July IN THEATER
Summer at Sea
Opens July 5
Vacation vicariously in the Metrograph air conditioning with Summer at Sea, a series of films set at the shore or on the open water, boasting sweaty, sun-dappled, sand-in-the-toes cinema by Christian Petzold, Wes Anderson, Lina Wertmüller, Ingmar Bergman, and many more. An invigorating gulp of ocean air for the days and nights when you’re stuck in the sticky city, including slapstick comedies, erotic idylls, and plenty of gut-wrenching dramas, a comforting reminder that access to a beach house isn’t the only cure for the crushing agony of city life!
Series Includes:
Afire – And the Ship Sails On – L’Avventura – Beach RatsBefore Midnight – A Bigger Splash – Contempt -Death in Venice
Everyone Else – La Piscine – La Pointe Courte – Lilo & Stitch
Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday – Moonrise Kingdom – Muriel’s Wedding
Pauline at the Beach – Summer with Monika – Swept Away – A Tale of Summer
In Pursuit of Shadows
opens July 5
In connection to Metrograph’s theatrical run of Wei Shujun’s Only the River Flows, an intensely atmospheric, absorbing new detective thriller in which a police investigation in 1990s rural China reveals the hidden secret life of a community, In Pursuit of Shadows offers an overview of some of the most magnificent noir-inflected policiers to come out of East Asia from the 1940s to the present day, with standout works from Johnnie To, Park Chan-wook, Wong Kar-wai, Bong Joon-ho, and Kurosawas Akira and Kiyoshi. A program of hot pursuits and neon nights, touching down in Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, and other ports of call.
Series Includes:
Chungking Express – Cure – Decision to LeaveHigh and Low – Infernal Affairs I, II & III – Memories of Murder
Only the River Flows – Stray Dog – The Wild Goose Lake
Under the Pavement, The Beach
opens July 6
As campus protests in the United States once again have become nightly news, more than one commentator has-with either horror, skepticism, or admiring approbation-evoked the specter of 1968, the year when open rebellion against the status quo in universities and on factory floors seemed on the brink of metastasizing into either a bright new dawn or, for worried law and order factions, total bedlam. Taking its title from one of the memorable graffiti slogans of the French protestors of May ’68 (“Sous les pavés, la plage!”), this series focuses on films marked in one way or another by the spirit of that insubordinate year-both the idealism that fired it and the disappointment that followed-to examine the cinematic legacy of a dream deferred.
Series Includes:
A Grin Without a Cat – Un film comme les autres – The DreamersMedium Cool – Getting Straight – La Chinoise
Something in the Air – Summer Palace – Zabriskie Point
John Ganz & Jamelle Bouie present
falling down
July 12
Stuck in gridlocked Los Angeles traffic one sweltering afternoon, unemployed ex-defense engineer William Foster (Michael Douglas) abandons his car on the highway-shades of the opening of Fellini’s 8 1/2-to cross the city on foot… and doesn’t like what he sees. The unhinged Foster, with his crew-cut, pocket protector, and starched shirt, proceeds to become a white-collar one-man-army, lashing out against gang members, lousy customer service, neo-Nazi Frederic Forrest, and just about every aspect of what he views as a degraded contemporary America, along the way finding himself in the eye of a media storm, both praised as a vigilante hero and damned as a dangerous psychopath. “Douglas is terrific… one of the richest, if most thoroughly unpleasant, and difficult roles of his career.” –The New York Times
Post-screening conversation with John Ganz and Jamelle Bouie
Passges
opens July 12
The reprieve of summer sometimes seems to be over in the blink of an eye, a phenomenon addressed obliquely in this eclectic series of films that deal with the evanescence of passing time, the disappearance of loved ones, and the reappearance of long lost friends. Movies that describe these ineffable experiences in the way that cinema alone can, featuring titles by Agnès Varda, Hong Sangsoo, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Edward Yang.
Series Includes:
The Beaches of Agnès – Eternity and a day – That Day, on the Beach – Happy HourUncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives – Still Walking
Long Live Scala Cinema!
opens July 13
Founded in 1979 by actor, producer, and director Stephen Woolley in 1979, for 14 years The Scala-initially a venue on Tottenham Street in central London then, two years later, relocated to its long-term home near the King’s Cross railway station-was the destination for adventurous London cinephiles with a taste for somewhat more disreputable fare, envisaged as Albion’s answer to the Times Square grindhouse, with an eclectic, daily-changing program that included all-night Shock Around the Clock horror marathons. Welcoming directors Ali Catterall and Jane Giles-a former programmer at the theater-to screen their new documentary SCALA!!!, examining the cinema’s history and legacy, Metrograph presents a program of Scala standards: films by John Waters, Bette Gordon, Stephen Sayadian, and David Lynch, as well as the banned-in-the-UK A Clockwork Orange, whose screening landed the theatre in legal hot water.
Series Includes:
Café Flesh – A Clockwork Orange – EraserheadKing Kong – La Marge – The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
Pink Flamingos – SCALA!!! – Variety
ACE Presents:
do the right thing
July 13
Has any movie better captured the atmosphere of those dog days when you can actually feel the suffocating weight of summertime in NYC? Production designer Wynn Thomas’s blazing red touch-ups on the shops and homes of Lexington Avenue, DP Ernest Dickerson’s flaring, hard-edged photography, and the tactile tensity conveyed by Barry Alexander Brown’s cutting combine to vividly convey the feeling of a blistering, oppressive heat wave that melts blacktop and sets tempers simmering, as Lee’s urgent, angry city symphony bears witness to the pressure cooker effects of a NYC heatwave on a few blocks in Bed-Stuy.
Q&A with editor Barry Alexander Brown on Saturday, July 13th
Republic
July 13
Li Eryang’s freestanding “Republic” sits in the heart of Beijing, a cramped, single, cluttered room decorated with colorful textiles and lights where a population consisting of Li and a rotating cast of his “Cosmic Brotherhood” meet to turn on, tune into psychedelic classics, and shoot the shit. Artist and filmmaker Jin’s charming documentary takes the viewer inside Li’s tiny refuge, therein contemplating the touchingly stubborn persistence of utopian striving in a world that’s anything but utopian.
Art Cinema, Olympiad, and the world
opens July 13
As Paris-and the rest of the planet-prepare for the forthcoming 2024 Summer Olympic Games, Art Cinema, Olympiad, and the World offers a survey of cinematic reflections on the Olympics from across the globe: innovatively imagined, high-style depictions of and reflections on the monolithic sporting spectacle. Films by Kon Ichikawa, Věra Chytilová, Masahiro Shinoda, Carlos Saura, and others act as kaleidoscopic investigations of the diverse set of social, economic, political, and industrial networks that operate around each edition of the Games, not only providing visionary depictions of top-caliber sport, but reflecting on how Olympics have-or might have-impacted people’s lives outside of the competitive arena.
Series Includes:
Marathon – The Olympics in Mexico – Sapporo Winter OlympicsSomething Different – Tokyo Olympiad – Turumba – Visions of Eight
Metrograph Selects: Philipp Westermair
Opens July 13
Select films, chosen specially by Metrograph staff.
“Movies can be a very good medicine to light up a bad day. Starship Troopers and Tampopo are in my top 15 movies, and both of these films have the ability to light up a shitty day for me.” -Philipp Westermair
Series Includes:
Starship Troopers – Tampopo
Basma Alsharif
Opens July 13
A self-described “nomadic” artist, photographer, and filmmaker, Alsharif, born to Palestinian parents and raised in France, the United States, and the Gaza Strip, has lived and worked in Chicago, Cairo, Beirut, Shahjah, Anman, Los Angeles, Paris, and Berlin. Alsharif’s footloose, far-ranging practice provides her a singular, vital perspective on issues connected to the imposition of geopolitical landscapes on human beings, particularly-but not exclusively-as this pertains to the Palestinian diasporic experience. Metrograph presents a program of her films, including her lauded 2017 feature Ouroboros and a selection of her richly layered, scintillatingly splintered, and intelligently interrogative experimental short works.
Series Includes:
Ouroboros – Basma Alsharif Shorts Program I – Basma Alsharif Shorts Program II
Members Only: Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
July 18
Self-destruction and the (distinctly masculine, masochistic) death drive have been constants in Schrader’s work since the days of Taxi Driver, so it’s only natural he would gravitate to the story of Yukio Mishima, the renegade/ultra-traditionalist Japanese artist whose own life was an extension of his art, with his shocking 1970 seppuku its apotheosis. Starring a masterfully restrained Ken Ogata as Mishima, with Philip Glass’s stirring score accompanying sumptuously stylized visualizations from Mishima’s body of work, including novels The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko’s House, and Runaway Horses.
Featuring a post-screening panel with Paul Schrader.
Members Only: Turn Every Page: The adventures of robert caro and robert gottlieb
July 18
The 50-year professional relationship between Robert Caro, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of hefty biographical tomes on Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson, and his editor, the late Robert Gottlieb, is illuminated in this intimate and absorbing documentary by Gottlieb’s own daughter, shot over the course of five years, which observes the two octogenarian legends of the New York literary scene in the course of racing to conclude the fifth and final volume of Caro’s Johnson pentalogy. A privileged perspective on two titans at work, shedding light on the often misunderstood art of the edit.
Introduction and Q&A with director Lizzie Gottlieb.
Members Only Summer Book Fair preview.
Lazy, Hazy, Swayze Days
Opens July 19
“If you were a consumer of pop culture in 1987, you either had a crush on him or were related to someone who did.” –The New Yorker, on Patrick Swayze
Whether busting moves in Dirty Dancing, breaking noses in Road House, or surfing at Point Break, the late actor, dancer, and “Sexiest Man Alive” Patrick Swayze was never less than a compelling screen presence, lithe, limber, and equally convincing as a brooding tough and a tender lover-sometimes in the same film. And what better way to pass some hot summer nights than with the sublime Swayze, a Houston native who prospered best in films featuring steamy environs, whose very surname has the cooling quality of a summer breeze?
Series Includes:
Dirty Dancing – The OutsidersPoint Break – Road House
In the Realm of Tatsuya Fuji
Opens July 19
Beginning his screen acting career at Nikkatsu Company in 1962, where he wiled away a decade in genre films, Tatsuya Fuji emerged as an international arthouse star thanks to his appearances in two scandalous, sexually explicit films by Nagisa Ōshima: 1976’s In the Realm of the Senses and 1978’s Empire of Passion, for which Ōshima won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival. An icon of ’70s Japanese cinema later adopted by one of the country’s finest 21st-century filmmakers, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, for whom he appeared in 2003’s Bright Future, Fuji will make a rare North American in-person appearance at Metrograph as we honor his lifetime of brilliant, boundary-pushing performances.
Series Includes:
Bright Future – Empire of PassionRadiance – In the Realm of the Senses
Ties That Bind: Tales of Madness
Opens July 27
Get fitted for a straitjacket and put down a deposit on a rubber room, as Ties That Bind takes you on a brain-bruising journey through a series of mad relationships, giving elegantly sinister cinematic form to stories of psychological dissolution and torment. A program of European cult classics from horror maestros of the old guard (Dario Argento, Robin Hardy) and the new (Julia Ducournau, Agnieszka Smoczyńska), as well as underseen gems like J. A. Bayona’s insidious 2007 The Orphanage, in which cinema’s singular aptitude for evoking the experience of slipping into psychosis can be experienced in all of its harrowing majesty.
Series Includes:
Antichrist – Eyes Without a Face – Let the Right One InThe Lure – The Orphanage – Suspiria
Titane – The Wicker Man