July In Theater
JULY IN THEATER
MY TRIP TO ITALY
opens JULY 1
Campari spritzes in Capri, barefoot Vespa rides along the coast, endless al fresco meals under a Tuscan sky… We’d all love to summer in Italy, but if you happen to be sweating it out in dear, dirty New York instead, we’ve got a scenic cinematic holiday booked for you at Metrograph—films in which foreign visitors find love, death, and everything in-between while exploring the modern and ancient sides of glorious Italia. With titles including David Lean’s Summertime, Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy, and Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, you can enjoy all the picturesque splendor of Italy while skipping the jetlag.
Series Includes:
Call Me By Your Name - Casino Royale - Death In Venice - From Russia With Love
Journey to Italy - I Vitelloni - Il Sorpasso - L’avventura - Roman Holiday - Stealing Beauty
Summertime - The Talented Mr. Ripley - Under the Tuscan Sun - The Wonders
Where is the Cat?
opens July 1
One unfortunate side effect of July 4th fireworks is the slew of “Missing Cat” flyers that appear every year in their aftermath, as pets spooked by the patriotic cacophony flee for their lives in terror. In order to raise awareness of this annual epidemic—and to play some excellent films—Metrograph presents Where is the Cat?, a collection of movies in which felines have either gone astray or, becoming the object of a search, provide a structuring absence. Including the Schrödinger’s puzzle box of Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s cat scratch fever dream House, and a host of other mischievous kitties, it’s more fun than a lifetime subscription to Cat Fancy.
Series Includes:
Burning - The Case of the Grinning Cat + A Short Story - Coraline
House - Kedi - Inside Llewyn Davis - The Long Goodbye
Neon Noir
OPENS July 1
When you think of film noir, you naturally think monochrome: the blackest of tenebrist shadows, the starkest of whites. But the legacy of noir has long outlived the era of postwar austerity that birthed it, resurfacing in the so-called “neo-noir” revival of the DayGlo 1980s, an era that was hardly noted for its muted palette. With Neon Noir, Metrograph showcases films from around the globe that have given the flinty, hard-boiled spirit of classic noir a makeover in flamboyant synthetic fabrics and post-MTV style, from the Hong Kong of Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels to the Los Angeles of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive. An infusion of vivid, gaudy, glowing color into the dark heart of noir.
Series Includes:
Alphabet City - Batman Forever - Blade Runner: The Final Cut
Drive - Fallen Angels - Ghost in the Shell - Inherent Vice - Long Day’s Journey into Night
The Matrix - Mulholland Drive - Streetwise - Tokyo Drifter - The Wild Goose Lake
DYNAMIC DINO: SELECTED FILMS FROM DE LAURENTIIS
OPENS JULY 1
Born in the province of Naples in 1919, in the course of his long life Dino De Laurentiis went from working in the family pasta business to being one of the most powerful independent producers in the business, first putting his stamp on postwar Italian neorealist productions and Fellini films, then later—after building his own studio facility in Wilmington, North Carolina—turning out big-budget spectacles to rival anything coming from the established Hollywood studios. A maverick outsider who loved to bet big on risky propositions from David Lynch to Conan the Barbarian, for some 60 years De Laurentiis brought a touch of the unexpected to international popular cinema with his daring, taste, and largesse, qualities sorely missed in an increasingly corporate entertainment industry.
Series Includes:
Barbarella - Conan the Barbarian - Dune - The Dead Zone
Flash Gordon- La Strada - Serpico
Three Days of the Condor - Year of the Dragon
also starring... yaphet kotto
opens july 7
Yaphet Kotto’s presence in a movie wasn’t a guarantee that it would be a masterpiece—though he was a crucial contributor to a few of them—but it did guarantee that the movie would be at least pretty good as long as Kotto was onscreen. Described by Pauline Kael as a “solid, great actor” and a “quietly beautiful” presence, Kotto, born in New York City in 1939, brought an inherent lived-in gravity to every part he played, whether Bond villain (Live and Let Die), working-class spaceship engineer (Alien), or harried FBI agent (Midnight Run). Kotto’s retirement from acting some years before his death in 2021 was a loss to cinema—but as you can see in this edition of Also Starring, he definitely didn’t have anything left to prove.
Series Includes:
Across 110th Street - Alien- Blue Collar - Friday Foster
Live and Let Die - Midnight Run - Nothing But a Man
The Running Man - The Thomas Crown Affair
animal farm: rats
Opens july 7
Rats are a fact of life for New Yorkers, one most of us might prefer to ignore. But it’s bad manners not to get to know your neighbors, and it’s in that spirit that this edition of Metrograph’s ongoing Animal Farm series highlights some of the best-loved films starring one of the least-loved of creatures, genus Rattus. They can be pestilent, vicious vermin, true, but here you’ll learn that rats can also be a boy’s best friend (Willard), aspiring Michelin star chefs (Ratatouille), and valorous freedom fighters (The Secret of NIMH), so don’t get uptight when you see one of these little guys hauling a slice of pizza across the subway platform. The city’s big enough for all of us.
With Intro and Q&A with Theo Anthony before Rat Film on July 7
Series Includes:
Dark Days - Rat Film Preceded by Rat Life and Diet in North America - Ratatouille
The Secret of NIMH - The Witches - Willard
Straub-Huillet: Early Works
Opens july 8
First meeting as cinephile students in 1954 Paris, Straub and Huillet would go on to work as husband-and-wife filmmaking collaborators until the latter’s death in 2006, generating a politically and aesthetically provocative body of work made largely outside of official funding bodies, based on extant literary sources—Brecht and Kafka, among others—and suggesting a desire to reinvent the art of motion pictures from scratch. With Straub’s death last year, there would be no new films in the inimitable style that he helped to create, but those that he and Huillet left behind remain monuments of European cinema, simultaneously austere, gorgeous, and finally, totally not reconciled to the dictates of commercial cinema.
Presented in new digital restorations overseen by Jean-Marie Straub, Olivier Boischot, and Barbara Ulrich.
Series Includes:
Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach - Eyes Do Not Want to Close at All Times
History Lessons - Not Reconciled, with Two Short Films
sTREAMING ON METROGRAPH AT HOME from july 1
tom palazzolo’s America
Opens july 8
Cinematic ethnographer of the rituals of working-class Chicagoland and its environs, Tom Palazzolo moved to the Windy City to attend the School of the Art Institute in 1960 and, inspired by the cinéma vérité filmmakers of Montreal and New York, soon after would begin to produce affectionate, funny film documents of urban eccentrics, baby showers, wedding rehearsals, and other oddities of the everyday. Presented in collaboration with Chicago Film Archives, Tom Palazzolo’s America offers a long-overdue New York showcase for the work of a Midwestern original, a slyly comic Studs Terkel of the 16mm underground.
Presented in collaboration with Chicago Film Archives.
Series Includes:
Tom Palazzolo Program 1: On Parade
Tom Palazzolo Program 2: Hot Nasty
Tom Palazzolo Program 3: America’s in Real Trouble
Tom Palazzolo Program 4: Palazzolo’s Portraits
Brunch at Metrographs
Opens july 8
The Metrograph Commissary is open for brunch again, and while we’re not necessarily saying you should start your day with a mimosa or three, we have lined up some time-tested pop crowd-pleasers in the cinemas that’ll look even better if you’ve had a couple. Titles picked with as much care as the Commissary staff lavishes on the cocktails they make, and the perfect high note to hit at the top of Saturdays and Sundays this summer.
Series Includes:
The 400 Blows - Grease - Ocean’s Eleven
Magic Mike - Notting Hill
Wong Ping: Between Desire and Isolation
opens Juy 14
Metrograph throws a spotlight on the experimental moving-image based works of Hong Kong-based renegade artist Wong, who since founding his Wong Ping Animation Lab in 2014 has established a sui generis signature style that encompasses vibrant neon palettes; crude, flat, pseudo-corporate visual language and subject matter; and paradoxically sophisticated voiceover tracks that tackle sex, politics, social media self-absorption, and perverse personal musings. Presented in the theater, At Home, and as an installation in the Metrograph Lobby, our Artist Focus on Wong includes his vulgar Aesop-inspired Fables series, united by a savage, often raunchy sense of satirical humor and surprising doses of morally serious social criticism; his perverse protest piece The Modern Way to Shower, released at the peak of Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement protests; and other wild and wooly works from an artist just mad enough to offer a lucid commentary on the times in which we live.
In theater:
Crumbling Earwax - The Modern Way to Shower - Sorry For the Late Reply
Wong Ping’s Fables 1 - Wong Ping’s Fables 2
at home:
An Emo Nose - Dear, Can I Give You a Hand - Sorry For the Late Reply
lobby installation:
The Other Side
Streetwise
opens July 21
A bracingly bleak crime drama soaked in sinister atmosphere, Na’s feature debut focuses on Dong Zi (Li Jiuxiao), a 21-year-old debt collector making a dishonest living in the bustling criminal economy in the Sichuan Province city of Zhenwu, all while aspiring to a better life than that which his ailing, ex-gangster father (an excellent Qi Zhi) has lived. Boasting a crack ensemble cast, brooding nocturnal cinematography courtesy of DP Li Jianeng, and an insider’s understanding of small-town claustrophobia, Na’s sleek neo-noir established him as one of Mainland China’s undeniable emerging talents during its lauded festival run.
A Dekanalog release
A Night of Knowing Nothing
july 28
An emotionally charged examination of the lives of Indian university students, Kapadia’s riveting, intoxicating documentary, winner of the L’Œil d’or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, is built around a series of letters written by a female student, L, at the Film and Television Institute of India to her estranged boyfriend, forbidden from continuing his relationship with L because she originates from a different caste. A film in which “love for the moving image—and love for artistic creativity—marches hand in hand with the fight for political freedom.”—Phuong Le, The Guardian
Introduction from Film Critic Siddhant Adlakha
Friday, July 28, 7:30pm
Presented with ICP as part of Love Songs.