Calendar: Week 3

April 13 - April 19

Atonement
Joe Wright, 2007 - 130 min.

This adaptation of Ian McEwan’s acclaimed novel, with an Oscar winning score and starring beauties Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, is a passionate and painful story of injustice, guilt, love and lust. In 1935 England, a young girl accuses her sister’s lover of a despicable crime he didn’t commit. While she’s completely incapable of understanding the ramifications of her actions, their effects are still devastating. The film follows the lovers’ (Knightly and McAvoy) attempts to undo the damage and find happiness together, while the young girl comes of age in war-torn London. 35mm.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Tim Burton, 2007 - 117 min.

It’s hard to imagine typical movie-musical fans enjoying the dissonant score and violent plot of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sweeney Todd, a work more frequently performed these days in opera houses. But the film works, thanks to Burton, no stranger to the macabre himself. Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter dramatically reinvent the roles of the titular barber and his assistant, who slit customers’ throats and bake them into pies, while remaining true to Sondheim’s original. 35mm.

The Impatient Maiden & The Kiss Before the Mirror
James Whale, 1932, 1933 - 78 & 69 min.

Two racy early Whale films demonstrate the director’s range and devotion to virtuosic pictorial treatment, irrespective of subject matter. The Impatient Maiden, adapted from a smutty novel, stars Mae Clarke as a woman who refuses to keep her sexual desire within the confines of marriage. In a pure pre-Code moment, even an appendectomy examination becomes a pretext for a tryst. The Kiss Before the Mirror, photographed by Karl Freund, follows an attorney who begins to suspect his wife of infidelity while defending a friend who murdered his wife over same. 35mm.

Time Regained
Raoul Ruiz, 1999, 158 min.

Reviewing this rendering of Proust’s multi-part novel that adapts almost exclusively from the concluding section, Jonathan Rosenbaum described Time Regained as ‘inviting the spectator who knows Proust to engage in a dialogue with it and the unitiated spectator to get lost in the swirling patterns of an enchanting and highly entertaining trailer.’ Ruiz uses his mastery of cinematic techniques to flatten the linear time of film into a tremendous and moving moment of infinite possibility and relationship, one in which all that can be connected is shown, magically, to already be so.In French with English Subtitles 35mm.

Les Visiteurs du soir
Marcel Carné, 1942 - 90 min.

This antifascist parable is based on a medieval French legend: “And so in the beautiful month of May, 1485, the Devil sent on earth two of his creatures in order to drive the human beings to despair.” Two wandering minstrels arrive at a wedding banquet, sent by the Devil to corrupt and destroy mankind. But the plans go awry when one of them falls in love with his intended victim. Like a fairy tale come to life, it’s a lavish, beautifully stylized film. Jacques Prevert wrote the script and Arletty, who was so memorable as Garance in Children of Paradise, stars.In French; subtitled. 35mm.

The Trial
Orson Welles, 1962 - 119 min.

Welles’ adaptation of the Kafka novel may not be the most faithful, but as a film it represents a masterful and influential work. Tony Perkins (Norman Bates in Psycho) stars as the bureaucrat Joseph K, who is summoned to court for a mysterious crime. Welles himself plays K’s lawyer, while his direction achieves a sense of nearhysteria throughout the nightmarish story. As one of the most innovative films by one of the most innovative directors, The Trial is a must-see. Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum writes: “Given the impact of screen size on what he’s doing, you can’t claim to have seen this if you’ve watched it only on video”. 35mm.

***Schedule Change*** Allá en el Rancho Grande
Fernando de Fuentes, 1936 - 95 min.

With Rancho Grande de Fuentes achieved what Hollywood had long failed to do: develop an entertainment idiom – the comedia ranchera – that could captivate the Latin America market. After its runaway international success, Rancho Grande became a template for most subsequent commercial productions in Mexico. De Fuentes’s genial blend of songs, jokes, and romance at a cozy, patriarchal, pre-Revolutionary hacienda was perhaps an ideological regression, but it was still an improvement upon Hollywood’s own frontier myths. Tito Guízar became a star as a singing, lovesick ranch hand. Note: in Spanish with French Subtitles. Archival 35mm.

Robot Monster
Phil Tucker, 1953 - 73 min.

With a budget of $16,000, an actor-friend with a gorilla costume and a diving mask, and plundered footage from One Million B.C., director Phil Tucker set out to make his masterpiece, a sci-fi film that addressed atomic age anxieties through the figure of Ro-Man XJ2, the alien invader who threatens the last surviving Hu-mans with a cosmic ray “from which will spring prehistoric reptiles to devour whatever remains of life!” When critics scorned this impossibly earnest film, Tucker attempted suicide, found unconscious in the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. Preceded by a short, Adam Raises Cain. 16mm.

There Will Be Blood
Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007 - 158 min.

Darker than billowing smoke, but conscious of the modern, Blood dispenses with the psychological nicety of an Horatio Alger story and tells us how the clashes between capitalism and religion, work and family, can drive a man mad. Daniel Day-Lewis delivers his Oscar-winning performance as Daniel Plainview, a California oilman whose gravelly voice and rotten demeanor evoke John Huston’s landmark performance as Noah Cross in Chinatown. With strong work from a stellar Paul Dano and a subtle Ciaran Hinds, this thriller drinks your milkshake. It drinks it up! 35mm.

Charlie Wilson's War
Mike Nichols, 2007 - 97 min.

Tom Hanks is Texas congressman Charlie Wilson, who, with help from a disgruntled CIA operative and a fundamentalist Christian, succeeds in arming Afghani insurgents against the Soviets. Wilson is that rarity of rarities, a red-blooded American in habit and address with a liberal heart of gold. Whether this portrait is accurate or not, the politics of this farce are easy to agree with, if a little too narrow to embrace. Nichols seeks to expose the whim and pettiness behind politics, while always keeping his caricatures tasteful and his statements lighthearted. 35mm.