Tuesday, January 20 at 7pm
Safe – 30th Anniversary Restoration Screening!
Directed by Todd Haynes (U.S., 1995) 119 min. DCP. With Julianne Moore, Peter Friedman, Xander Berkeley.
Before May December (2023), Carol (2015), Far From Heaven (2002), and many other seminal films, Todd Haynes began his artistic partnership with Julianne Moore when he directed Safe, the unnerving story of a woman’s descent into malady that now reverberates uncannily as a tale of two plagues – one that preceded the film (AIDS) and another that came decades later (COVID). Moore gives an astonishing performance as Carol White, a Los Angeles housewife whose affluent environment turns against her in the form of an inexplicable illness. What begins as sudden allergic reactions to everyday chemicals, fragrances and fumes turns increasingly violent, transforming the laminated safety of Carol’s existence into a terror of everyday life. When she is diagnosed with an immunity disorder called “Twentieth Century Disease,” and sets off to New Mexico in search of treatment, Carol’s journey turns inward. And, in the crisis of identity that results, Safe reveals the ways in which disease infests our basic sense of who we are. Introduced by Film/Media Studies Professor Josie Torres Barth.
“Seductive… Scarily confident, beautifully acted. It will seize any viewer who dares to surrender to its spell. Feel free to laugh or scream.” -Richard Corliss, Time Magazine
Tuesday, January 27 at 7pm
Queen Kelly – New Digital Reconstruction and Restoration!
Directed by Erich von Stroheim (U.S., 1929) 101 min. DCP. With Gloria Swanson, Walter Byron, Seena Owen, Tully Marshall.
It should have been a dream collaboration: a glamorous world-famous movie star (Swanson) and her financier lover (Joseph P. Kennedy) hire the most celebrated director of the time (Erich von Stroheim) to make a groundbreaking independent film. Instead, Queen Kelly was canceled mid-production. The movie was shot in sequence and after filming just a few of the scandalous African sequences, Gloria Swanson, the film’s star and producer, shut it down. This unfinished film — like Erich von Stroheim’s desecrated Greed —became Hollywood legend. Basing his reconstruction on von Stroheim’s original scripts, Dennis Doros, of Milestone Films, has employed multiple techniques to recreate the film’s dénouement.
This “decadent late-silent masterpiece, Erich von Stroheim’s epic unfinished swan song pulls no punches. His characters contend with whippings, suicide, a German East African bordello and more in this story of a prince, the orphan girl he falls in love with, and the mad queen whose jealousy wreaks havoc on everyone involved. The great silent film star Gloria Swanson plays Patricia Kelly, the convent orphan whose life is turned upside down when Prince “Wild” Wolfram (Walter Byron) becomes obsessed with her, angering his betrothed queen” (Film at Lincoln Center).
“This new restoration may just be everything that Swanson dreamed of for her lovechild Queen Kelly” – The Guardian
Tuesday, February 3 at 7pm
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand, UK, France, Spain, Germany, Netherlands, 2010) 114 min. 35MM. With Thanapat Saisaymar, Jenjira Pongpas, Sakda Kaewbuadee. In French, Thai and Lao with English subtitles.
Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, acclaimed artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s magical examination of life and death defies easy categorization. An appreciative overview of the director’s career in the New Yorker sets the premise, and the movie’s surreal underbelly: “The titular hero is a widower who is preparing for death in the wooded mountain valley where he lives. The oppressive natural world is all around, with its insect sounds and its thick nights. Boonmee is not alone. There to help him get his affairs in order are his sister-in-law, his nephew, and his primary caregiver. The group is joined by Boonmee’s beloved late wife, who simply appears, as does their long-lost son, who materializes as a man-size monkey with glowing red eyes. The film can be seen as a kind of ghost story, in which the dead return to share a meal with their living relatives and a beast with a heartbreaking light in its eyes lurks in the tall grass at night. At the same time, the dead are eating and the beast is lurking in a real place, with a sociopolitical background that is as important to Weerasethakul as the fantastical products of his imagination.” Presented in collaboration with the Weis Center, in concert with its year-long Trees Series.
“Like that other poet-filmmaker before him Jean Cocteau, Weerasethakul, who goes by the nickname Joe, produces a cinema in which dreams and politics converge. But, where Cocteau’s work is driven by Western ideas about structure, sound, and acting, Weerasethakul’s draws on Buddhist tradition and Thai folklore to create stories that—like life—often change direction, stop abruptly, or become something else altogether.” – Hilton Als, The New Yorker
Tuesday, February 10 at 7pm
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You – Exclusive Theatrical Screening!
Directed by Mary Bronstein (U.S. 2025) 114 min. DCP. With Rose Byrne, Conan O’Brien, A$AP Rocky, Danielle Macdonald
This A24 release is a stunner, cinematically and psychologically claustrophobic and viscerally immersive thanks to its score-less, experiential sound design. Ten minutes in, and you will know why Rose Byrne was honored as Best Female Actor at the 83rd Golden Globe Awards for what many are calling the performance of a lifetime. Byrne plays a woman whose life is literally and figuratively crashing down around her, as she attempts to navigate her child’s mysterious illness, her absent husband, a missing person and an increasingly hostile relationship with her therapist. A “virtuosic maternal freakout” (The New Yorker) like none other, If I Had Legs is a dark comedy, a non-stop panic attack whose absurdity and raw emotional honesty promise to hit hard when viewed on the big screen, surrounded by other filmgoers who are embarking on the intense journey with you.
“Wrenching and at times suffocating, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a howl of maternal desperation spiked with jagged humor… Bronstein’s script turns a mother’s anxiety into an almost supernatural force.” – The New York Times