Calendar: Week 1

March 31 - April 5

Monday, March 31 - 7:00
Naked Lunch
David Cronenberg, 1991 - 115 min.
David Cronenberg, the world’s greatest living director, adapts William S. Burroughs. The novel’s disconnected, cut-up structure, its incongruous, wildly offensive, and tonally divergent routines, and its hallucinatory and flamboyantly pansexual imagery make straightforward filming impossible. Instead, what he delivered is a bizarre hybrid of Burroughs’ novel, his biography, and Cronenberg’s cavalcades of meat and fluid: a film as trapped between two competing sensibilities (Cronenberg’s and Burroughs’) as Hitchcock and Selznick’s Rebecca. Come for the William Tell routine; stay for the Mugwump jism. 35mm.
Tuesday, April 1 - 7:00
Children of Paradise
Marcel Carné, 1945 - 190 min.
One of the most celebrated films in the history of French cinema, this lushly romantic work has been called the French Gone With the Wind, and is one of the great triumphs of Occupation-era filmmaking. Set in Paris in the 1840s, it tells the epic tale of Garance (Arletty), an actress and woman of the world, and the men who love her, among them the mime Baptiste (unforgettably portrayed by Jean-Louis Barrault) and the actor Lemaître (Pierre Brasseur). The dazzlingly literate script, which explores the themes of life and art, dreams and reality, was written by the great screenwriter Jacques Prévert.In French; subtitled. 35mm.
Wednesday, April 2 - 7:00, 9:15
Cape Fear
J. Lee Thompson, 1962 - 105 min.
This tightly crafted and violent thriller shocked audiences upon its initial release (British censors mandated 161 cuts in order to avoid an “X” rating), but has since become an iconic American thriller. The story follows ex-con Max Cady (Robert Mitchum) on his unblinking quest for revenge against the attorney who helped jail him (Gregory Peck). Peck was initially offered the role of Cady, but refused to play the villain. The change in casting resulted in a physical mismatch between Mitchum and the 6’3” Peck, a disparity masterfully compensated for by the pair’s superior and occasionally improvisational acting. 35mm.
Thursday, April 3 - 7:00
La Mancha de Sangre
Adolfo Best-Maugard, 1937 - 70 min.
Censored, banned, and presumed completely lost until the mid-1990s, La mancha de sangre is probably the strangest and most sordid film to emerge from Mexico in the 1930s. The film, which follows an innocent country boy who falls in love with the marquee whore of the Mancha de sangre nightlcub, superficially resembles other cabaret films but director Best-Maugard (an assistant to Eisenstein on his ill-fated Que viva Mexico) offers delirious details (real-life pimps, full-frontal female nudity) found nowhere else. The only surviving copy has no sound for reel 4 and no picture for reel 9. Archival 35mm.
Thursday, April 3 - 9:00
The Land Before Time
Don Bluth, 1988 - 80 min.
Rousing adventure and hilarious hijinks await as Littlefoot the Apatosaurus, freshly orphaned thanks to the stubby arms and wrath of the evil T-Rex Sharptooth, journeys to The Great Valley to escape a desecrated landscape. He meets Cera the Triceratops, Ducky the Saurolophus, Petrie the Pteranodon and Spike the Stegosaurus! The Land Before Time is a landmark children’s film, spawning a number of beloved direct-to-video sequels and capturing the hearts and minds of paleo-centric children across the world. Set to a pulse pounding score, it’s dino-mite! Preceded by a Soviet short, Mountain of Dinosaurs. 35mm.
Friday, April 4 - 6:30, 9:00, 11:30
No Country for Old Men
Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007 - 122 min.
The Coen brothers have brought us everything from bowlers who pack serious heat to wood chippers that pack serious feet. And in their latest effort, which recently won Best Picture of the year at the Oscars, they disappoint neither in shock, nor in substance, nor in style. With beautiful cinematography at once reminiscent of old Westerns and consciously in contrast to them, the Coens retell Cormac McCarthy’s tale of the serial killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem at his terribly and unforgettably coiffed best). Josh Brolin delivers a breakout performance as Chigurh’s valiant foe. 35mm.
Saturday, April 5 - 7:00, 9:00, 11:00
Margot at the Wedding
Noah Baumbach, 2007 - 91 min.
Writer and director Baumbach follows up The Squid and the Whale with another painfully accurate look at the strained relations of family and friends within New York’s intelligentsia. Margot (Nicole Kidman) takes her son to spend a weekend with her sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who is about to marry a whimsically erstwhile artist. Self-deprecating humor and hostile intra-familial ploys run rampant as Baumbach uses familiar tools to create a surprisingly fresh and entertaining story. Watch for Jack Black’s breakout artistic role. No, seriously. 35mm.