COMING IN JANUARY
COMING IN JANUARY
SPECTACLES & SPIRITS
JAN 3 - 13
Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn is, among many other things, a eulogy to the popular film culture of its director’s youth, as represented by King Hu’s 1967 Dragon Inn aka Dragon Gate Inn, a watershed work in the wuxia genre and in the cinema of Taiwan. To accompany Metrograph’s re-release of Tsai’s yearning, lovely, quietly comic film, we present a program of some of the best high-flying, quick-striking, sword-swinging wuxia films—historical martial arts movies whose cultural presence in Greater China is roughly equivalent to that of the Western in the United States, or the samurai drama in Japan, in which heroes and quite a few heroines are found routinely defying the laws of gravity and all physical probability in the heat of righteous, bloodstained combat. A hot shot of pure adrenaline and fluttering cinematic euphoria, and the only real superhero movies that have ever been made.
At Home & In Theater
GOODBYE, DRAGON INN
DIRECTED BY TSAI MING-LIANG
The Fu-Ho Grand, a movie palace in Taipei, is closing its doors. Its valedictory screening: King Hu’s 1967 wuxia epic Dragon Inn, playing to a motley smattering of spectators, including two stars of Hu’s original opus, Miao Tien and Shih Chun, watching their younger selves with tears in their eyes. Developing the slyest, most delicate of character arcs involving a lovelorn usherette, a Japanese tourist cruising for companionship, and an oblivious projectionist played by Lee Kang-sheng, Tsai crafts a film both powerfully plangent and deadpan funny. The sense that moviegoing as a communal experience is slipping away takes on a profound and painful resonance in Goodbye, Dragon Inn, a film too multifaceted to reduce to a simple valentine to the age of pre-VOD cinephilia.
In Theater
DRAGON INN
DIRECTED BY KING HU
In Theater
TOUCH OF ZEN
DIRECTED BY KING HU
In Theater
RAINING IN THE MOUNTAIN
DIRECTED BY KING HU
In Theater
EXECUTIONERS FROM SHAOLIN
DIRECTED BY LIU CHIA-LIANG
Lau, the greatest martial artist practitioner-historian-filmmaker of all time, is in fine fetch and fettle in this rousing 18th-century period piece.
In Theater
CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON
DIRECTED BY ANG LEE
2021 FAVORITES
JAN 3 - 25
Metrograph At Home presents a selection of some of our favorite films of 2021: festival favorites, arthouse highlights, and multiplex puzzlers.
At Home
HER SOCIALIST SMILE
DIRECTED BY JOHN GIANVITO
A spare, quietly impassioned, experimental documentary that, in exploring the relationship between cinema and the written word, brings us as close we can hope to get to the private mental and moral universe of Helen Keller.
At Home
OLD
DIRECTED BY M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN
M. Night is at his most perverse in this gleefully lowbrow high-concept thriller, which finds a cluster of well-heeled vacationers trapped on a stretch of seemingly paradisial beachfront on which they age at a terrifying and unnatural pace
At Home
PARIS CALLIGRAMMES
DIRECTED BY ULRIKE OTTINGER
A film about a long faded Paris, and also about an imagined future Paris, the utopian metropolis that Ottinger eloquently recalls having dreamt about with friends while living on the Left Bank.
At Home
UN FILM DRAMATIQUE
DIRECTED BY ERIC BAUDELAIRE
The diverse student body at a newly opened junior high school in the underserviced Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, Collège Dora Maar, is given a platform from which to uninhibitedly voice their confidential hopes and fears.
At Home
DOWNSTREAM TO KINSHASA
DIRECTED BY DIEUDO HAMADI
The first film from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to earn Official Selection status at Cannes, Hamadi’s documentary follows several survivors of the country’s 2000 Six-Day War as they trek to the capital, Kinshasa, petitioning to receive compensation for the terrible losses that they’d incurred in that conflict, and facing a labyrinth of red tape when they arrive.
KURT RUSSELL: IT’S ALL IN THE REFLEXES
JAN 6 - 19
Kurt Russell is the platonic ideal of a macho American movie star: lantern jaw, dimpled chin, heroic bouffant… the works. The pleasure of Russell’s filmography is that he doesn’t shy away from this fact, but embraces it, goofs around with it. He can play the epitome of grim, tough-guy bravado, as he does in Carpenter’s Escape films, or a parody of the same, as when putting on his John Wayne burlesque in Big Trouble in Little China, pulling it all off through a God-given gift of comic timing that often goes unnoticed because it’s so effortless. (And he has depths of pathos, too! The man really is the total package!) Bottom line: Kurt Russell is the greatest and everybody basically knows this, so we’re running a bunch of Kurt Russell movies. It’s just that simple. So hop on the Pork Chop Express, and get ready for the ride of a lifetime.
In Theater
TANGO & CASH
DIRECTED BY ANDREI KONCHALOVSKY
The paragon of boneheaded, big-budget ’80s buddy action-comedies, getting its jollies by mismatching battle-tested blue-collar LAPD cowboy cop Cash (Russell) with his opposite number, Tango (Sylvester Stallone), a suave Armani-clad dandy working out of Beverly Hills.
In Theater
USED CARS
DIRECTED BY ROBERT ZEMECKIS
Locked into a ten-year Disney contract before he was old enough to drive, a grown-up Russell had to prove that he wasn’t just a kid who showed up in fluff like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969)—and he did it definitively starring in Zemeckis’s ruthless, manic satire.
In Theater
TEQUILA SUNRISE
DIRECTED BY ROBERT TOWNE
A crafty, intricately plotted, and deliciously deviant crime thriller evoking the grim Golden Age of California film noir—a tale in which no-one can be trusted, and plot twist ambushes lurk around every corner.
In Theater
ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK
DIRECTED BY JOHN CARPENTER
Carpenter’s 1981 vision of a dystopian 1997, in which Manhattan has been turned into an anarchic maximum-security prison fenced-off from the rest of the United States. Arguably, Russell’s most iconic role. His beard stubble here belongs in the Library of Congress.
In Theater
BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA
DIRECTED BY JOHN CARPENTER
Hop on the Jack Burton Pork-Chop Express! Long before the rest of Hollywood got hip to the effervescent action cinema coming from Hong Kong, Carpenter was just about the only guy in The Biz attuned to the vibrations coming across the Pacific.
At Home & In Theater
THE THING
DIRECTED BY JOHN CARPENTER
CGI can summon up ethereal outerworlds and endless untold marvels, but mere pixels can never create the viscous, loathsome ickiness of Carpenter’s unnerving, slithery remake of Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks’s 1951 science fiction classic of the same name.
In Theater
SOLDIER
DIRECTED BY PAUL W. S. ANDERSON
Among Kurt’s most curt performances, and a miracle of stripped-down cinematic storytelling courtesy Resident Evil mastermind Anderson.
In Theater
SWING SHIFT
DIRECTED BY JOHN CARPENTER
The rare period piece that feels as alive and imperative as Right This Minute, Demme’s sweet-spirited, sublimely sensitive Swing Shift sets its scene during the topsy-turvy World War II years.
In Theater
ESCAPE FROM L.A.
DIRECTED BY JOHN CARPENTER
In this particular motion picture, Kurt Russell, in the company of Easy Rider star Peter Fonda, surfs a tsunami wave as it surges down Wilshire Boulevard, the spectacle realized by way of the crummiest VFX you’ve ever clapped eyes on.
In Theater
EXECUTIVE DECISION
DIRECTED BY STUART BAIRD
Full of whiplash reverses, it’s a crackerjack action-thriller pitting brains against brawn, with bespectacled Russell playing against he-man type as the brainiac who’s called on to save the day.
In Theater
BREAKDOWN
DIRECTED BY JONATHAN MOSTOW
A terrific, tight, and blindsidingly nasty thriller courtesy of genre specialist Mostow, and a showcase for Russell at his most vulnerable and wrathful.
MIKLÓS JANCSÓ X 6
JAN 14 - 17
Long before Béla Tarr established himself as the Hungarian master of the long take, there was Miklós Jancsó, whose epic 1965 historical drama The Round-Up Tarr counts among his favorite films of all-time. Jancsó, whose directing career began in the 1950s, became an international arthouse sensation in the ’60s, renowned at home and abroad for works like The Red and the White (1967) and Red Psalm (1971), which combine a breadth of scale to rival Visconti, a keen eye for the telling historical detail, and an unbelievably intricate, arabesque choreography of bodies in motion. Jancsó’s films have been less screened in recent years, owing to the paucity of decent materials, but this selection of six new restorations brings them roaring back in all of their broad-shouldered splendor, emotional impact, and epic scope. Films that have to be seen—and preferably seen big—to be believed.
At Home & In Theater
RED PSALM
DIRECTED BY MIKLÓS JANCSÓ
A passion play with a distinctly socialist bent, Red Psalm recalls the harvesting strikes that brought rural Hungary to a standstill in the 1890s and the repressive carnage that followed in their aftermath.
At Home & In Theater
WINTER WIND
DIRECTED BY MIKLÓS JANCSÓ
A sprawling historical drama told with only thirteen remarkable sustained shots, Winter Wind takes place in 1934 as Croatian separatists, supported by Hungary, struggle to declare independence from Yugoslavia by any means necessary.
At Home & In Theater
ELECTRA, MY LOVE
DIRECTED BY MIKLÓS JANCSÓ
Janscó’s radically original, downright hypnotic retelling of the Ancient Greek myth against the backdrop of the puszta, Hungary’s vast, muddy plains, is among the long-take master’s most bravura stylistic performances, its 70-minute runtime made up of only twelve intricately composed shots.
At Home & In Theater
THE CONFRONTATION
DIRECTED BY MIKLÓS JANCSÓ
Dressing his historical drama in contemporary ’60s fashions, Jancsó, born in 1921, delivers a sympathetic-yet-stern address to the radicals of his generation, which doubles as an interrogation of the obstreperous New Left.
At Home & In Theater
THE RED AND THE WHITE
DIRECTED BY MIKLÓS JANCSÓ
Set in the heat of the Russian Civil War circa 1919, which we join in the company of a troop of Hungarian irregular volunteers stationed at the Ipatyev Monastery in Soviet territory, two of whom narrowly escape a terrible slaughter at the hands of the White guards.
At Home & In Theater
THE ROUND-UP
DIRECTED BY MIKLÓS JANCSÓ
One of Béla Tarr’s favorite films of all-time and a formative influence on his filmmaking, Jancsó’s international breakthrough lays its scene in the long, terrible aftermath of the suppressed 1848 Hungarian Revolution.
Staff Picks: Kim's Video
BEGINS JAN 20
The Kim’s Video empire started out in an enterprising immigrant hustler’s East Village laundromat on Avenue A, a joint that ran a dodgy sideline renting VHS tapes out of cardboard boxes and laundry baskets. It became a legendary New York City institution—a discount film school, with outlets as far as exotic Jersey City and a multi-story flagship located in a former bathhouse on St. Mark’s Place, famous for cranky behind-the-counter attitudes, dismal wages, and a mind-boggling selection. After the closing of its final location in 2014, Kim’s faded into the mists of legend: an exceptional place, but also representative of a broader international video store culture that’s long hovered on the brink of extinction. Kim’s is gone but far from forgotten, and so Metrograph salutes the esoteric eclecticism of Kim’s Video with a series made up of film selections and introductions by a number of former store clerks who’ve gone on to better things still branded for life by their time, as well as the mysterious Mr. Kim himself.
Titles include selections by Isabel Gillies, Lorry Kikta, Ralph McKay, Alex Ross Perry, Sean Price Williams, Mr. Kim, and more.
Staff Picks will continue throughout 2022, each month featuring selections that celebrate the small and specialty video stores, independent theatres, and community hubs where passionate film lovers gather.
At Home
REFLECTIONS OF EVIL
DIRECTED BY DAMON PACKARD
A self-distributed two-and-a-half-hour assault on commercial movies, good taste, and cinema as you know it.
In Theater
Chariots of Fire
DIRECTED BY HUGH HUDSON
There is something spiritual about Hudson’s film: the period settings, all that running, and the synth-heavy score by Vangelis, which has stayed with me always.
In Theater
Edge of the World
DIRECTED BY MICHAEL POWELL
Community and cinema are familiars from way back, Powell’s first personal film reaffirmed that in 1937.
In Theater
STRANGE BEHAVIOR (aka DEAD KIDS)
DIRECTED BY MICHAEL LAUGHLIN
The high school kids in picture-perfect Galesburg, Illinois, have turned into psychopaths overnight, and it’s up to police chief Michael Murphy to figure out what’s going on.
In Theater
Beware of a Holy Whore + Invocation of My Demon Brother
DIRECTED BY RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER
I first saw Beware of a Holy Whore while standing behind the counter on the third floor at Kim’s. It’s probably my favorite movie-within-a-movie movie.
In Theater
Bicycle Thieves
DIRECTED BY VITTORIO DE SICA
The single best-known work of postwar Italian neorealist cinema, with a script by the movement’s leading theoretician/philosopher, Cesare Zavattini.
In Theater
M
DIRECTED BY FRITZ LANG
Lang’s first sound film, the breakout starring role for Peter Lorre, and one of the undisputed masterpieces of prewar German cinema, in M the story of Lorre’s at-large child murderer.
In Theater
Broken Blossoms
DIRECTED BY D. W. GRIFFITH
Among Griffith’s best and most beautiful films, clearly evidencing a debt to Dickens; with Broken Blossoms the master of spectacle and sprawl put aside his epic ambitions to produce a work of rare intimacy, delicacy, and heartbreaking emotional purity.
Citizen Blue
JAN 21 - 27
Born in Oklahoma, raised in Portland, based at various times in Los Angeles, Paris, Houston, and Buffalo, and gone much too soon, James Blue (1930-1980) was a filmmaking dynamo who left behind an engaged and impassioned body of work that’s begging for rediscovery. His best-known film, which made him the first American to win the Critic’s Prize at Cannes, was his 1962 The Olive Trees of Justice—enjoying a concurrent re-release run at Metrograph. But that film, an adaptation of a novel by Jean Pélégri set against the backdrop of the Algerian struggle for independence, represents only a fraction of Blue’s total output. As his only fiction feature, The Olive Trees of Justice is an outlier in Blue’s filmography, but the careful counterbalance of the personal and political found in it runs through his nonfiction cinema, the subject of this retrospective. Included are films made for the United States Information Agency (USIA), stinging social portraits of Houston’s neglected neighborhoods, and intelligent, empathetic expeditions to both Algeria and Kenya—works that have lost none of their imperative immediacy through the years.
At Home & In Theater
The Olive Trees of Justice
DIRECTED BY JAMES BLUE
The lone fiction feature of acclaimed France-based, American-born documentarian James Blue, winner of the Critic’s Prize at Cannes in 1962, The Olive Trees of Justice follows a Frenchman of Algerian descent on a journey to visit his dying father back home, his memories of a bucolic boyhood on his family farm intermingling with the violent contemporary reality of the Algerian struggle for independence, circa 1962. Shooting on location as tanks rolled through city streets, Blue elicits extraordinary naturalistic performances from a nonprofessional cast that includes Pierre Prothon as the son and Jean Pélégri—author of the novel on which the film is based—as his father. While casting an unblinking eye on the catastrophe of crumbling colonialism, Blue never loses focus on the emotional core of his film, giving us a rare sense of everyday life as it carries on amidst tectonic, world-historical events.
At Home
CITIZEN BLUE
DIRECTED BY DANIEL MILLER
Dan Miller's documentary about filmmaker James Blue depicts a passionate American film artist who was always doing something different.
At Home
paris at dawn + amal
DIRECTED BY JAMES BLUE
Two short documentary works from James Blue made during the filmmaker's formative years in Paris.
At Home & In Theater
u.s.i.a. shorts
DIRECTED BY JAMES BLUE
Blue’s “Columbian Trilogy” describes the operations of John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress in the Latin American country.
At Home & In Theater
A Few Notes on our Food Problem + KENYA BORAN
DIRECTED BY JAMES BLUE
James Blue’s first film in color and his last for the USIA, nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
At Home
INVISIBLE CITY
DIRECTED BY JAMES BLUE
James Blue's inquiry into the degradation of Houston’s housing that takes him to landlords, impoverished tenants, and real-estate offices.
At Home
WHO KILLED THE FOURTH WARD?
DIRECTED BY JAMES BLUE
A nonfiction murder mystery about the destruction of a community — namely, the titular epicenter of Black Houston.
Source Material: Emma Cline Selects
Co-Presented by Gagosian
JAN 21 - 31
Writer Emma Cline presents a selection of films on the theme of “source material”, continuing a programmer-in-residence series co-presented with Gagosian in theater and at home. Emma Cline Selects will feature cinema inspired by the ethos of Gagosian’s new fiction imprint, Picture Books, which asks artists to respond to works of literature in order to open up dialogue. To this end, she has selected films that are in conversation with existing cinema or the work of other artists, that originate in writing, or that reconsider historical events.
In Theater
3 women
DIRECTED BY ROBERT ALTMAN
Alongside his more touted multi character panoramas, Robert Altman also had a fondness for small-scale dramas investigating the complexities of female psychology, and of these none is greater than the ineffable 3 Women.
In Theater
AMERICAN MOVIE
DIRECTED BY CHRIS SMITH
Smith’s documentary about Wisconsin-native filmmaker Mark Borchardt’s attempt to make the great American movie is perhaps the testament to the beauty of artistic ambition.
In Theater
A BIGGER SPLASH
DIRECTED BY LUCA GUADAGNINO
Guadagnino’s reworking of Jacques Deray’s La Piscine takes place on a beautiful Sicilian island, a setting that is upstaged by performances from Ralph Fiennes, Dakota Johnson, and Tilda Swinton.
In Theater
ADAPTATION
DIRECTED BY SPIKE JONZE
A meta-commentary on the codified rules of screenwriting, an exploration of “adaptation” in all its forms, and miraculously, a genuinely funny, moving, and enthralling story.
In Theater
SHERMAN'S MARCH
DIRECTED BY ROSS MCELWEE
An exhilarating memoir movie made up largely of comic-anthropological encounters with women in which McElwee’s musings on Sherman and the Civil War sit alongside his observations on life, love, loneliness, and faith.
In Theater
MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS
DIRECTED BY PAUL SCHRADER
The story of Yukio Mishima, the renegade/ ultra-traditionalist Japanese artist who lived his life as an artwork, with his seppuku his final masterstroke.
In Theater
crumb
DIRECTED BY TERRY ZWIGOFF
In this intimate, deeply melancholy, years-in-the-making documentary, Zwigoff revealed the deep well of pain and family dysfunction that cartoon artist R. Crumb’s work draws from.
In Theater
the diary of a teenage girl
DIRECTED BY MARIELLE HELLER
A sexual coming of age story featuring Bel Powley credibly playing the 15-year old titular protagonist and a typically wonderful performance by Alexander Skarsgård as her older and equal parts creepy and charming lover.
In Theater
ZOLA
DIRECTED BY JANICZA BRAVO
What at first seems like a glamorous trip full of “hoeism” rapidly transforms into a 48-hour journey involving a nameless pimp, an idiot boyfriend, some Tampa gangsters and other unexpected adventures in this wild, see-it-to-believe-it tale.
At Home
THE FUTURE
DIRECTED BY MIRANDA JULY
July, in her second feature, plays one half of a childless thirtysomething couple, opposite Hamish Linklater, whose relationship begins to unravel as they enter into a tailspin of self-doubt while waiting to adopt an injured stray cat from the shelter.
Presented with a Q&A with Miranda July and Emma Cline.
STREAMING LIVE FEB 2 & ON DEMAND FEB 3 - 5
In The Streets
BEGINS JAN 28
Ask individuals from all walks of life the same question and you’ll get responses that reflect both universal truths and the staggering diversity of experience. This is the basic premise behind Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi, and Alice Rohrwacher’s Futura—an inquiry into Italian youth’s attitudes about the future, having its premiere theatrical run at Metrograph—but they’re not the first to have the idea, as this accompanying retrospective demonstrates. The questions vary—“Can a person act sincerely in front of a camera?” in 1961’s Chronicle of a Summer; “Are you happy?” in 1968’s Inquiring Nuns—and the answers are just as unexpected as humans tend to be. Films that, with a simple set-up, reveal the vast complexity of humanity.
In Theater
Chronicle of a Summer
DIRECTED BY JEAN ROUCH & EDGAR MORIN
Sociologist Edgar Morin approached Jean Rouch with a radical idea: making an ethnographic film about Paris, the place where they lived, by asking a cross-section of Parisians the same question: “Are you happy?”
At Home & In Theater
INQUIRING NUNS
DIRECTED BY GERALD TEMANER & GORDON QUINN
Two young nuns to hit the streets of Chicago in the turbulent year of ’68 and pose a question to the men and women that they’d meet: “Are you happy?” The result is a time capsule of a city and a nation on the brink.
In Theater
Le Joli Mai
DIRECTED BY CHRIS MARKER
A snapshot of Paris in the spring of 1962, in the aftermath of the ceasefire with Algeria, taken as urban Paris was being radically reshaped by the powers that be.
At Home & In Theater
FUTURA
DIRECTED BY PIETRO MARCELLO, FRANCESCO MUNZI, AND ALICE ROHRWACHER
The work of a triumvirate of Italian cinema’s leading lights—Marcello (Martin Eden), Munzi (Black Souls), and Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro)—Futura is a unique collective work, comprised of a series of interviews with boys and girls in their late teens collected during a series of journey across Italy, taken before and after pandemic and lockdown. Asked to describe their hopes and fears about the future in an unsettled world, and in a country where jobs are scarce, the film’s articulate, intelligent, often witty young subjects reveal a shared disillusionment, an uncertainty as to if there will be a future at all. What emerges is a poignant picture of the precarity of youth facing incredible new pressures, but also of youth’s extraordinary resilience—a work of intermingled pessimism and possibility.
In Theater
Taxi Tehran
DIRECTED BY JAFAR PANAHI
Panahi directs and stars in this docufiction miracle, which finds him posing as a share taxi driver in Tehran who, rather than demanding cash payment from customers for his services, asks only to hear something about their lives.
In Theater
THE GIVERNY DOCUMENT (SINGLE CHANNEL)
DIRECTED BY JA'TOVIA GARY
Gary employs a dizzying array of cinematic techniques—including animations overlaid on archival film and spontaneous woman-to-woman street interviews—in her coruscating contemplation of Black female performers.
In Theater
WILDWOOD, NJ
DIRECTED BY CAROL WEAKS CASSIDY AND RUTH LEITMAN
Leitman and Cassidy’s Super 8 time capsule of the Jersey Shore in High ‘90s fashions, focusing specifically at the women—from adolescence to retirement age—who flock to the titular beach town to flirt, frolic with friends, or just take the sea air.