Sundays may be a “wan, stuff shadow of a robust Saturday” or a day of “forced leisure for folks who have no aptitude for leisure,” but a weekend is still a weekend. The pleasure of a Friday night, the knowing the burdens of work week have a brief respite carry themselves into the following two days of leisure, and what better way to indulge in that leisure than heading to the cinema.
***FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 26***
GONE GIRL, David Fincher
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
David Fincher’s film version of Gillian Flynn’s phenomenally successful best seller (adapted by the author) is one wild cinematic ride, a perfectly cast and intensely compressed portrait of a recession-era marriage contained within a devastating depiction of celebrity/media culture, shifting gears as smoothly as a Maserati 250F. Ben Affleck is Nick Dunne, whose wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) goes missing on the day of their fifth anniversary. Neil Patrick Harris is Amy’s old boyfriend Desi, Carrie Coon (who played Honey in Tracy Letts’s acclaimed production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) is Nick’s sister Margo, Kim Dickens (Treme, Friday Night Lights) is Detective Rhonda Boney, and Tyler Perry is Nick’s superstar lawyer Tanner Bolt. At once a grand panoramic vision of middle America, a uniquely disturbing exploration of the fault lines in a marriage, and a comedy that starts black and keeps getting blacker, Gone Girl is a great work of popular art by one of our best filmmakers. A 20th Century Fox and New Regency release.
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CLASSICS OF THE TWENTIES
Anthology Film Archives
Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy
BALLET MÉCANIQUE (1924, 19 min, 35mm, b&w, silent. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
René Clair & Francis Picabia
ENTR’ACTE (1924, 22 min, 35mm, b&w)
Man Ray
LE RETOUR À LA RAISON (1923, 2 min, 16mm, b&w, silent)
ÉTOILE DE MER (1927, 13 min, 16mm, b&w, silent)
EMAK BAKIA (1927, 18 min, 35mm, b&w, silent)
Marcel Duchamp & Man Ray
ANEMIC CINEMA (1926, 7 min, 35mm, b&w, silent)
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ABIGAIL LESLEY IS BACK IN TOWN, Joseph Sarno
Anthology Film Archives
One of Sarno’s last soft-core features before the advent of hardcore, ABIGAIL LESLEY is a soul-searching study of small-town sexual politics and unrequited passion. Sarah Nicholson’s gutsy, intuitive performance is well supported by fellow cast members Jamie Gillis, Jennifer Welles, Eric Edwards, Sonny Lanham, and the late, great Mary Mendum. Shot on location in Sarno’s hometown of Amityville, New York. Steamy!
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CAFE LUMIERE, Hou Hsiao-hsien
Museum of the Moving Image
Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien. 2003, 103 mins. 35mm. With Yo Hitoto, Tadanobu Asano. Hou is frequently compared to the master Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. In Café Lumière, commissioned for the centenary of Ozu’s birth, Hou addresses that legacy directly. He applies Ozu’s low-angle perspective to this film set in a distinctly contemporary Tokyo that looks backwards to the city’s disappearing past. At the center is Yoko (pop star Yo Hitoto), a writer investigating the life of a modernist composer of the 1930s. She is pregnant by a man she does not want to marry, and has found a kindred spirit in a used-bookstore owner who aids her research.
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***SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 27***
GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE, Jean Luc-Godard
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
The 43rd feature by Jean-Luc Godard (and the only film at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival to get a round of applause mid-screening),Goodbye to Language alights on doubt and despair with the greatest freedom and joy. At 83, Godard works as a truly independent filmmaker, unencumbered by all concerns beyond the immediate: to create a work that embodies his own state of being in relation to time, light, color, the problem of living and speaking with others, and, of course, cinema itself. The artist’s beloved dog Roxy is the de facto “star” of this film, which is as impossible to summarize as a poem by Wallace Stevens or a Messiaen quartet. Goodbye to Language was shot, and can only be truly seen and experienced, in 3-D, which Godard has put to wondrous use. The temptation may be strong to see this film as a farewell, but this remarkable artist is already hard at work on a new project. A Kino Lorber release.
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’71, Yann Demange
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
A riveting thriller set in the mean streets of Belfast over the course of 24 hours, ’71 brings the grim reality of the Troubles to vivid, shocking life. Within days of being posted to Northern Ireland in a divided province that would soon turn into a war zone after January 1972’s Bloody Sunday, squaddie Gary (Jack O’Connell) finds himself trapped and unarmed in hostile territory when a house raid provokes a riot. Running for his life as the lines between friend and foe become increasingly blurred, Gary gets a baptism of fire and we get a stark, eye-opening look at the dirty war that tore Northern Ireland apart. Suggesting an update of Carol Reed’s classic Odd Man Out, this tough, compact suspenser is tightly written by Black Watch playwright Gregory Burke and handled with a dynamic, vigorous energy by debut director Yann Demange. A Roadside Attractions release.
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THE GREEN, GREEN GRASS OF HOME, Hou Hsiao-hsien
Museum of the Moving Image
Hou’s third and last vehicle for Kenny Bee was this Cinemascope musical in which Bee plays a substitute teacher newly arrived from Taipei to a country village, where he begins a romance with a fellow teacher, much to the chagrin of his city girlfriend who comes to drag him back. Such material may seem like an unlikely project for Hou, known for his withdrawn and observant style, but The Green, Green Grass of Homeis significant for being the film on which Hou first allowed improvisation, giving the schoolchildren free reign in front of the camera, and so marking the film as an important step in the burgeoning New Cinema movement.
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LA SAPIENZA, Eugène Green
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
In Eugène Green’s exquisite new film, Alexandre (Fabrizio Rongione) and Aliénor (Christelle Prot Landman) are a married couple who are unhappy in an all-too-familiar way: they have retreated into silence and away from intimacy. Alexandre, an architect, decides to restore himself by renewing his old dream of writing about the great Baroque architect Francesco Borromini. They drive to Ticino, Borromini’s birthplace, and then to Stresa on Lake Maggiore, where they meet a brother and sister. Goffredo (Ludovico Succio) is an architecture student in need of support and Lavinia (Arianna Nastro) is a shut-in who goes into a panic when her brother is too far away. As Alexandre and Aliénor offer their friendship to Goffredo and Lavinia, they restore their own sense of inner balance. It’s difficult to convey the precise beauty of La Sapienza, to describe its serenity, its quiet intensity, or the delicate equilibrium Green locates between faces, landscapes, and architectural forms.
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A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, Eliza Kazan
Film Forum
Faded Southern belle Vivien Leigh’s Blanche DuBois is destroyed by her brutish brother-in-law, Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski (“two of the greatest performances ever put on film” – Pauline Kael). Kazan retained the claustrophobic setting and the principals of his own Broadway smash, plus Leigh from Olivier’s London production, of Williams’ classic.
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MISUNDERSTOOD, Asia Argento
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
The imaginative life of a preteen girl in Rome in the 1980s is depicted with love and humor by Asia Argento, who grew up in the same place and time under similar showbiz circumstances. All but ignored by her divorced, narcissistic parents and tormented by her more conventional and manipulative siblings, Aria (a marvelous Giulia Salerno) shuttles between the well-appointed digs of her singer mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and actor father (Gabriel Garko), carrying her only companion, a large cat who is more affectionate and comfortable in his own skin than any of the humans in her life. A precociously gifted writer, Aria elaborates her cat-accompanied walks into the sometimes life-threatening adventures that mix with mundane actualities. As a projection of young female subjectivity, Misunderstood is ingenious, direct, and utterly real.
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MAP TO THE STARS, David Cronenberg
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
David Cronenberg takes Bruce Wagner’s script—a pitch-black Hollywood satire—chills it down, and gives it a near-tragic spin. The terrible loneliness of narcissism afflicts every character from the fading star Havana (Julianne Moore, who won the Best Actress Award at Cannes for her nervy performance) to the available-for-anything chauffeur (Robert Pattinson) to the entire Weiss family, played by John Cusack, Olivia Williams, Evan Bird, and Mia Wasikowska. The last two are brother and sister, damaged beyond repair and fated to repeat the perverse union of their parents. And yet, in their murderous rages, they have the purity of avenging angels, taking revenge on a culture that needs to be put out of its misery—or so it must seem to them. Cronenberg’s visual strategy physically isolates the characters from one another, so that their occasional violent connections pack a double whammy. An eOne Films release.
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ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, Sergio Leone
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Sergio Leone’s final and perhaps greatest film, Once Upon a Time in America is a New York gangster saga housed within an intricate temporal construction that shuttles between eras, plunging the characters and the viewer into an ocean of longing, regret, and rumination over what might have been. Robert De Niro and James Woods star as boyhood friends from the Lower East Side who build a bootlegging empire, and Elizabeth McGovern appears as the woman of their dreams (played as a girl by Jennifer Connelly). When this film was originally released in the United States, it was edited down to size and put in chronological order. It was followed by a re-release: a much longer cut that preserved the director’s structure. This version includes 22 minutes of restored footage—never before seen in the U.S.—that returned to the film three decades after its theatrical release, deepening the characters and enlarging the work of the astonishing cast that also includes Tuesday Weld, Joe Pesci, Treat Williams, and Louise Fletcher. (McGovern, Williams, and Fletcher are showcased in recovered scenes.) Restoration funded by Gucci and The Film Foundation.
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SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION, Ethan Hawke
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Seymour Bernstein started playing the piano as a little boy, and by the time he turned 15 he was teaching it to others. He enjoyed a long and illustrious career of concertizing before he gave it up to devote himself to helping others develop their own gifts. Ethan Hawke’s lovely film is a warm and lucid portrait of Bernstein—his work habits; his memories of learning the piano with Clara Husserl; his army stint during the Korean War; his sharp observations about his fellow pianists; his interactions with his students and conversations with friends; his preparations for a private concert. But it’s also a film about the patience, concentration, and devotion that are fundamental to the practice of art and life. Seymour: An Introduction allows us to spend time with a generous human being who has found balance and harmony within himself. A Sundance Selects release.
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***SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28***
FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON, Hou Hsiao-hsien
Museum of the Moving Image
Hou’s Paris-set tribute to Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 kid’s classic The Red Balloon concerns seven-year-old Simon and his life with mother Suzanne, a performance artist, as they are seen through the eyes of a Chinese student hired as Simon’s nanny. Song Fang, an actual film student, is essentially playing herself, and the free improvisations give the proceedings a winning air of play, appropriate to a movie that features a sentient balloon as Simon’s benevolent companion. “In its unexpected rhythms and visual surprises, its structural innovations and experimental perfs, its creative misunderstandings and its outré syntheses, this is a movie of genius.”—J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
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THE GLASS MENAGERIE, Irving Rapper
Film Forum
“Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve,” muses Arthur Kennedy between stints at the shoe warehouse, worrying about limping, painfully shy sister Jane Wyman, and overbearing “Southern belle” mom Gertrude Lawrence (Noël Coward’s legendary screen partner), but a surprisingly sensitive Kirk Douglas is about to call. First film adaptation of a Williams work – adapted from his first Broadway smash.
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NYFF SHORTS PROGRAM: 1
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
In August / En Août
Jenna Hasse | Switzerland | 2014 | 9m
As a family crumbles, a little girl goes on what may be her final joyride with her father.
Young Lions of Gypsy / A Ciambra
Jonas Carpignano | France/Italy | 2014 | 16m
A Romani boy learns his street smarts from his older brother.
Ophelia
Sergei Rostropovich | Germany | 2014 | 12m
Verging on Alzheimer’s, an aging actress (played by Hanna Schygulla) finds that the power of memory is stronger than ever.
Humor
Tal Zagreba | Israel | 2014 | 5m
A mime inadvertently sets off a bizarre chain reaction…
Travel support provided by Consulate General of Israel
A Paradise / Un Paraíso
Jayisha Patel | Cuba | 2013 | 14m
Tragedy haunts a family—the circumstances of which run deep throughout their isolated Cuban village.
Wu Gui
Jordan Schiele | China/Singapore/USA | 2014 | 15m
A woman has bigger plans for the construction worker whose turtle she agrees to buy.
The Girl and the Dogs
Selma Vilhunen & Guillaume Mainguet | Denmark/Finland/France | 2014 | 15m
Three teenage girls make an unexpected detour on the way to a party.
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WHIPLASH, Damien Chazelle
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
A pedagogical thriller and an emotional S&M two-hander, Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash is brilliantly acted by Miles Teller as an eager jazz drummer at a prestigious New York music academy and J.K. Simmons as the teacher whose method of terrorizing his students is beyond questionable, even when it gets results. Dubbed “Full Metal Jacket at Juilliard” at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award, Chazelle’s jazz musical was developed from his short film of the same name, which premiered at Sundance the previous year. The live jazz core that is fused with Justin Hurwitz’s ambient score, the blood-on-the-drum-kit battle between student and teacher, and the dazzling filmmaking will keep your pulse rate elevated from beginning to end. A kinesthetic depiction of performance anxiety—you don’t need to be a musician to feel it—Whiplash also presents us with a moral issue open to debate. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
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NYFF SHORTS PROGRAM: 2
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Chlorine / Cloro
Marcelo Grabowsky | Brazil | 2014 | 18m
Paradise is about to be lost for a filthy-rich family of questionable behavior.
Travel support provided by Ancine
The Return / Le Retour
Yohann Kouam | France | 2013 | 20m
When the older brother he idolizes comes back home, Willy realizes that he doesn’t know him as well as he thought.
Hepburn
Tommy Davis | USA | 2014 | 6m
A divorced father takes his young son to work.
La Estancia
Federico Adorno | Paraguay | 2014 | 14m
Peasants kicked off their farms return to bury the dead.
The Kármán Line
Oscar Sharp | UK | 2014 | 24m
Due to an unusual condition, a suburban wife finds herself growing apart from her family.
Crooked Candy
Andrew Rodgers | USA | 2014 | 6m
For some, a U.S. ban cannot abate the need for Kinder eggs.
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DARK VICTORY, Edmund Goulding
IFC Center
“In the glorious year of 1939, Bette Davis and Warner Bros. produced one of the best with DARK VICTORY, a pure soap opera whose predictable melodramatics are dazzlingly transcended by consummate acting backed by the glittering power of studio filmmaking. Davis bristles as spoiled socialite Judith Traherne, whose charmed life of horseback-riding and partying is rudely interrupted by a brain tumor. Davis is riveting in all her restless passion, as is her supporting cast, which includes George Brent as her surgeon/husband; Ronald Reagan, in probably the best role of his career, as a drunken playboy; Humphrey Bogart, uncharacteristically playing an Irish stable groom; and Geraldine Fitzgerald, warm and sincere as Trahern’s devoted best friend (one of the rare instances when golden-age Hollywood presented a relationship between women as more than the usual sniping and spitting). Legend has it Davis furiously contested the use of Max Steiner’s sweeping angelic crescendo at the film’s tear-duct-draining conclusion–and, typically, lost the argument to Jack Warner.” – Baltimore City Paper
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BJÖRK: BIOPHILIA LIVE, Nick Fenton & Peter Strickland
IFC Center
BIOPHILIA LIVE is a concert film that captures the human element of Björk’s eponymous multi-disciplinary multimedia project. Recorded live at London’s Alexandra Palace in 2013, the film features Björk and her band performing every song on the Biophilia album and more, using a broad variety of instruments—some digital, some traditional and some completely unclassifiable—resulting in a vital piece of the grand mosaic that is Biophilia.
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NYFF52 SURPRISE SCREENING
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Join us for a surprise screening of a highly anticipated 2015 release from a New York Film Festival favorite!
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A BORROWED LIFE, Hou Hsiao-hsien
Museum of the Moving Image
The directorial debut of Wu, who has worked with Hou, Edward Yang, and Ann Hui, was little-seen in the United States despite being one of Martin Scorsese’s ten favorite films of the 1990s. A Borrowed Lifefollows a working-class Taiwanese family from the aftermath of independence from Japanese rule to the 1980s, centering on the relationship between father, coal miner Sega and son Wen-jian (who is played by three actors), characters drawn from Wu’s life. “[C]onveys a remarkably vivid sense of the natural world as it is apprehended by a child.” —The New York Times
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THE 50 YEAR ARGUMENT, Martin Scorsese
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
The New York Review of Books, a renowned NY literary institution that’s played a substantial role in American cultural and political life, gets the royal treatment in this celebration of a half-century of critical engagement and dissent. Interweaving the history and evolution of the publication, founded by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein (in reaction to what they considered the impoverished state of book reviewing in The New York Times!), with an examination of its amazing track record of wrestling with the urgent issues and inconvenient truths of the day, from Vietnam to Iraq, this look at the magazine and the journalistic values it enshrines is thoughtful, lively, and moving. It’s also a juicy compilation of greatest hits and historical bull’s-eyes, with guest appearances by James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and a host of other literary and political luminaries. An HBO Documentary Film.
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