Coming in December
COMING IN DECEMBER
MASUMURA X 5
DEC 3 - 9
Before the Japanese New Wave, there was Yasuzô Masumura—a father of Japanese cinematic modernism, an early hero to Nagisa Ōshima, and a merciless observer of contemporary society. After learning his craft at Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and acting as assistant to canonical Japanese directors Kenji Mizoguchi and Kon Ichikawa, Masumura embarked on a furiously prolific career at Daiei studios, where his output included barbed, subversive corporate sabotage satires (Giants and Toys, Black Test Car), smoldering smorgasbords of perversity (Blind Beast), and fantasias of female vengeance (Irezumi). A voice of liberation in society he viewed as dangerously repressed, Masumura would say: “There is a secret song that lies unvoiced in the heart of every Japanese that I want to express in my films with a boisterous, even lunatic cry.”
At Home & In Theater
irezumi
DIRECTED BY YASUZÔ MASUMURA
Irezumi stars a sinister and seductive Ayako Wakao as a young woman sold into geisha house servitude, marked for life by a spider tattoo that awakens in her an unquenchable desire to destroy the men who have wronged her.
At Home & In Theater
BLACK TEST CAR
DIRECTED BY YASUZÔ MASUMURA
A scorched earth corporate war between the Tiger Motorcar Company and the Yamato Company, who will both employ any means necessary—spies, blackmail, sabotage, and more!—to beat each other in getting their new sports car models to market.
At Home & In Theater
BLIND BEAST
DIRECTED BY YASUZÔ MASUMURA
Blind sculptor Michio (Eiji Funakoshi), whose studio is a temple devoted to outsize female anatomy, kidnaps Aki (Mako Midori), a model for SM photographs, so that she may act as his captive muse while he pursues his dream of a new form of art that serves touch rather than sight.
At Home & In Theater
THE BLACK REPORT
DIRECTED BY YASUZÔ MASUMURA
The Black Report traces an investigation into the murder of the president of Fujiyama Foods, and subsequent trial, revealing a viper’s nest of underhanded allegiances and malicious motives beneath the surface of society.
At Home & In Theater
GIANTS AND TOYS
DIRECTED BY YASUZÔ MASUMURA
A glaringly gaudy satire of a ’50s Japan dominated by a ruthless new corporate culture, capitalist excess, and the figure of the suicidally overworked salaryman, Giants and Toys takes place in the battlefield of business, where three candy manufacturers vie to corner the caramel market through any-means-necessary snares and traps.
SORRENTINO X 4 CO-PRESENTED WITH NETFLIX
DEC 2 - 6
The youthful exuberance and anguish of Paolo Sorrentino’s latest, The Hand of God—set in the world of his childhood, 1980s Naples—may come as a surprise to viewers familiar with the Italian filmmaker’s celebrated body of work. Perhaps best known to American audiences for his series The New Pope, Sorrentino has made himself at home in the corridors of power, from the Vatican to the Italian Chamber of Deputies—an observer of the creeping corruption and of the pathologies of middle age that often accompany the acquisition of influence. But what unites Sorrentino’s filmography, including The Hand of God, is his lavish visual imagination—a voluptuary taste for beauty tinged with regret and an appetite for the comically surreal. To mark the arrival of his new movie on Netflix, we present a program of four of Sorrentino’s finest outsized ruminations on “success” and excess, movies so big that they threaten to spill off the screen.
In Theater
Il Divo
DIRECTED BY PAOLO SORRENTINO
Sorrentino favorite Toni Servillo, in a mordantly funny and often deadpan performance, stars as Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti.
In Theater
The Great Beauty
DIRECTED BY PAOLO SORRENTINO
A carnivalesque Roman social whirl in Sorrentino’s international arthouse phenomenon, the winner of Best Foreign Film at the 86th Academy Awards.
In Theater
Youth
DIRECTED BY PAOLO SORRENTINO
On holiday at a spa in the Swiss Alps, lifelong friends Fred (Michael Caine), a classical composer, and Mick (Harvey Keitel), a film director, find themselves with the dubious privilege of leisure time in which to sift through fading memories.
In Theater
Loro
DIRECTED BY PAOLO SORRENTINO
It was perhaps inevitable that Sorrentino, an Italian maximalist of the first order, would eventually address himself to the well-documented excesses of media baron and politician Silvio Berlusconi.
Luke Fowler Series
DEC 4 - 19
A program of films by Luke Fowler, an artist, filmmaker, and musician based in Glasgow whose work explores the limits and conventions of biographical and documentary filmmaking, and has often been compared to the British Free Cinema of the 1950s. Includes Fowler’s 2011 feature All Divided Selves, a chronicling of the life of guru-like Glaswegian psychiatrist R.D. Laing, and a broad selection of Fowler's wide-ranging works created for cinema and gallery.
In Theater
Electro Pythagoras (a portrait of Martin Bartlett) + Country Grammar (with Sue Tompkins)
DIRECTED BY LUKE FOWLER
A pair of tributes to musicians, one paying homage to unduly obscure composer Bartlett, and the other documenting a performance by Tompkins, frontwoman of Life Without Buildings.
In Theater
To the Editor of Amateur Photographer
DIRECTED BY LUKE FOWLER
Fowler and collaborator Mark Fell utilize archival documents and personal testimonials to give an account of the history of Pavilion, a Leeds-based feminist photography center formed in 1983 with the mission of representing and encouraging the production of women’s photography.
In Theater
The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper, and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott
DIRECTED BY LUKE FOWLER
Fowler’s collaboration with Peter Hutton and George Clark looks at the life and work of Marxist historian Edward Palmer Thompson, employed beginning in 1946 by the Workers’ Education Association (WEA) to teach adult education classes in West Riding’s industrial towns.
In Theater
The Way Out + Pilgrimage from Scattered Points
DIRECTED BY LUKE FOWLER
Two films about brazenly unorthodox musical outsiders. The Way Out about Xentos “Fray Bentos” Jones, a founding member of post-punk act The Homosexuals. Pilgrimage from Scattered Points describes the operations of Cornelius Cardew and The Scratch Orchestra, a patchwork community of professional composers and amateur musicians from all walks of life.
In Theater
What You See is Where You’re At + Bogman Palmjaguar
DIRECTED BY LUKE FOWLER
In What You See is Where You’re At, Fowler uses found sound and film footage to revisit the legacy of the 1965-69 Kingsley Hall experiment, initiated by Glasgow-born psychiatrist R.D. Laing. With Bogman Palmjaguar, he gives a portrait of the titular hermit outlaw.
In Theater
ALL DIVIDED SELVES
DIRECTED BY LUKE FOWLER
Fowler recounts the life and legend of Glasgow-born psychiatrist-cum-guru R.D. Laing whose influential 1967 book The Politics of Experience questioned the traditional categorization of the “mentally ill.”
COMING SOON
In Theater
A Grammar for Listening (Parts 1-3)
DIRECTED BY LUKE FOWLER
Always an unusually acoustically minded filmmaker, Fowler investigates the complicated relationship between looking and listening in this three-part film cycle, made in collaboration with composer Éric La Casa, musician Toshiya Tsunoda, and sound artist Lee Patterson.
COMING SOON
In Theater
Houses (For Margaret) + Cézanne + ENCEINDRE + George + Mum’s Cards + Patrick
DIRECTED BY LUKE FOWLER
A program of Fowler’s portraits of places, including several reflecting absent human subjects
COMING SOON
LYNNE SACHS
DEC 10 - 12
Since bursting onto the filmmaking scene in the 1980s, Memphis-born Lynne Sachs has compiled an inimitable, astonishing body of work which includes essay films, diaristic shorts, gallery installations, and quite a number of simply uncategorizable hybrids. Sachs’s wide-ranging, restless ingenuity is on full display in this program, which includes her 2020 documentary portrait A Film About a Father Who; The Washing Society, her collaboration with playwright Lizzie Olesker, which premiered in 2015 at a Clinton Hill laundromat; and this year’s E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo, a ruminative, surprising response to the January 6th Capitol Hill riots. A blast of engaging, and engaged, cinema.
In Theater
Film About a Father Who
DIRECTED BY LYNNE SACHS
Made up of footage shot by Sachs between 1984 and very nearly the present day, the film represents her endeavor to better understand the outsized personality and myriad affairs of her father.
In Theater
The Washing Society + Clotheslines
DIRECTED BY LYNNE SACHS AND ROBERTA CANTOW
The Washing Society pays lyric homage to the little-acknowledged but essential labor of dealing with dirty laundry, screening with Roberta Cantow’s feminist forebear Clotheslines, a film that takes laundry seriously as a form of folk art.
In Theater
Lynne Sachs Shorts
DIRECTED BY LYNNE SACHS
Four shorts exemplifying the breadth and tireless curiosity of Sachs’s film practice, as well as an ongoing engagement with issues of justice and resistance.
LOST HISTORIES
DEC 10 - 16
Accompanying Metrograph’s run of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Last and First Men, which evokes a stark vision of the future via monumental structures erected in the former Republic of Yugoslavia, we’re presenting a program of puzzling, provocative films in which past, present, and future are inextricably intertwined, and sometimes indistinguishable from one another. Featuring the SoCal pop apocalypse of Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, Possession director Andrzej Żuławski’s embattled Polish epic On the Silver Globe, and other visions from pasts still to come and futures already in ruins.
In Theater & At Home
LAST AND FIRST MEN
DIRECTED BY JÓHANN JÓHANNSSON
Two billion years in the future, humanity finds itself on the verge of extinction. Almost all that remains are lone, surreal monuments—the futuristic, solemn, Brutalist stone slabs erected during the communist era in the former Yugoslav republics, arrestingly photographed in luminous 16mm black-and-white. A stunning feature debut and final cinematic testament from the late composer and musician Jóhann Jóhannsson (Sicario, Arrival, Mandy) conjures a world of surreal and phantasmagorical monuments, once intended as symbols of unity and brotherhood, now abandoned beacons beaming their message into the wilderness. Based on the cult 1930 science fiction novel by British author Olaf Stapledon, with narration by Tilda Swinton, Last and First Men is a poetic, hopeful, and tragic work: an allegory of remembrance, ideals, and the death of Utopia.
A Metrograph Pictures release
In Theater
ON THE SILVER GLOBE
DIRECTED BY ANDRZEJ ŻUŁAWSKI
Begun in 1976 as the most ambitious production in the history of Polish cinema, shut down the following year by the Ministry of Culture, and completed by Żuławski after spending over a decade in exile, the cursed On the Silver Globe is a blessing to fans of far-out cinema.
In Theater
Southland Tales
DIRECTED BY RICHARD KELLY
Kelly followed up sleeper hit Donnie Darko with this vision of pop apocalypse which, while widely booed on initial release, has proven just as tenacious a cult property over time, eerily prescient of contemporary American surreality.
In Theater
Homo Sapiens
DIRECTED BY NIKOLAUS GEYRHALTER
Geyrhalter’s eerie, mysterious, magisterial film, entirely bereft of human presence, offers us a vision of the planet after humanity’s lease has expired.
COMING SOON
In Theater
INAATE/SE
DIRECTED BY ADAM KHALIL AND ZACK KHALIL
The Seven Fires Prophecy, an ancient story of the Indigenous Ojibway people of Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that predicted the despoilation of the earth by European colonizers, provides the basis of the Khalil brothers’ feature debut.
In Theater
Wild Relatives + Flores
DIRECTED BY JUMANA MANNA AND JORGE JÁCOME
Manna’s second feature documents the process whereby an international agricultural research center, forced by the Syrian civil war to flee Aleppo for Lebanon, begin to rebuild using back-ups from Svalbard. Screens with Flores, Jácome’s sumptuous pseudo-documentary post-eco-apocalypse sci-fi romance, set against a backdrop of the hydrangea-drenched Azores.
THE RUSSIANS LOVE THEIR CHILDREN TOO
Kon Trubkovich Selects
CO-PRESENTED WITH GAGOSIAN
DEC 10 - 19
Gagosian artist Kon Trubkovich, raised in Moscow until the age of eleven, draws extensively on personal and collective memory in his multi-hyphenate practice. Appropriately, for the program he has curated for Metrograph, Trubkovich brings together a collection of films that offer a multiplicity of recollected reflections on Russia, some whose relevance may be self-evident (Sergei Loznitsa’s Stalin send-off State Funeral), others, less so (Richard Donner’s The Goonies?).
In Theater
TAXI BLUES
DIRECTED BY PAVEL LUNGIN
“I saw this movie when I was in my twenties. It’s about a Jewish saxophonist who meets a very Russian, very anti-Semitic taxi driver, and it turns into a demented buddy movie."—Kon Trubkovich
In Theater
The Goonies
DIRECTED BY RICHARD DONNER
“It’s very personal to me because it was the first American children’s movie that I saw in Russia, and I was obsessed with it as a kid, I would watch this movie dubbed in Russian every day after I got home from school."—Kon Trubkovich
In Theater
The Color of Pomegranates
DIRECTED BY SERGEI PARAJANOV
“One of the greatest works of art in film, in my opinion. It’s almost entirely without dialogue—a painting in motion, essentially—and it’s so hard to talk about it because really it is a visual experience."—Kon Trubkovich
In Theater
Mirror
DIRECTED BY ANDREI TARKOVSKY
“Mirror comes closer than any movie I’ve ever seen to understanding and depicting what it means to recollect something, to really recount your own childhood and the feeling of things around you from a child’s perspective."—Kon Trubkovich
In Theater
Wings of Desire
DIRECTED BY WIM WENDERS
“Wings of Desire is just a really, really beautiful film. I picked it because—and you can sense it in the film—it’s a kind of allegory for reunification of Germany."—Kon Trubkovich
In Theater
The Needle
DIRECTED BY RASHID NUGMANOV
“It’s about a guy whose girlfriend gets hooked on heroin, and he goes to save her from this grip of addiction and this evil dealer who is operating in a decrepit Moscow. It’s a weird, simple plot but a very surreal movie."—Kon Trubkovich
COMING SOON
In Theater
Brother
DIRECTED BY ALEKSEI BALABANOV
“I saw Brother probably when it came out, on a DVD or something, in the late 1990s. Bodrov, the lead, became a kind of archetype for kids my age or a little bit older. He became a cult figure after he died in a mud avalanche."—Kon Trubkovich
COMING SOON
In Theater
The Event
DIRECTED BY SERGEI LOZNITSA
“The title alludes to the event that was the 1991 putsch. As in Maidan, you have a similar trajectory, this crescendoing momentum of people into the political sphere where they ultimately overwhelm the system, though The Event is almost entirely found footage."—Kon Trubkovich
COMING SOON
In Theater
Maidan
DIRECTED BY SERGEI LOZNITSA
“Loznitsa’s work is really important to my personal work, and to what I’ve been thinking about in terms of my paintings. The three films I chose deal with these overlapping themes of the rebellion against the state, or the state rebelling against itself, the philosophy of crowds, and the very specific nuance that takes form in Russia."—Kon Trubkovich
COMING SOON
In Theater
STATE FUNERAL
DIRECTED BY SERGEI LOZNITSA
“Sergei’s new movie is about the funeral of Stalin, a bizarre event in Russian history, where you had essentially a traumatized nation, after years and years of purges, having a kind of Stockholm syndrome funeral that went on for days and days and days."—Kon Trubkovich
COMING SOON
SATURDAY AFTERNOON CARTOONS
DEC 11
At Home & In Theater
SATURDAY AFTERNOON CARTOONS
DIRECTED BY VARIOUS DIRS
Archivist, historian, and distributor Tommy José Stathes joins us for two unique wintry programs of rare prints of early animated films from his collection. These back-to-back screenings feature two different sets of fun and surreal Christmas holiday films, all created in the 1930s through the 1950s. In addition to strange snowy scenarios, silly tree trimming parties, a couple of sing-alongs, and Christmas morning gift-giving follies, there will be a few familiar faces like Popeye, Grampy, Scrappy, Frosty, Santa and his elves, and even Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer!
SEAN DURKIN X 2
DEC 11
Durkin’s feature debut, Martha Marcy May Marlene, was one of the most distinctive and disturbing American independents of the last decade, the showcase for a breakout performance from star Elizabeth Olsen, playing the troubled survivor of a Catskill Mountains cult. No less accomplished (and unsettling) was his recent follow-up, The Nest, a tale of ‘80s nouveau riche imposture, marital breakdown, and slowly surfacing family secrets, featuring a never-better Jude Law and Carrie Coon. Put side by side, these films show a filmmaker remarkably attuned to nuances of performance and to dog whistle registers of disquietude, a master of the contemporary psychological thriller.
In Theater
Martha Marcy May Marlene
DIRECTED BY SEAN DURKIN
Q&A with director Sean Durkin and Elizabeth Olsen
A Sundance phenom and the breakout role of a revelatory Elizabeth Olsen, Durkin’s feature debut is a keen, sensitive study in the psychology of cult induction and the trauma of its aftermath.
In Theater
THE NEST
DIRECTED BY SEAN DURKIN
Intro by director Sean Durkin
Playing a crass nouveau riche show-off with a too-wide smile that’s a brittle front for mounting anxieties, Jude Law has never been better than in Durkin’s ’80s-set The Nest, which begins with Law’s British poor-boy-made-good welcoming the American family that he has acquired during his stay on Wall Street—including wife Carrie Coon—to their new home, a sprawling, ostentatious Surrey mansion.
ALFREDA'S CINEMA PRESENTS
DEC 18
At Home and In Theater
KINDRED
DIRECTED BY VARIOUS DIRS
Alfreda's Cinema presents Kindred, a consideration of Black British Cinema through the lens of Black women from 2014-2021. Curator Melissa Lyde writes, "Cecile Emeke, Deborah Findlater, Jenn Nkiru, Ufuoma Essi, and Rabz Lansiquot and Imani Robinson (Languid Hands) have vivaciously carved out their own representation as British-born artists reframing Blackness and Black womanhood. Collectively, their films emanate a sensual aesthetic that doesn't ask for your permission to exist, to be either Black or a woman. These films are a jolt to the system because they remind us of our oneness as a people. It's with pride that we recall the last 10 years of short works from these innovative visual artists who have made a way out of no way, and who perpetually push the frame forward. Please join us for a new wave retrospective in Black British Cinema led by Black women, beginning with Deborah Findlater's She Can Eat Me Alive, Jenn Nkiru's Rebirth is Necessary, Languid Hands' Towards A Black Testimony, Cecile Emeke's herenowthenwhat and Ufuoma Essi's Bodies in Dissent."
COMING SOON
DANIEL SCHMIDT SELECTS
DEC 17 - 20
In Theater
The Brother from Another Planet
DIRECTED BY JOHN SAYLES
A mute, telepathic extraterrestrial runaway slave known as The Brother, who to all observers looks like an ordinary Black man, ventures into the streets of New York City, where he is confronted with a bevy of curious earthlings.
COMING SOON
In Theater
The Lake House
DIRECTED BY ALEJANDRO AGRESTI
Speed stars Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves reunite in this wrinkle in time epistolary romance.
COMING SOON
In Theater
Watermelon Man
DIRECTED BY MELVIN VAN PEEBLES
In a racially provocative twist on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, bigoted, boneheaded white suburbanite salesman Jeff Gerber (Black stand-up and actor Godfrey Cambridge, introduced in whiteface) wakes up one day to find himself looking in the mirror at a Black man.
COMING SOON
In Theater
Birth
DIRECTED BY JONATHAN GLAZER
At the moment Anna’s husband, Sean, dies while jogging in Central Park, a child is born. Ten years later, as Anna has just accepted a marriage proposal from boyfriend Joseph, that child slips into her apartment and informs her that he is Sean, returned.
COMING SOON
In Theater
It’s Always Fair Weather
DIRECTED BY GENE KELLY & STANLEY DONEN
Among the most colorful, energetic, and downright crazy of the golden-age MGM musicals produced by the Arthur Freed Unit, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s co-directorial follow-up to Singin’ in the Rain is an exuberantly funny, dance-filled comedy.
COMING SOON
In Theater
The Return of Martin Guerre
DIRECTED BY DANIEL VIGNE
Based on a documented case of alleged identity theft in 16th century France, Vigne’s historical drama stars Gérard Depardieu as “Martin Guerre,” a peasant who, after a decade of war and wandering, returns to his wife and home village in the southwest, only to in time be accused of and put on trial for imposture for having taken the place of the real Martin.
COMING SOON
At Home
THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTED
DIRECTED BY JEAN ROLLIN
His low-budget genre films were dismissed by contemporary French critics as “Rollinade,” but gradually Jean Rollin has been recognized as a stubbornly original creator of deeply personal films, and this is one of his finest. Beginning with the image of nude female fugitives fleeing across a landscape of bleak, impersonal high-rises, The Night of the Hunted revolves around an antiseptic clinic purportedly holding patients—including leading lady and Rollin favorite Brigitte Lahaie—in order to treat them for memory loss, though some suspect the doctors are pursuing more insidious ends. A profoundly mournful film in horror movie trappings, like Rollin’s The Living Dead Girl, concerned more with female friendship than jump scares. Come, drink the Rollinade.
COMING SOON
2 X Wachowski
DEC 17 - 25
Follow the Wachowskis from their early, scrappy years in steamy neo-noir to the height of their carte blanche, post-The Matrix big-budget extravagance, with late night screenings of their early lesbian romance thriller Bound and their delirious, turbocharged live-action anime adaptation Speed Racer—both films that underperformed at the box office on initial release, only to be ardently embraced later by a new generation of cinephiles. A wild, loop-the-loop ride from pulp to pop, united by the shared sibling vision of two unruly and utterly original imaginations.
In Theater
BOUND
DIRECTED BY THE WACHOWSKIS
Slinkily stylish, unabashedly sexy, sharp as a pair of garden shears, and packing more twists and turns than a handcuff knot, the Wachowskis’ neo-noir feature debut hums with the pure pleasure of movie-making virtuosity.
COMING SOON
In Theater
SPEED RACER
DIRECTED BY THE WACHOWSKIS
Adapting the internationally beloved ’60s anime and manga of the same name, the Wachowskis’ produced a mind-melting, overpowering kaleidoscopic futurist fantasia, a giddy folly of sugar high multiplex avant-gardism.
COMING SOON
JOHN M. STAHL
DEC 24 - 30
Some of the titles of John M. Stahl’s films—Imitation of Life, Magnificent Obsession—may be more familiar than Stahl’s name is, because they’re better known for the versions that Douglas Sirk made from the same source material in the 1950s. But years before Sirk emerged in Hollywood, Stahl was one of the undisputed masters of American melodrama, at the peak of his powers producing a remarkable string of films that includes transatlantic romantic tragedy Back Street, the wrenching Margaret Sullavan weepie Only Yesterday (a precursor to Letter from an Unknown Woman), and genuinely disturbing fanged female thriller Leave Her to Heaven. In a program of rare prints—including little-seen pre-Code drama Seed—and elevated emotions, come discover one of the hidden treasures of Golden Age Hollywood.
In Theater
Back Street
DIRECTED BY JOHN M. STAHL
The first, and indisputably, greatest of three screen adaptations of Fannie Hurst’s novel of the same name, with emotional depths and a pre-Code sexual candor absent from later versions.
COMING SOON
![Title: LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN ¥ Pers: TIERNEY, GENE ¥ Year: 1945 ¥ Dir: STAHL, JOHN M. ¥ Ref: LEA006AF ¥ Credit: [ THE KOBAL COLLECTION ]](https://metrograph.imgix.net/2021/12/leave-her-to-heaven.jpg?fm=pjpg&ixlib=php-3.3.1 "LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN")
In Theater
Leave Her to Heaven
DIRECTED BY JOHN M. STAHL
After spending much of the ’30s on narratives of self-sacrificing women, Stahl gave audiences a force of feminine vengeance to be reckoned with in the form of Gene Tierney’s wrathfully jealous Ellen Berent.
COMING SOON
In Theater
Only Yesterday
DIRECTED BY JOHN M. STAHL
Sourced from Stefan Zweig’s (uncredited) Letter from an Unknown Woman, Stahl’s film transfers the action from Vienna to New York City where, on the eve of the 1929 Crash, ruined and suicidal stockbroker Jim (John Boles) is recalled to an old affair by a letter.
COMING SOON
In Theater
Holy Matrimony
DIRECTED BY JOHN M. STAHL
Returning to his native England in 1905 to be knighted after a long tropical exile, publicity-averse painter Priam Farll (Monty Woolley) prankishly swaps identities with his recently deceased valet, Leek. Once having done so, Farll realizes that he’s powerless to put a stop to the masquerade.
COMING SOON
In Theater
Seed
DIRECTED BY JOHN M. STAHL
Would-be writer Bart (John Boles) has had his literary ambitions all but smothered by the duties of fatherhood when along comes old flame Mildred (Genevieve Tobin), who strokes his deflated ego and offers him a chance to finish his Great American Novel in her swanky art deco duplex, away from wife Peggy (Lois Wilson).
COMING SOON
In Theater
The Keys of the Kingdom
DIRECTED BY JOHN M. STAHL
Gregory Peck earned an early Academy Award nomination for his performance as Scottish-born Father Francis Chisholm, a Catholic missionary in remotest China who converts through compassion rather than bribery.
COMING SOON
In Theater
Magnificent Obsession
DIRECTED BY JOHN M. STAHL
Tragedy comes in twos to the life of Robert Merrick (Robert Taylor), a spoiled scion of wealth who is first indirectly responsible for the death of a famous surgeon, then for the blinding of the surgeon’s grieving widow, Helen (Irene Dunne).
COMING SOON
In Theater
When Tomorrow Comes
DIRECTED BY JOHN M. STAHL
A flirtation between posh concert pianist Philip (Charles Boyer) and working-class waitress Helen (Irene Dunne) turns serious when they’re caught in a hurricane on a driving date near his Long Island manse, but still greater storms lie ahead, for Philip had forgotten to mention the fact that he is unhappily married.
COMING SOON
In Theater
Imitation of Life
DIRECTED BY JOHN M. STAHL
Stahl’s films return time and again to the subject of female sacrifice, often treated with an intriguing ambivalence, and his adaptation of the Fannie Hurst bestseller adds the dimension of race to his great theme, depicting the symbiotic-but-lopsided relationship between entrepreneur Claudette Colbert and her Black business partner/housekeeper, Louise Beavers’ “Aunt” Delilah.
COMING SOON
Christmas
DEC 24 - 30
This holiday season, whether you’re looking for a Christmas Carol, New Year’s Eve gloom, or obsessive psychosexual odysseys, Metrograph has you covered with a slate of bizarro seasonal classics from the likes of Whit Stillman (Metropolitan), Paul Verhoeven (Elle), Stanley Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut), Paul Thomas Anderson (Phantom Thread), and Sean Baker (Tangerine). Much more fun than watching the yule log and hotter than a pot of Lapsang souchong tea—God bless us, everyone!
In Theater
ELLE
DIRECTED BY PAUL VERHOEVEN
Verhoeven’s seasonal celebration of aberrant psychology includes a tour de force performance by Huppert over Christmas dinner, in which she verbally decimates her mother, her ex-husband’s new girlfriend, her son, and her grandson (!), all before furtively fucking her business partner’s spouse.
COMING SOON
In Theater
Phantom Thread
DIRECTED BY PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON
One of the key scenes in Anderson’s evocation of the world of haute couture in postwar England takes place at a riotously colorful New Year’s Eve ball, but the film itself qualifies for inclusion in a holiday series by virtue of having the quality of a gift opening, with each scene unveiling new sensorial, sartorial pleasures.
COMING SOON
In Theater
Tangerine
DIRECTED BY SEAN BAKER
Taking place over a single day, Christmas Eve, and a few blocks, those along Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood, Baker’s dynamic, funny, iPhone-shot neo-screwball knockout finds a visual analogue for the vivacity and urgency radiated by its extraordinary dual leads.
COMING SOON
In Theater
Metropolitan
DIRECTED BY WHIT STILLMAN
Among the most iconic New York independent films of the ’90s, Metropolitan is an irresistible comedy of manners and a tour through an Upper East Side once decorated with teenage patrician debutantes and dandies.
COMING SOON
![TITLE: EYES WIDE SHUT DIGITAL IMAGES ONLY ¥ PERS: CRUISE, TOM / KIDMAN, NICOLE ¥ YEAR: 1999 ¥ DIR: KUBRICK, STANLEY ¥ REF: EYE024AB ¥ CREDIT: [ THE KOBAL COLLECTION / WARNER BROS ]](https://metrograph.imgix.net/2021/12/eyeswideshut-1600x900-c-default.jpg?fm=pjpg&ixlib=php-3.3.1 "EYES WIDE SHUT DIGITAL IMAGES ONLY")
In Theater
Eyes Wide Shut
DIRECTED BY STANLEY KUBRICK
Christmas lights take on a malevolent gleam in Kubrick’s final masterpiece. Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) hits the shivering streets of a dreamlike “Manhattan”—doubled for by London, with second-unit work in NYC courtesy of Arthur Jafa—after a pot-hazy domestic bust-up with wife Alice (Nicole Kidman).
COMING SOON