November IN THEATER
Do it Again!
Opens November 1
If at first you succeed, try, try again-such, at least, is the logic behind the self-remade film: those rare instances in which a filmmaker, following the passage of years, or the crossing of a language barrier, or a leap from telefilm to the big screen, circles back to pay themselves the sincerest form of flattery. In the firm belief that anything that was good the first time will be just as good (or better) on the second go-round, we’re bringing together twinned works by Yasujiro Ozu, Howard Hawks, Alan Clarke, Michaels Mann and Haneke, and many more, in a series that shows just how nice twice can be.
Series Includes:
An Affair to Remember – The Beaver Trilogy – El DoradoFunny Games – Good Morning – Heat
I Was Born, But… – Irma Vep – Rio Bravo – Scum
The Graduates
opens November 1
Peterson’s quietly compelling, slow-burn feature debut, set in the final weeks of a high school academic year, explores the long-term psychological and emotional aftermath of a school shooting on its survivors, graduating students and faculty both, with standout performances coming from Mina Sundwall as a young woman still mourning the death of her boyfriend, Moonlight’s Alex Hibbert as a basketball team star who’s been MIA since the tragedy, and John Cho as the coach struggling to keep up a brave face through unendurable heartbreak. A somber and sobering portrait of a community collectively coping with, and through, crisis, executive produced by Chloé Zhao, The Graduates will screen with the world premiere of Maryam L’ange’s short Rāz (The Secret), in which the shockwaves of an unexpected death wash over an Iranian American family gathered for a wedding.
Q&A with director Hannah Peterson and Mina Sundwall, lead actor of The Graduates, moderated by filmmaker Rachel LambertFriday, November 1, 7:30pm Q&A with director Hannah Peterson and Mina Sundwall, lead actor of The Graduates, moderated by Genevieve Yue, associate professor of Culture and Media at The New School
Saturday, November 2, 7:45pm
Insomnia
Opens November 1
The Baffler is pleased to present a live performance by Andrew Norman Wilson. In the 2010s, Andrew Norman Wilson had seen his art go viral a few times, and landed four biennials-the start of a promising career. In “It’s Not What the World Needs Right Now,” his recent essay for issue 73 of The Baffler, Wilson asks what precisely that looks like in an industry that pays in clout and almost never in cash. In a performance that features new images, videos, and passages that paint a stark portrait, replete with a rib removal and an episode of penguin-induced dissociation, Wilson insightfully and often hilariously explores his departure from a contemporary art world whose works serve no one but yacht owners and curatorial bureaucrats with terminal degrees.
Wang Bing’s Youth Trilogy
Opens November 1
Shot between 2015 and 2019 in the textile factories of Zhili, a district of Huzhou City in northern Zhejiang province, which rely on the grueling labor of hundreds of thousands of young migrant workers drawn from the provincial countryside, Wang’s Youth Trilogy is a verité saga exploring the individual toll of contemporary China’s ambitious, relentless economic expansion, depicting-with unfailing empathy for its subjects-the rising tensions between rank-and-file laborers and their management, the glaring disparity between official prosperity and individual deprivation, and the moving endurance of solidarity and aspiration in the face of a system that sows division. An epochal, career-defining work of “21st-century turbo-capitalism captured with the spirit of 19th-century social realism” from “China’s foremost cine-sociologist.” [Sight & Sound]
Wang Bing’s complete Youth Trilogy is being released in the U.S. by the dGenerate Films Collection at Icarus Films.
Series Includes:
Youth (Spring), Youth (Hard Times), Youth (Homecoming)
My Crazy Uncle (or aunt)
opens November 1
To tweak the tagline of John Hughes’s Uncle Buck: “They’re crude. They’re crass. They’re family.” Just in time for Thanksgiving and the annual confrontation with the gnarlier branches of your family tree that comes along with it, a series delving into cinema’s rich heritage of unusual-to say the least-uncles and aunts. The colorful cavalcade of nutcase avunculi include a delusional gone-to-seed jock (Napoleon Dynamite), Jacques Tati’s delightfully dotty Monsieur Hulot (Mon Oncle), Jimmy Stewart and his invisible 6’3 ½” leporine drinking buddy (Harvey), and Cary Grant’s very naughty aunts (Arsenic and Old Lace). Say what you will about ’em, at least these relatives keep things interesting at the dinner table.
Series Includes:
Uncle Buck – Adams Family Values – Napoleon DynamiteMon Oncle – Harvey – Auntie Mame
Arsenic and Old Lace – Practical Magic – Shadow of a Doubt – Stoker
Don’t Go in the Sewers
Opens October 11
Ben Hania received her first real international recognition with 2017’s Beauty and the Dogs, a harrowing depiction of a Tunisian rape survivor’s ordeal that premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes, and she has since established herself as equally adept in the fields of fiction, nonfiction, and the liminal spaces between, with subsequent works including The Man Who Sold His Skin (an investigation of “the art world and the political stakes of our times,” per the filmmaker, nominated for Best International Feature at the 93rd Academy Awards) and Four Daughters, a singular meta-documentary study in grief and radicalization that was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 96th Academy Awards. One of the leading lights of contemporary cinema in the Arab world, Ben Hamia has singled out one theme that unifies her diverse filmography: “Injustice.”
Series Includes:
Four Daughters – The Man Who Sold His Skin – Beauty and the Dogs
Crush the Strong, Help the Weak
opens November 2
Antiheroes and black sheep abound in this collection of rough-and-ready films from southeast and east Asia concerning rebellious outsiders bound together by their keenly developed sense of class consciousness and their outside-the-law existence, its ragtag cast of renegade characters including Shinjuku triads clashing with yakuza for control of Tokyo, Korean desperados on the run from the Imperial Japanese Army, small-time hoodlums bumming around in c. 1960 Taipei, and even Technicolor Thai cowboys. With no initiation past the price of admission and peak-performance films by Takashi Miike, Edward Yang, Park Chan-wook, Stephen Chow, among others, membership in this gang definitely has its privileges.
Series Includes:
Tears of the Black Tiger – The Good, The Bad, The Weird – Gangs of WasseypurKung Fu Hustle – A Brighter Summer Day -Lady Vengeance
Shinjuku Triad Society – The Man From Nowhere – The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi
The Heroic Trio
Nicholas Uncaged
Opens November 8
Heaped with praise and panegyrics as one of the finest screen actors of his generation, pilloried and parodied as an anything-for-a-paycheck hambone with a weakness for weird wigs and prostheses, Nicolas Cage is a one-man sideshow, a mixture of Marlon Brando, Robert Mitchum, Lon Chaney, and a stick of TNT who takes back “serious thespian” prestige whenever he wants to, dives into grindhouse material and Academy Award hopefuls with the same mad enthusiasm, and never seems to be having anything less than a total blast in front of the camera. From blockbusters to broody neo-noirs, from dining on cockroaches to hunting for foraging pigs, a tribute to the inimitable and impossible to pin down Nic, a prodigious and untamed talent whose kabuki mannerisms, off-the-wall accent work, and go-for-broke brio have been delighting discerning moviegoers for almost 40 years.
Series Includes:
Moonstruck – Wild at Heart – Red Rock WestNational Treasure – Con Air – The Wicker Man
Vampire’s Kiss – Adaptation – Pig
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
JEFF WALL SELECTS
Opens NOVEMBER 8
Artist Jeff Wall curates a selection of films that have influenced his practice, continuing a programmer-in-residence series co-presented with Gagosian.
“My main interest in film is the photography, its character and quality. But in order for it to excel, it needs to be photography of something worth photographing. That means a film ought to be about a subject worth narrating, so the scenario-the writing-is important. And it means the scenario needs to be well-realized, so then the art direction and performances are important, too. When all those things are outstandingly done, the film can become a more serious work of art, and I can look at it the way I look at a painting by Matisse or the way I read a story by Chekhov. But there can be beautifully photographed films where the performances are poor, where the settings and so on are badly done. I often like them, too… not all art is the very best art and less-than-best can still be good, satisfying, exciting. I chose the films for this series because I think they’re in the upper registers of achievement, each in its own way.” -Jeff Wall
Co-presented with Gagosian
Pre-screening presentation by artist Jeff Wall on Fat City, Saturday, November 9th
Series Includes:
Jeff Wall Presents Fat City – Strange by the Lake – The White Ribbon
The World is a Staget
opens November 9
A bushido Macbeth, Brechtian epic theater exploring the sinister side of simperingly smiley smalltown America, a Montmartre stage troupe in occupied France employing their little playhouse as a site of passive resistance… The play’s the thing in this series, including works by Lars von Trier, Qiu Jiongjiong, Nagisa Oshima, and other equally formidable talents, and consisting of films located at the intersection of cinema, live theater, and political inquiry, exploring the means by which performance and stagecraft can be used as tools of social critique and commentary, using the closed world under the proscenium as a microcosm of the wider world.
Series Includes:
Annette – A New Old Play – Death by HangingThe Traveling Players – The King and the Clown – Throne of Blood
The Last Metro – Under the Pavement Lies the Strand
The World – Opera Jawa – Dogville
around ludlow: 10002 arts presents: les films from les filmmakers
November 10
A new platform for the exciting community around Metrograph, including filmmakers, artists, arts’ organizations, and social clubs based in our home of Ludlow Street and the surrounding area. Around Ludlow celebrates our unique community, inviting our neighbors to come in and make themselves at home, continuing with guest programming stints from 10002 ARTS Presents, a group of artists and creatives living or working in the 10002 zip code who come together to share their work and celebrate the neighborhood’s rich history of art and culture.
Alice Diop: Traces of the Margins
opens November 16
A Senegalese French child of the Paris suburbs that figure so prominently in her work, filmmaker Alice Diop has, in her documentaries and 2022 narrative fiction debut Saint Omer, striven to “oppose the dominant image of France that denies a part of the population.” An essential aspect of Diop’s creative mission is her “La Cinémathèque idéale des banlieues du monde” (“the ideal cinematheque of the outskirts of the world”) project, founded in 2021 with the assistance of the Centre Pompidou and the Ateliers Médicis, its stated mission to “welcome, protect, and work on films that come from all the peripheries of the world.” Along with a selected program of her own documentaries, Traces of the Margins will screen a carte blanche of films selected by Diop, creating a downtown home for the Cinémathèque idéale.
Presented with the support of Villa Albertine and Unifrance.In Partnership with La Cinémathèque idéale des banlieues du monde (“the ideal cinematheque of the outskirts of the world”).
Series Includes:
Danton’s Death – Towards Tenderness – On CallAfter the Sun + Hold Back – Dry Ground Burning
Screen Time at Metrograph
opens November 17
It’s never too early to get your kids started on quality cinema, and with that in mind Metrograph continues our new regular strand for youngsters of all ages that includes both specially curated screenings for children, tweens, and their parents, with screenings of Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman (2021) and Adrià Garcia and Víctor Maldonado’s Nocturna (2007), and the next edition of Art Cinema for Tots.
Series Includes:
Art Cinema for Tots – Nocturna – Petite Maman
Retrofuturism: the films of lev kalman & Whitney horn
Opens November 15
In a collaboration that stretches back to 2004, Kalman and Horn have created a sui generis style entirely their own, blending deadpan wit, invitingly handcrafted images on analog film, dreamy synth soundtracks, playful mixing and bending of genre tropes, a keen sense for the odd period detail, and casually tossed off sociopolitical insights. On the release of their latest, Dream Team, a visually arresting homage to the ’90s late-night cable erotic thriller, we look back over highlights from one of the most consistently exciting collaborations in 21st century American independent film, including visits with Honduran teens searching for a ‘fountain of youth’ (Blondes in the Jungle), indolent graduate students filling idle hours with talk (L for Leisure), and female sight-seekers in 1890s Colorado (Two Plains & a Fancy).
Series Includes:
Dream Team – Blondes in the Jungle L for LeisureTwo Plains & a Fancy
Focus on Crystal Moselle and Derrick B. Harden
Opens November 23
A graduate of New York’s School of Visual Arts, San Francisco-born Moselle’s feature debut, The Wolfpack, was among the most revelatory nonfiction films of the 2010s, the story of six homeschooled cinephile brothers who, during years shut away from the outside world, had created one of their own in a four-bedroom Lower East Side apartment. Chance encounters, like that which led to her meeting The Wolfpack’s subjects, have continued to constitute a crucial part of Moselle’s docufiction practice, which has produced Skate Kitchen, a winningly laid-back slice-of-life narrative featuring members of the titular all-female skateboarding collective, and now, The Black Sea. Co-directed by Moselle and the film’s star, Derrick B. Harden, an accomplished musician and artist, The Black Sea is a charming, entirely improvised fish-out-of-water comedy whose release by Metrograph Pictures-and weekend engagement at the cinema-accompanies this series. Alongside Moselle’s work, Harden has curated a special screening of Melvin Van Peebles’s 1971 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, a key influence on his artistic achievements.
Crystal Moselle and Derrick B. Harden in person
Series Includes:
Skate Kitchen preceded by Window Feel – Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song
Mira Nair’s Take on Modern Indian Cinema
opens November 23
Bhubaneswar-raised, New York City-based visionary filmmaker and activist Mira Nair, a force in both Indian and American cinema since the rapturous reception of her 1988 Salaam Bombay!, presents a hand-picked program of contemporary films from the subcontinent that show the diversity of Indian films beyond the realm of studio spectacle.
“These films show us the India we live in but rarely ever truly see. Cinema is a tricky craft; you start with a dream, but the road to make (art) is so long, do you end with one? These films capture the brutality & tenderness of the dream to the max. ” -Mira Nair
Series Includes:
All That Breathes – BoongStolen – The Wold is Family
Story by Lillian Lee
opens November 29
Novelist, journalist, and screenwriter, Hong Kong-born Lillian Lee has been a formidable figure in her hometown’s cultural scene for more than 40 years-though, as only a handful of her novels have appeared in translation, non-Sinophone audiences can best experience the signature romantic melancholy of her work through the films that she’s written. The quality of the directors Lee has worked with speaks volumes of the esteem in which she’s held, their ranks including Stanley Kwan (Rouge), Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine), and Fruit Chan (Three… Extremes), among other luminaries. A writer equally adept at describing the rhythms of quotidian contemporary urban life and delving into the deep well of traditional Chinese folklore-often, as in Rouge, in the same work-Lee’s contributions to Hong Kong cinema have added inestimably to its glory.
Series Includes:
Rouge – Three… ExtremesA Terra Cotta Warrior – Farewell My Concubine
Absconded Art
Opens November 29
Just in time for the dawn of corporate plagiarism being craftily branded as AI “art,” a series about forgers, fakers, and canvas takers, featuring a taut recreation of the heist of the century high-wire walk between the Twin Towers (Man on Wire), Orson Welles’s puckish contemplation of fraudulent Old Masters and cinematic prestidigitation (F for Fake), the battle to repatriate the archives of Mexico’s most famous architect (The Proposal), and other ruminations on originality, public domain usage and the art of stealing art.
Series Includes:
Art and Craft – F for FakeMan on Wire – The Proposal