy that crushes the very people it claims to protect.” – Indiewire
Tuesday, September 9 at 7pm
Sorry, Baby – Exclusive Area Screening!
Directed by Eva Victor (U.S. 2025) 103 min. DCP. With Eva Victor, Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges.
Eva Victor’s notable debut is a restrained exploration of trauma, a gentle, feeling, patient and even humorous portrait of a woman trying to heal. A favorite at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, where Victor won the prestigious Waldo Salt Award for screenwriting and the Grand Jury prize in the U.S. dramatic competition, Sorry, Baby isn’t showy. It depicts, with minute focus, delicacy and acid humor, the before and aftermath of sexual assault, doing so in a fresh, compassionate and brave voice. An A24 Release.
“Sorry, Baby is a movie with a trauma at its center, but it’s not a trauma drama. It’s about living with such things and still going on with your life. And the manner in which Victor presents this narrative, with such verve and confidence and tenderness and pitch-black humor, defies easy description. It’s simply an amazing display of someone knowing how to get their voice and vision across.” – Rolling Stone
Tuesday, September 16 at 7pm
Stray Dog – New Restoration!
Directed by Akira Kurosawa (Japan 1948) 122 min. DCP. With Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura. Japanese with English subtitles.
A bad day gets worse for young detective Murakami (Mifune) when a pickpocket steals his gun on a hot, crowded bus. Desperate to right the wrong, he goes undercover, scavenging Tokyo’s sweltering streets for the stray dog whose desperation has led him to a life of crime. With each step, cop and criminal’s lives become more intertwined and the investigation becomes an examination of Murakami’s own dark side. Pure cinema: a nearly 10-minute sequence portraying Mifune’s obsessive, guilt-ridden search – shot by hidden camera in the city’s toughest black market. Screening on the occasion of Janus Films’ nine-film festival, featuring spectacular 4K restorations of some of the the legendary director’s most influential titles.
“Mifune is magnetic as a Tokyo cop obsessed with recovering his gun, but the real star is the city itself, in all its heat and squalor. The movie is an impassioned outcry against social dissolution — Kurosawa sees both Mifune and the thief who goes on a crime spree with the cop’s pilfered Colt as a product of a brutal postwar environment.” – Michael Sragow, The New Yorker
Tuesday, September 23 at 7pm
Highest 2 Lowest – Exclusive Area Showing!
Directed by Spike Lee (U.S. 2025) 122 min. DCP. With Denzel Washington, Jeffrey Wright, Ilfenesh Hadera, A$AP Rocky.
After Akira Kurosawa’s spectacularly cinematic police procedural about a kidnapping, comes a new Spike Lee Joint inspired by High and Low. Brothers Denzel Washington and Spike Lee reunite for the 5th in their long working relationship for this reinterpretation of the great Japanese filmmaker’s crime thriller, now played out on the mean streets of modern day New York City. When a titan music mogul (Washington), widely known as having the “best ears in the business”, is targeted with a ransom plot, he is jammed up in a life-or-death moral dilemma.
“There’s enough Spike Lee magic in Highest 2 Lowest to justify a trip to the cinema.. it’s a movie that gleefully kicks its characters out of their comfy environs to plunge them into New York’s rattling, noisy crowds—and it’s worth watching with the biggest audience you can find..” – David Sims, The Atlantic
Tuesday, September 30 at 7pm
The Lovers on the Bridge – New 4K Restoration!
Directed by Leo Carax (France 1991) 126 min. DCP. With Juliette Binoche, Denis Lavant. French with English subtitles.
Leos Carax’s delirious saga of l’amour fou burns with an intoxicating stylistic freedom as it traces the highs and lows of the passionate relationship that develops between a homeless artist (Binoche) who is losing her sight and a troubled, alcoholic street performer (Lavant) living on Paris’s famed Pont-Neuf bridge. Capturing their romantic abandon with a giddy expressionist energy—especially in a wild dance sequence set against an explosion of fireworks— this whirlwind love story is an exhilarating journey through a relationship that confirmed Carax’s status as one of the leading lights of the post–New Wave French cinema.
“In [my book Film Follies: The Cinema Out of Order] I called The Lovers on the Bridge the perfection of the form; and in recent months I’ve shown up in various cities for one-night screenings where, griotlike, I’ve sung the film’s genealogy and praise. I couldn’t back off even if Orson Welles were to descend from heaven and anathematize the picture, with Renoir at his right hand and Ozu at his left. Nor would I want to back off. The Lovers on the Bridge is one of the most splendidly reckless films ever made–the film that might have torn through the mind of Godard’s Pierrot le Fou, after love made him paint his face blue and tie sticks of dynamite to his hair.” – Stuart Klawans, The Nation
Tuesday, October 7 at 7pm
Phantom Lady – New 4K Restoration!
Directed by Robert Siodmak (U.S. 1944) 87 min. DCP. With Ella Raines, Alan Curtis.
Robert Siodmak was one of “Hollywood’s most enduringly influential yet too-little-celebrated Film Noir helmers,” a “dark visionary” celebrated in a retrospective at Lincoln Center last year. His first foray into the genre that would come to define his artistry, Phantom Lady already evinces the hallmarks of the German director’s work within film noir, namely a consummately macabre sense of atmosphere and a gift for rendering his characters’ troubled subjectivities through the arresting interplay of image and sound. Adapted from a novel by Cornell Woolrich, the film stars Ella Raines as a secretary who must prove that her boss (Curtis) has been wrongly accused of murdering his wife, stumbling through an obscure labyrinth in search of a mysterious woman whom he met shortly before his wife’s death and subsequently vanished. What seems to be a simple enough set-up, in Siodmak’s hands, yields an exemplary and absorbing work of light, shadow, and psychology (Lincoln Center notes).
Tuesday, October 21 at 7pm
The Hottest August
Directed by Brett Story (U.S. 2019) 94 min. DCP.
A complex portrait of a city and its inhabitants, The Hottest August gives us a window into the collective consciousness of the present. The film’s point of departure is one city over one month: New York City, including its outer boroughs, during August 2017. It’s a month heavy with the tension of a new President, growing anxiety over everything from rising rents to marching white nationalists, and unrelenting news of either wildfires or hurricanes on every coast. The film pivots on the question of futurity: what does the future look like from where we are standing? And what if we are not all standing in the same place? The Hottest August offers a mirror onto a society on the verge of catastrophe, registering the anxieties, distractions, and survival strategies that preoccupy ordinary lives. Introduced by Creative Writing Professor Clarence Orsi, whose Creative Nonfiction Workshops will explore the film’s innovative combination of spontaneity and craft in interview research, its nuanced portrait of a particular place and moment in time, and the way its structure operates through juxtaposition and accumulated detail.
“Critic’s Pick! Fascinating. A cinematic gift… an intellectual challenge and an emotional adventure.”
— Glenn Kenny, The New York Times
Tuesday, October 28 at 7pm
Jacob’s Ladder – Brand New 4K Restoration! Followed by Student Films!
Directed by Adrian Lyne (U.S. 1990) 113 min. DCP. With Tim Robbins, Elizabeth Peña, Danny Aiello.
This bone-chilling and hallucinatory thriller, a unique look at the horrible effects of war on the human psyche, was directed by Academy Award-nominated director Adrian Lyne (Fatal Attraction, Flashdance) and written by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin (Ghost). Jacob Singer (Robbins), a Vietnam War veteran plagued with troubling hallucinations and traumatic flashbacks, struggles to maintain his sanity as his terrible past invades his waking life. As girlfriend Jezzie (Peña) and chiropractor friend Louis (Aiello) try to help him find balance, Jacob only descends further into madness and despair. Featuring an impressive supporting cast of contemporary and future stars including Ving Rhames, Jason Alexander, Eriq La Salle, Pruitt Taylor Vince, and an uncredited Macaulay Culkin, and music by Maurice Jarre (Lawrence of Arabia, Winter Kills), the 4K restoration of Jacob’s Ladder is primed to unsettle a new generation of moviegoers this Halloween season. Feature screening will be followed by premiere of Fall 2025 Student Film Challenge shorts. Awards ceremony after the program!
“A truly creepy, nerve-jangling experience.” — Dave Kehr
Tuesday, November 4 at 7pm
Seeing Red, The Films of Su Friedrich – Director in Person!
Directed by Su Friedrich (U.S. 1993-2024) TRT 90 min. DCP.
Su Friedrich is a queer cinema pioneer, known for her richly personal films about identity, family history, and lesbianism. As part of the Music Department’s week of Considering Matthew Shepard programming, we are thrilled to be hosting a visit from Friedrich, who will present her films The Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire, Too (1993); Seeing Red (2005), and Jerusalema: From Austria to Zimbabwe (2024). These selections highlight how Friedrich’s probing engagement with cinema radicalizes film form and content – by incorporating a feminist perspective and issues of lesbian identity; by moving between the personal and the political – from autobiographical films about family to the investigation of society’s notions of sexual identity; and by using a palette that includes home movies, archival footage, interviews and scripted narratives. As Friedrich wrote in an early statement of purpose, her work “is about and for the many of us who are trying to get some pleasure from, and some power in, a world that has been for too long in the hands of those who depend on our fear of them.” Friedrich will appear in person to introduce the films and discuss them after with the audience. Co-presented with Bucknell’s Music Department.
“Su Friedrich once again stands out from the crowd. Despite her quarter-century’s experience in making intensely self-revelatory, formally complex films, nothing less than a professional crisis drove her to start a video diary… Her video diary has now grown into a piece called Seeing Red, and viewers will discover that she has mulled over her pained monologues until they have taken on a musical form. Underscored by Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, her complaints now play against the counterpoint of a wordless travelogue through Brooklyn. Sometimes bracingly expressive, sometimes serenely beautiful, the outdoor images interrupt and tease, echo and comment upon Ms. Friedrich’s bedroom outpourings, putting them into their artistic place.” — Stewart Klawans, The New York Times
Tuesday, November 11 at 7pm
The Porcelain War
Directed by Brendan Bellomo & Slava Leontyev (U.S./Ukraine/Australia 2024) 87 min. DCP. Ukranian and Russian with English subtitles.
In a war waged against ordinary civilians, amid the chaos and destruction of the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine, three artists choose to fight, armed with their art and, for the first time in their lives, guns. As the war intensifies, one picks up his camera to film their story, and on tiny porcelain figurines, the others capture their idyllic past, uncertain present, and hope for the future, finding inspiration and beauty as they defend their culture and their country (adapted from IFC Center notes). Winner of Sundance’s US Documentary Grand Jury Prize. Introduced by Russian Studies professor Lenora Murphy.
“The latest documentary dispatch from Ukraine, Porcelain War, brings a message of hope rooted in art. Making art does feel like an act of resistance during the Russian invasion, when Kremlin propaganda attacks the very existence of Ukrainian culture. But what’s intriguing is that the directors also celebrate Ukraine’s military defense, making for a jangly mix of idyll and warfare.” — Nicholas Rapold, The New York Times
Tuesday, November 18 at 7pm
It Was Just an Accident
Directed by Jafar Panahi (Iran/France/Luxembourg 2025) 102 min. DCP. With Vahid Mobasseri, Mariam Afshari, Ebrahim Azizi, Hadis Pakbaten. Farsi with English subtitles.
2025 winner of the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, this latest from the great Iranian director Jafar Panahi (Offside, This is Not a Film) is “a truly remarkable parable about empathy, mercy, righteousness, regret, and unfulfilled rage” (David Fear, Rolling Stone). In his first film since his liberation from imprisonment and a filmmaking ban, the provocative Iranian auteur devises a darkly comic revenge thriller with a deceptively simple premise: A family has a car accident, then pulls in to an auto shop. The mechanic, Vahid, thinks he recognizes the driver—indeed suspects that he is the man who tortured him in prison. Vahid kidnaps him, preparing to bury him alive, but—is he certain that this man is his torturer? Vahid gathers other survivors to verify his suspicion, with escalating consequences, as Panahi mounts incisive critiques of societal corruption and the afterburn of tyrannical rule (adapted from Film Forum notes).
“A beautiful film. I have never seen anything quite like it.” – Martin Scorsese
Tuesday, December 2 at 7pm
Lingua Franca – Director in Person!
Directed by Isabel Sandoval (U.S./Philippines 2019) 84 min. DCP. With Isabel Sandoval, Lynn Cohen, Eamon Farren. English/Tagalog/Russian with English subtitles.
A love story between an undocumented, transgender, Filipina caregiver and a Russian-Jewish slaughterhouse worker in Brooklyn, New York, Lingua Franca was the first feature by a trans woman of color to play at many of the prestigious festivals that selected it for screenings (Busan, London, and more). A tweet from writer-director-star Isabel Sandoval, citing her cinematic influences (Chantal Akerman’s 1976 News from Home, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, James Gray’s 2008 Two Lovers, and Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 In the Mood for Love) hints at the “something dreamier and more elusive” found in what might otherwise be “your standard social issue melodrama” (Criterion Current). Furthermore, per Drew Gregory at Autostraddle, “this is a political film that’s explicit about its character’s struggles and the struggles so many undocumented immigrants faced before Trump and are facing now under Trump—and how transness intersects with this experience.” Co-funded by Bucknell’s English Department, Literary Studies Program, Women’s & Gender Studies Program, University Lectureship Committee, Global Student Council, and the Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans* and Queer Resources. Introduced by Literary Studies professor Steven Beardsley.
“Quiet moments come alive with defiance in Lingua Franca, the third feature film from writer-director Isabel Sandoval. In one scene, a cautious woman tentatively allows herself to experience pleasure, a tumult of emotions erupting across her face; in another, two friends sitting in a church find solace in a softly sung hymn from their youth. The film’s vision is at once radical and nuanced, and that the protagonist of Lingua Franca is a trans Filipina immigrant is both rare and deeply personal to Sandoval, who also stars in the indie dram.” – Los Angeles Times
Tuesday, December 9 at 7pm
Fall Film Showcase!
Directed by Bucknell Students! TRT approximately 70 minutes.
Join us for the world premiere of student films produced as final projects this semester. Playing with 48 hour film challenge films! Filmmakers will be in attendance!