August In Theater
AUGUST IN THEATER
Back to School With Kirsten Dunst
opens August 4
Summer break may be over, but we’ve got one sure-fire way to take the sting away: a celebration of Kirsten Dunst in the high heady heyday of her teen queen years, including the awestriking 1999-2000 run of Drop Dead Gorgeous, The Virgin Suicides, and Bring It On. From the languid atmospherics of Sofia Coppola’s feature debut to pom-pom shaking choreography in Peyton Reed’s classic cheerleading comedy, Dunst was the cool girl who could do it all—so join us in saluting the teenager par excellence of the fin-de-millennium.
Series Includes:
All I Wanna Do - Bring It On - Dick
Drop Dead Gorgeous - The Virgin Suicides
Jean Grémillon x2
opens August 4
After an early initiation in documentary, Grémillon produced his first fiction feature in 1928, and for the following two decades was one of the most formidable French filmmakers working, best remembered for the expressionistically shot poetic realist melodramas he produced immediately before and during the German Occupation. This duet of restored Grémillon films, 1937’s Lady Killer and 1938’s The Strange Mister Victor, are a gateway to the director’s peak period, and an ideal introduction to a fervid and lyrical cinematic imagination.
Series Includes:
Lady Killer - The Strange Mister Victor
Straub-Huillet: Pillars
OPENS August 4
Across their life, the husband-and-wife filmmaking duo Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet generated a politically and aesthetically provocative body of work, which, in toto, suggests nothing less than a desire to reinvent the art of motion pictures from scratch. Restlessly resourceful, the pair made over 40 films during their half-century collaboration, many based on extant literary sources. We’ve collected here some of their supreme achievements, including Moses and Aaron, an awesomely austere adaptation of innovative Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg’s unfinished opera of the same title, and Class Relations, Straub and Huillet’s nightmare-vivid adaptation of Franz Kafka’s incomplete novel Amerika.
Series Includes:
Class Relations - From the Cloud to the Resistance
Moses and Aaron - Too Early, Too Late
The Color of Black and White
OPENS August 11
Black-and-white photography ceased to be the cinematic standard in most of the world sometime during the 1960s, but filmmakers have been periodically rediscovering the charms of monochrome cinematography ever since. On the occasion of Kino Lorber’s 10th anniversary re-release of Andrew Bujalski’s lo-fi video-shot comedy Computer Chess, we’re showcasing the surprising mini-boom in black and white that occurred around the time of its release, screening grayscale greats from Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha), Ana Lily Amirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night), Alexander Payne (Nebraska), Paweł Pawlikowski (Ida), and other film artists who helped audiences appreciate the austere and sensual pleasures of black and white.
Series Includes:
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night - The Artist
Blancanieves - Computer Chess - Frances Ha
Frankenweenie - Ida - Nebraska
past lives
opens August 11
Nora and Hae Sung, close childhood friends in Seoul, see their bond broken when Nora’s family emigrated from South Korea to Canada. After two decades of separation and sporadic meet-ups, they’re reunited in New York as adults (Greta Lee and Teo Yoo) for one fateful week, together confronting questions about destiny, love, fate, regret, and the irrevocable choices that shape a life in playwright Song’s tender, intimate feature debut. “Song draws you into her characters’ worlds seamlessly… In a sense it’s a time-travel movie, because even as the two characters keep moving forward, they remain inexorably tethered to the past, which means it’s also a story about everyday life.”—Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
An A24 release.
F. Gary Gray in Action
opens August 11
After making his name as an in-demand music video director for acts including Outkast, Dr. Dre, TLC, and Ice Cube, New York City native Felix Gary Gray made the leap to feature filmmaking. Since then, the knack for action that was already evident in Gray’s earliest work has found expression in a host of lean, efficient genre films. We’ll be screening a selection of Gray’s crackling crime capers, including femme stick-up stunner Set It Off, his turbocharged remake of 1969’s The Italian Job, vigilante white-knuckler Law Abiding Citizen, record industry satire (and Elmore Leonard adaptation) Be Cool, and hip hop biopic Straight Outta Compton. Sit back, strap in, and prepare to get knocked the fuck out.
Series Includes:
Be Cool- Alien- The Italian Job
Law Abiding Citizen - Set It Off
Straight Outta Compton
Focus on Sudanese Film Group
Opens AUGUST 12
The foundation of the Sudanese Film Group (SFG) by Eltayeb Mahdi, Ibrahim Shaddad, and Suliman Elnour in April of 1989 was the climax of a period of creative ferment that had been underway in Sudanese filmmaking since the late ’70s, when these three men began producing formally innovative and slyly subversive short films under state sponsorship. Staff at the Ministry of Culture’s cinema department, they formed the SFG, aspiring to artistic independence from government strictures—but their freedom was short-lived, ended by Omar al-Bashir’s military coup in June and subsequent theocratic rulership. Digitally restored in 2018, this too-brief surge in Sudanese cinema can now be discovered in all its glory by a new generation.
Series Includes:
Talking About Trees - Short Films by Sudanese Film Group
Christian Slater: Outsider
Opens August 18
Of all the stars to emerge amidst the federally mandated optimism of the “Just Say No” Reagan-Bush years, there was only one who consistently registered an understanding that all of this pastel preppie stuff… actually totally sucked. Christian Slater, born and raised in New York City, was the archetypal troublemaker in all black who smoked cigarettes in the parking lot after high school when he wasn’t in detention, a born anti-authoritarian who girls swooned over and guys modeled their hair after—and we’re bringing back the best of his bad boys in a selection of films that find him generally stirring up mischief. To paraphrase Patricia Arquette in True Romance: “He’s so cool, he’s so cool…”
Series Includes:
Gleaming the Cube - Heathers
Pump Up the Volume - True Romance
Saturday Afternoon Cartoons: Cool for School
August 19
Curator Tommy José Stathes joins Metrograph in the middle of August with Cool For School, a selection of vintage cartoon films that encapsulate the upcoming back-to-school season. Come enjoy silly classroom shenanigans, neurotic school teachers, clever kid delinquents, and other assorted scholarly trials and tribulations. Spanning the 1910s through the ’50s, this assortment showcases classic characters such as Farmer Al Falfa, Bobby Bumps, Flip the Frog, Porky Pig, Baby Huey, Little Lulu, and others.
Metrograph Selects: Kaila Hier
Opens august 25
Select films, chosen specially by Metrograph staff. For the latest iteration of our recurring series, Metrograph Publicist staff Kaila Hier picks three of her personal favorites.
“While every movie is its own little surprise, each of these films are connected to a lasting memory of unexpected delight from when I first discovered them, and they’ve persisted as some of my most watched films over the years. Tonally, they couldn’t be more different—a hardboiled noir set in a high school, a modern-day kaiju movie as much about toxic masculinity as it is monsters, and a faux behind-the-scenes look at a wacky dog show (my first Christopher Guest, no less!)—but through each of them I saw and continue to see a bold form of genre-bending and intuitive filmmaking that makes diving into the wild world of cinema so exciting.”—Kaila Hier
Series Includes:
Best In Show - Brick - Colossal
Fassbinder Serials
Opens August 25
A dervish of creative activity, in-between making films for the cinema Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a genius at extracting funding from West Germany’s various regional public broadcasting stations. Not only did this result in a bushel of telefilms, but extraordinary ventures into the serial form, including the two-part World on a Wire, and the five episodes of Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day. Even when making work for small-screen broadcast, Fassbinder’s vision was never less than capaciously cinematic—so leave the boob tube at home and see the only real “Must See TV” writ large.
Series Includes:
Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day: Episode 1
Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day: Episodes 2 +3
Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day: Episodes 4 + 5
Carpet Cowboys
opens August 25
The psychedelic carpets lining our hotel hallways, casinos, and convention centers can be traced to one town: Dalton, Georgia, the “Carpet Capital of the World.” In this bastion of American manufacturing, we find an interwoven set of locals who are the unsung creators and developers behind the majority of the country’s carpets, always looking at the ground for their next big break.
Among them is Roderick James, a Scottish expat and freelance textile designer living his life as a modern-day cowboy with an ambitious slew of eclectic business ventures. Through Rod’s journey chasing after The American Dream and the experiences of his peers in Dalton, Carpet Cowboys explores the tensions between personal and national identity, and the rapidly changing global economic model of the United States that too often leaves so many behind.
Where does the myth of American identity begin and where does it end, and who ultimately gets to cash in?
A MEMORY release.
Co-directors Emily MacKenzie and Noah Collier and Executive Producer John Wilson in attendance for select screenings.