August IN THEATER 

Twisted Sister
Opens August 2

Critic and programmer Miriam Bale, in a 2012 issue of her short-lived but widely beloved journal Joan’s Digest, offered a shrewd study of a subgenre she termed “persona swap” cinema, these being defined as “psychological, supernatural” works concerned with the transference of personae between two women, films that “at their best illuminate very specific aspects of relationships between women.” Drawing on (and expanding from) Bale’s own canon, Twisted Sister showcases films by Jacques Rivette, Věra Chytilová, Catherine Breillat, Robert Aldrich, Ingmar Bergman, and others, for a program of magical mergers, malleable identities, and woman-centered films that investigate, in Bale’s words, “the complexities and conflicts of female friendship.”

Q&A with Petrol director Alena Lodkina August 24

Series Includes:

Céline and Julie Go Boating – Daisies – Duelle
Fat Girl – My Twentieth Century – Persona
The Silence – Sisters – Sweetie
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Shinji Sômai x 3
opens August 2

“I can say with absolute conviction that no Japanese filmmaker makes a film without being conscious of Shinji Sômai’s existence… [Sômai] convinced the Japanese audience at the time that ‘cinema is not dead yet.’… For anyone who wants to see a movie that has the power to change and sustain your life, I urge you to see Shinji Sômai’s films.”-Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

Shinji Sômai’s tragic death at age 53 in 2001 robbed Japanese cinema of one of its foremost talents, a poet of alienation, frustration, and youthful revolt whose 13 films show a distinct and compassionate perspective, likened by critic Chris Fujiwara to that of Jean Vigo and Nicholas Ray for his lyrical depictions of adolescence. Revered in his native country-where his admirers include Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and Hirokazu Kore-eda-but too-little-screened abroad, Sômai’s revelatory cinema can be experienced here with recent restorations of three of his greatest evocations of youth in all of its loneliness, rage, and beauty.

Series Includes:

Moving – P.P. Rider – Typhoon Club

Focus on James N. Kienitz Wilkins
opens August 2

Raised in Maine and currently based in New York City, where he studied at Cooper Union, Wilkins has carved out a body of moving image work that combines conceptual rigor, an unerring ability to locate the uncanny in the everyday, and a bone-dry wit. A downloadable PDF of a public hearing in Alleghany, New York; a mysterious videotape that becomes the center of a detective yarn; reflections on the history of the toxic Androscoggin River; or 35mm publicity stills scoured from movie studio press kits… in Wilkins’s able hands these things act as launching pads for freewheeling, rhizomatic meditations on the photographed image, representations of race, the history of Hollywood, and American life as lived under late capitalism. A curated selection of the work to date of an enormously original and utterly unclassifiable talent.

Appearances from director James N. Kienitz Wilkins August 2, 3, & 4

Series Includes:

Common Carrier – Indefinite Pitch Followed by This Action Lies
Mediums Preceded by Special Features – The Plagiarists
Still Film Preceded by Moon V. State

India Donaldson Selects
August 3

Accompanying Metrograph’s run of American writer-director India Donaldson’s lauded debut Good One, the filmmaker selects two films to share that influenced her anxious, haunting first feature: Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum and Julia Loktev’s The Loneliest Planet.

“Two films I soaked in and tried to extract some wisdom from before filming Good One. They are both gentle and patient, and have their own unique internal rhythms. They revel in subtlety and elevate the minutiae of small gestures and glances. I feel the affection the filmmakers have for their actors, and I share it.” -India Donaldson

Introductions from India Donaldson August 3

Good One
opens August 9

A standout success at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Donaldson’s piercing debut drama stars astonishing newcomer Lily Collias as 17-year-old Sam, forced to play mediator and peacemaker while on a three-day backpacking trip in the Catskills with her father (James Le Gros) and his oldest friend (Danny McCarthy), whose gently contentious back-and-forth threatens to reach a boiling point as their trek goes along. An exquisitely detailed and beautifully performed three-way character study describing the discoveries of youth, and the boundaries of experience that “announces the arrival of a wonderful new voice in writer-director India Donaldson.” (Harper’s Bazaar).

A Metrograph Pictures release.

Members Only preview screening Tuesday, August 6

Q&A with director India Donaldson and actors Lily Collias & Danny McCarthy August 9

Q&A with actor Lily Collias August 10

moving
Opens august 9

Blindsided by her parents’ divorce and her father’s disappearance from the family home, sixth grader Ren plunges headlong into rebellion, questioning and pushing back against an adult world whose authority she had previously taken for granted. An operatically emotional and psychologically acute portrait of adolescence that immerses one in the point of view of its young protagonist, played with unforgettable vivacity by young Tabata Tomoko, which has remained one of Sômai’s most beloved works since its premiere in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival, and sparkles still today thanks to a new restoration.

Bad Trips
opens August 16

A series of films in which the best-laid schemes for rest and relaxation turn traumatic, as a consolation prize for those of us stuck in the city for the summer. A canoeing trip in the backwoods of Georgia? A family holiday in Morocco? A daddy-daughter birthday trip to Busan? A country getaway to Lake Winnipesaukee? You can’t call AAA when you’re faced with rabid rednecks, cloak-and-dagger kidnappers, zombie epidemics, a gruelingly neurotic Bill Murray, or some of the other unexpected perils that might best be avoided by just putting the suitcases away and heading to the movies instead.

Series Includes:

Deliverance – The Man Who Knew Too Much – Save Yourselves!
Train to Busan – What About Bob?

In Concert
Opens August 16

An all-thriller, no-filler summer concert series without the astronomical ticket prices, sweaty stink, or bathroom lines, this series gives center stage to some of the rock world’s quintessential kooks, cranks, and one-offs, including two psychotic acts rockin’ a mental institution to its foundations (The Cramps and The Mutants: The Napa State Tapes), Lou Reed and John Cale giving a sublime send-off to Andy Warhol (Songs for Drella), and the gold standard of concert docs, recently restored to its original potency (Stop Making Sense). You might not have gotten to catch some of the above artists in their prime-or Richard Hell, or Tom Waits, also on the bill-but, thankfully, some superb filmmakers did.

Q&A with The Cramps and The Mutants: Napa State Tapes director Mike Plante August 16

Q&A with Songs for Drella director Ed Lachman August 24

Series Includes:

Big Time – Blank Generation – The Cramps and the Mutants: The Napa State Tapes
Downtown ’81 – Songs for Drella with Scenes of the Life of Warhol – Stop Making Sense

Also Starring… Carol Kane
August 17

A singular presence with her thick, golden corkscrew mane, wide silent screen star eyes, and unforgettable, warbling diction, Carol Kane, whose first film performances came when she was still a teenager, rose to prominence following her Academy Award-nominated lead role in Joan Micklin Silver’s 1975 Hester Street, and over her six decades onscreen, has been something close to a guarantor of quality in a film. Equally adept in comedy and drama, through the years Kane has shown a rare sense of good curatorial taste in choosing her roles, at home and abroad. This edition of our ongoing Also Starring… series showcases the deeply intelligent eclecticism of her extraordinary career, featuring Kane in L.E.S. melodramas, fantasy-flavored comedies, claustrophobic thrillers, and much else besides.

Carol Kane in conversation with New Yorker staff writer Naomi Fry August 17

Series Includes:

Carnal Knowledge – Hester Street – The Last Detail – The Mafu Cage
Office Killer – The Princess Bride – Scrooged – When a Stranger Calls

Anatomy of an Actor
Sandra Hüller in Five Films
opens August 23

After a breakout year in 2023 that included much-lauded turns in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest and Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning Anatomy of a Fall, Sandra Hüller isn’t only a cult property worshiped by arthouse goers for her crushing karaoke performance of “The Greatest Love of All” in Maren Ade’s 2016 Toni Erdmann, but also a César winner and Academy Award nominee widely acknowledged as one of the finest actors of her generation. This series tracks Hüller’s rise in five films, from her early role as an epileptic woman who believes herself to be possessed by the devil in Hans-Christian Schmid’s 2006 Requiem, to the mortifyingly funny watershed of Toni Erdmann, to her chillingly chipper turn in Maria Schrader’s 2021 sci-fi dramedy I’m Your Man, to the annus mirabilis of ’23. A catch-up with the formidable accomplishments of a performer who seems destined for still greater things ahead.

Series Includes:

Anatomy of a Fall – I’m Your Man – Requiem
Toni Erdmann – The Zone of Interest