May In Theater 2024
May IN THEATER
Jane Schoenbrun Selects
opens May 3
On the occasion of the much-anticipated release of their I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun’s follow-up to their 2021 lo-fi microbudget breakout We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Metrograph has invited the director to screen two of the key inspirations for their latest—American horror classics Messiah of Evil and The Return of the Living Dead—alongside a Member’s Only Preview of the Sundance standout thriller itself, a canny, creepy meditation on the pleasures and perils of pop culture obsession. A celebration of the cult classics canon, curated by a director whose work is destined to join it.
Messiah of Evil
Intro by Jane Schoenbrun
Friday, May 3, 10:30pm
The Return of the Living Dead
Intro by Jane Schoenbrun
Saturday, May 4, 10:30pm
Series Includes:
Messiah of Evil - Return of the Living Dead
Euro-Heists
opens May 3
There’s money and other valuables stashed in vaults from Paris to London to Turin, and the scheming subjects of this series are on a mission to liberate the loot, whether the spoils are in francs, pounds sterling, or lira. A custom vehicle for pure, process-oriented cinema, the best heist flicks are riveting exercises in high-style filmmaking. In Euro-Heists, we’ve packaged a Grand Tour of luscious larceny—featuring films by Jules Dassin, Alexander Mackendrick, Jonathan Glazer, and many more—that will allow for the study of subtle nuances in safe-cracking, getaway driving, and double-dealing techniques all across the Continent and on both sides of the Channel.
Series Includes:
Danger: Diabolik - Hudson Hawk - The Italian Job
The Ladykillers - Le Cercle Rouge - Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels
Rififi - Ruben Brandt, Collector - Sexy Beast - Topkapi
Metrograph Selects: Victoria Ashley
May 3
Select films, chosen specially by Metrograph staff. For the latest iteration of our recurring series, the Metrograph Events team’s Victoria Ashley shares some of her personal favorites.
"Whenever asked about my favorite film, I always say I don’t have just one but several as there are so many movies I love, across all different genres. These three films—The Big Picture, Purple Noon, and Three Days of the Condor—reflect this: they are completely different in every way but loved equally by me for the story each so magically tells."—Victoria Ashley, Metrograph Events team
Series Includes:
The Big Picture - Purple Noon - Three Days of the Condor
Ethics of Care
opens May 3
A program of diverse titles exploring the myriad ethical quandaries and spiritual rewards that can come with taking the role of caretaker to another human, be it parent (Bong Joon-ho’s Mother), child (Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s L’Enfant, Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs), sibling (Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows), romantic partner (Michael Haneke’s Amour, Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves), or some other, more ambiguous arrangement (Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master). Films that explore uncomfortable, essential questions concerning the dynamics of co-dependency—can mercy be a form of vanity? Is “taking responsibility” always the responsible thing to do?—in lucid, fearless, and deeply felt ways.
Series Includes:
Amour - Breaking the Waves - Capernaum
Europe ‘51 - Floating Weeds - L’Enfant
The Master - Melancholia - Mommy
Mother - Nobody Knows - Through a Glass Darkly
Animal Farm: Moles
opens May 3
Animal Farm returns with a deep dive into those denizens of the depths, the bashful, burrowing mole. You’ll see plenty of the small, squinty-eyed subterranean mammals on screen here, digging up a storm in films like Fantastic Mr. Fox and Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, as well as the underground tunnel-dwelling human subjects of Dark Days, the hollow earth mutants of The Mole People and, for good measure, some homograph “moles,” including the deep cover agents of The Departed and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Marilyn’s beauty mark (albeit a fake, her real one is covered up!) in Some Like It Hot.
Series Includes:
Dark Days - The Departed - El Topo
Fantastic Mr. Fox - Fast, Cheap & Out of Control - The Mole People
Some Like It Hot - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
’90S NOIR
Opens May 3
Dopey fall guys, angling femme fatales, double-crosses and love triangles, excessive smoke and the darkest of shadows… Some things never go out of fashion. Though the narrative and stylistic conceits that make up film noir never really left cinema, they had their best decade since the 1940s in the years of grunge, gangsta rap, the Gulf War, and William Jefferson Clinton. With ’90s Noir, explore the depressive, desperate cinematic underbelly of the decade’s official optimism and prosperity, with highlights from the heyday of the erotic thriller as well as auteur works by Wong Kar-wai, the Wachowskis, Spike Lee, and an obscure video store clerk with the initials Q.T.
Series Includes:
Bound - Cape Fear - Clockers
Deep Cover - Fallen Angels -Following
Life is Cheap... But Toilet Paper is Expensive - Miller’s Crossing - Pulp Fiction
Pusher - Reservoir Dogs - Suture
Small Town, Big Dreams
Opens May 3
In the early years of the 21st century, Mainland China experienced a drastic demographic transformation, as residents of rural villages uprooted themselves en masse to relocate to the country’s metastasizing metropolises with hopes of participating in the ongoing national economic miracle that was producing new fortunes seemingly every day. Bringing together fiction and documentary work, Small Town, Big Dreams offers a variety of cinematic perspectives on this historical period of migration and dislocation, and all the hope, disillusion, discovery, and loss that came along with it.
Series Includes:
Kaili Blues - Suburban Birds - Three Sisters - Winter Vacation
Dream With Your Eyes Open
Opens May 3
“When the cinema lights go down,” Rainer Werner Fassbinder once said, “the dream begins and the subconscious takes over.” He is hardly the first or last figure to make the connection between dreaming and filmgoing—two activities involving the experience of vivid but unreal images that occur in the dark—and in Dream with Your Eyes Open, we explore works in which filmmakers have translated the illogic and illumination of what the mind produces during the sleep of reason, and the exhilaration that can come from travelling to another place or reality. Featuring reveries from the formidable minds of Akira Kurosawa, Richard Linklater, Satoshi Kon, and more. Pinch yourself—it’s the real thing.
Series Includes:
3 Women - Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams - The Holy Mountain
Lost Highway - Mirror - Orpheus
Paprika - Three Crowns of the Sailor - Tropical Malady - Waking Life
AGGRO DR1FT
Opens MAY 10
The first indefinable object to emerge from Korine’s shrouded-in-mystery EDGLRD collective, the simmeringly psychedelic AGGRO DR1FT—entirely shot in infrared, through thermal lenses—is a vibe-soaked odyssey following a supremely gifted-but-tormented assassin (Jordi Mollà) as he embarks on a mission to take down a Miami crime syndicate whose members include rapper Travis Scott.
Piping Hot Pfeiffer
Opens 10
“She’s so crystalline in her beauty,” Pauline Kael wrote of Michelle Pfeiffer in 1989, “that people may not recognize what a talented actress she is.” In fact, by the late ’80s, Pfeiffer had already begun pulling in heaps of industry plaudits, and 35 years on it’s hard to argue that she’s been “slept on,” but the sheer breadth of her superlative cinematic output is still worth marveling over—as this showcase proves. From her breakout role in Brian De Palma’s Scarface to her late ’80s/early ’90s golden age, encompassing roles in Dangerous Liaisons, Married to the Mob, The Age of Innocence, and beyond, a focus on a screen actress of startling range, actorly intelligence, and coiled force.
Series Includes:
The Age of Innocence - Batman Returns - Dangerous Liaisons
The Fabulous Baker Boys - Frankie and Johnny - Married to the Mob
Scarface - The Witches of Eastwick
Modern Families
opens May 10
Six queer adolescents keeping house together; a couple of left-wing anarchists committed to raising their children “off the grid”; a makeshift Tokyo family who make a living from petty theft; a lesbian couple raising two teenagers together who become entangled with the kids’ anonymous sperm donor… These, and others, are the subjects of the films in Modern Families, a collection of films that, in the words of Shoplifters director Hirokazu Kore-eda, “explore what makes a family,” and explore the peculiarities, hurdles, and rewards that come along with a diversity of household setups, based on blood ties or otherwise.
Series Includes:
Captain Fantastic - Eat, Drink, Man, Woman - First Comes Love
The Kids are Alright - Shoplifters - So Pretty
Totally F***ed Up
American Landscapes: The Cinema of Kelly Reichardt
opens May 11
Since her second feature, 2006’s Old Joy, Miami-born Reichardt has staked a claim to the Pacific Northwest—Oregon in six films, with the Montana of Certain Women an outlier—that has made her name as synonymous with the region as, say, Faulkner’s is with Mississippi. The attention she pays to the specific cadences and rituals of life in the Northwest, from the Portland of Showing Up to the thinly populated southern Oregon in Night Moves, is matched by her exhaustive engagement in every aspect of her films, from screenwriting—frequently in collaboration with Jonathan Raymond—to editing, which she will discuss in depth in a panel presented by American Cinema Editors (ACE) as part of this full retrospective of her eight features to date, a chance to review the filmography of a confirmed regionalist whose particular genius has taken her far beyond the boundaries of her chosen home.
Presented with intros and Q&As from Kelly Reichardt on May 11, May 18, and May 24.
Series Includes:
Certain Women - First Cow - Meek’s Cutoff
Night Moves - Old Joy - River of Grass
Showing Up - Wendy and Lucy
Mother’s Day at Metrograph
May 12
Celebrate Mother’s Day with the master of maternal melodrama, Pedro Almodóvar, and one of his finest, funniest, and most deeply felt tributes to motherhood, 2006’s Volver. The film explores the boundless lengths to which a mother—in this case, an extraordinarily committed Penélope Cruz—will go to protect a child, as well as the ways that intergenerational trauma can linger and complicate the trails and tribulations of maternity, as Cruz reconnects with her own mother (the great Carmen Maura). Since all of that sacrifice can make a gal thirsty, bring mom to the movies and get a ticket for a free mimosa on the house at our upstairs Commissary.
Series Includes:
Volver
Kim Ki-young x2
opens May 17
Kim Ki-young was one of the trailblazers of South Korean cinema’s postwar golden age, and has been cited as an influence by Park Chan-wook, Kim Ki-duk, and Bong Joon-ho, who called the elder Kim his favorite director. Struggling against the strictures of state censorship, Kim turned out a series of feverish films mixing elements of melodrama, horror, and film noir. His daring dissections of the domestic, social, and sexual pathologies of his native land began with his first popular hit, 1960’s The Housemaid, and ended with his final provocation, 1995’s An Experience to Die For, seen by audiences only after its director’s premature death in 1998. Metrograph screens both of these “bookend” works, the latter the last of Kim’s three collaborations with grande dame Youn Yuh-jung, winner of an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her work in 2020’s Minari.
Series Includes:
An Experience to Die For - The Housemaid
Chris Marker’s Le Dépays
opens May 25
To mark the publication of the first English-language edition of Chris Marker’s 1982 photo-essay Le Dépays by Film Desk Books, Metrograph offers a program of films that touch on some of the director’s recurring obsessions, as evidenced in this remarkable volume. A program of short films explore some of his favorite animal avatars (Cat Listening to Music, An Owl is an Owl is an Owl), and his profound connection to Japan (The Koumiko Mystery, Sans Soleil, Tokyo Days), followed by a panel discussion with Paul Chan and Lynne Sachs, moderated by Sadie Starnes, while A.K., Marker’s portrait of Akira Kurosawa on the set of Ran (1985), screens in a very special double bill.
“Inventing Japan is just another way of getting to know it. Once you’ve gotten beyond the clichés, once you’ve outwitted the cliché of cutting through the clichés, then the chances are mathematically the same for all, and consider the time you’ve saved! Trust appearances, consciously confuse the décor with the drama, never worry about understanding, just be there—dasein—and everything will come your way. Well, something, at least.”—Marker, in Le Dépays
With intros and Q&As from series curator Sadie Starnes, artist and writer Paul Chan, filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs, and writer Ethan Spigland.
Series Includes:
A.K. - Chris Marker Shorts - Kashima Paradise
Ran - Sans Soleil
The Whittney Review Salon: Women’s Work
May 25
Editor and writer Whitney Mallett joins Metrograph after the launch of the third issue of The Whitney Review of New Writing to present the New York premiere of Mara Mckevitt's electric parable of professional power struggle, Val, followed by a salon-inspired talkback with Mckevitt and actor Emily Allan.
Making its New York theatrical premiere, Mckevitt’s Val presents a gripping study in the shifting power between two women—employer and employee—that takes place during one stifling afternoon at the office, lensed by the formidable Sean Price Williams. Screens with Miranda July’s The Amateurist, a squirm-inducing surveillance culture tragicomedy in which one woman observes and describes the onscreen actions of another (both played by the director).
Post-screening salon featuring Whitney Mallett, Mara Mckevitt, and Emily Allan on Saturday, May 25th
Samsara
opens May 31
An immersive, absorbing, and wildly original journey of death and rebirth, Patiño’s film begins in Laos, observing the lives of a young man, the local monks he befriends, and an elderly woman at the end of her life, then picks up after the woman’s death with the birth and nurturing of a goat kid on the coastline of Zanzibar. In between these sections lies a passage through the unknown, accompanied by a dense sonic collage and the play of color and light, that makes for a depiction of the afterlife—or, rather, the space between lives—that’s entirely without precedent. “Part film, part guided meditation, it’s unlike anything else you will experience in the cinema.”—The Guardian
Visionary Auteurs: Five Decades of mk2
Opens May 31
Founded in 1974 by Bucharest-born Marin Karmitz, mk2 has through its 50 years been involved in the production, distribution, and exhibition of films by a line-up of directors that reads like a who’s who of French and international cinema, including Jean-Luc Godard, Justine Triet, Agnès Varda, François Truffaut, Michael Haneke, Abbas Kiarostami, Claire Denis, Céline Sciamma, and too many others to name. To mark the company’s half century as an independent, family-run titan of cinema, we’re screening a long list of titles from their vast catalog, including the Karmitz-directed 1972 documentary Blow by Blow, as well as welcoming actress and director Lubna Playoust to screen her very contemporary state-of-cinema address, Room 999, made four decades later in response to Wim Wenders’s 1982 cine-interrogation, Room 666.
Series Includes:
A Season in France - The Apple - Ash is Purest White - Au Revoir Les Enfants
Blow for Blow - Le Bonheur - La Cérémonie - Certified Copy
Chocolat - Code Unknown - Every Man for Himself - Hotel du Nord
Laurence Anyways - Mélo - The Oak - Paranoid Park
Portrait of a Lady on Fire - Room 999 - Shoot the Piano Player - Sibyl
Three Colors: Blue - Twentynine Palms - Woman is the Future of Man