Playing in November
COMING IN NOVEMBER
LIVES OF PERFORMERS
NOV 1 - 15
“The world is a stage/ The show is a stage…”—anyways that’s what the cast of Vincente Minnelli’s musical blowout The Band Wagon (1953) have to say in their big number “That’s Entertainment,” and they oughtta know. The world and the show just keep blending together in this collection of films about actors, dancers, and musicians, men and women who move between the clarifying spectacle of the stage and the complexities of life outside of the spotlight. In the soundstage New Orleans circus of Max Ophüls’s Lola Montes (1955); Maggie Cheung’s interpretation of Ruan Lingyu, tragic star of 1930s Shanghai cinema, in Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage (1991); or the backstage bedlam of The Band Wagon, the separation between life and art can sometimes seem nearly nonexistent—which is all part of the show, of course.
In Theater
the story of the last chrysanthemum
DIRECTED BY KENJI MIZOGUCHI
Mizoguchi’s masterpiece lays its scene in Meiji-era Tokyo, where fumbling actor Kikunosuke breaks with his Kabuki star father to take up with low-born servant Otoku.
In Theater
ALL THAT JAZZ
DIRECTED BY BOB FOSSE
Playing the chain-smoking, Dexedrine-and-Alka-Seltzer-popping, serially womanizing workaholic choreographer/filmmaker Joe Gideon, Roy Scheider is the thinly-disguised alter-ego of director Fosse, whose musical film-a-clef dramatizes a bout of manic work in the mid-‘70s that nearly killed him.
In Theater
PAYDAY
DIRECTED BY DARYL DUKE
Wallowing in everything that Nashville publicists preferred to keep off the record—the drinking, the womanizing, the fake smiles, the cheap motels, the record station payola—Payday just might be the realest movie about country music ever made
In Theater
CENTER STAGE
DIRECTED BY STANLEY KWAN
In this unconventional biopic by Hong Kong New Wave master Stanley Kwan, one of the brightest movie stars of the Golden Age of Hong Kong pays tribute to a predecessor from pre-revolutionary Chinese cinema, as Maggie Cheung passionately embodies Ruan Lingyu.
In Theater
PERFECT BLUE
DIRECTED BY SATOSHI KON
Rising J-pop star Mima has quit singing to pursue a career as an actress and model, but her fans aren’t ready to see her go, and when she takes on a recurring role on a popular TV show, her handlers and collaborators suddenly begin turning up murdered.
In Theater
THE HERO
DIRECTED BY SATYAJIT RAY
a meditation on so-called high and low culture, while director Ray extends the same human interest and ability to delineate character to a plethora of memorable supporting players in this lesser-known great work.
In Theater
OPENING NIGHT
DIRECTED BY JOHN CASSAVETES
Myrtle Gordon (Rowlands), an actress entering her Grand Dame years, is in final rehearsals for a play when a disturbed young fan is killed in front of her.
In Theater
JO JO DANCER, YOUR LIFE IS CALLING
DIRECTED BY RICHARD PRYOR
The deep well of personal pain that was the wellspring of Pryor’s comedy is explicitly explored and exorcised in his self-reflective, warts-and-all autobiographical directorial debut.
In Theater
TO BE OR NOT TO BE
DIRECTED BY ERNST LUBITSCH
This fleet comedy about a Warsaw theatre troupe led by Carole Lombard and Jack Benny using their chops to fluster occupying Nazi high command is also a deeply moral protest picture.
In Theater
UNFAITHFULLY YOURS
DIRECTED BY PRESTON STURGES
Symphony conductor Rex Harrison, in a role modeled on English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, IS driven to elaborate musical fantasies of reproach and revenge by obsessive thoughts of wife Linda Darnell’s supposed extramarital activities.
In Theater & At Home
THE RED SHOES
DIRECTED BY MICHAEL POWELL & EMERIC PRESSBURGER
A ravishing fantasia that has enchanted generations of moviegoers with its stunning stylistics and dramatic inquiry into the difficult relationship between life and art.
In Theater
JANE B. PAR AGNES V.
DIRECTED BY AGNÈS VARDA
A meditation not only on Birkin’s career, but on the relationship between photography and painting, and how the traditional artist-muse dynamic changes when it becomes a woman-to-woman conversation.
Mia Hansen-Løve Selects
NOV 5 - 13
Beginning with her 2007 feature debut All is Forgiven, which premiered at Cannes when the writer-director was only 26 years old and is now receiving a belated American theatrical run from Metrograph, Mia Hansen-Løve has exhibited an acute interest in the worrying operations of time and tide in people’s lives and a pronounced tendency to both autobiography and family portraiture. This program of films selected by Hansen-Løve offer insight into the cinematic inspirations that have informed her deeply humane body of work, including movies by such diverse figures as Victor Sjöström, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, and Kelly Reichardt.
In Theater & At Home
ALL IS FORGIVEN
DIRECTED BY MIA HANSEN-LØVE
Mia Hansen-Løve was only twenty-five when she directed one of the most striking and auspicious first features in 21st century French cinema, which finds the brisk economy of expression, nuanced characterization, and formal daring of her future films (Father of My Children, Eden, Things to Come) firmly in place. With her feature debut Hansen-Løve has already found her great subject: the passage of time and how it moves differently for different people, here at work in a strikingly original, deeply empathetic family drama that sidesteps all clichéd sentimentality on the way to achieving quietly devastating results.
In Theater
WENDY AND LUCY
DIRECTED BY KELLY REICHARDT
An unsentimental portrayal of life on the fringes in the United States, following down-on-her-luck Wendy (a sublimely stoic Michelle Williams, often carrying the film alone), her pet dog, and her haggard Honda on an aimless road trip from Indiana to the Alaskan frontier
In Theater
LE BONHEUR
DIRECTED BY AGNES VARDA
One of Varda’s most purely beautiful movies, and one of her most challenging as well, calling into question the cost of that beauty.
In Theater
THE WIND
DIRECTED BY VICTOR SJÖSTRÖM
Repression and hysteria find ravishing visual expression in Sjöström’s overwhelming tour-de-force, a majestic maelstrom of pure cinema.
In Theater
A TALE OF WINTER
DIRECTED BY ÉRIC ROHMER
Raising a daughter conceived during a brief but unforgettable fling 5 years earlier, hairdresser Félicie vacillates between two suitors while really loving neither, keeping a candle quietly burning for the father of her child.
In Theater
A BRIGHTER SUMMER’S DAY
DIRECTED BY EDWARD YANG
A sprawling and intimate evocation of the Taiwan of Yang’s teenage years: the outset of the 1960s, a period defined by street gang activity, the political repression of the Kuomintang military government, and the ubiquity of American pop culture.
In Theater
MILLENNIUM MAMBO
DIRECTED BY HOU HSIAO-HSIEN
Structured as a flashback to the then-present from the then-future of 2011, Millennium Mambo is a transfixing trance-out of a movie, drenched in club lights, ecstatic endorphin-rush exhilaration, and a nagging undercurrent of ennui.
MAYUKH SEN Selects
NOV 3 - 8
Before he won the James Beard Journalism Award that cemented his status as a breakout star of contemporary food writing in 2018, Mayukh Sen was a Stanford film student and all-around cinema lover. Now, on the occasion of the publication of his book Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America by W.W. Norton & Co., Sen shows he never lost his taste for movies, coming to Metrograph with a program of films on female labor, migration, and food that inspired him as he wrote this group biography, including choice cuts from Pedro Almodóvar, Gregory Nava, Wayne Wang, and Ousmane Sembène. Pull up a chair and tuck in.
In Theater
VOLVER
DIRECTED BY PEDRO ALMODÓVAR
Penélope Cruz leads a remarkable ensemble cast—the six main actresses shared a Best Actress award at Cannes in 2006—in Almodóvar’s comic drama, set in the Madrid suburbs and in the filmmaker’s native La Mancha region.
In Theater
BLACK GIRL
DIRECTED BY OUSMANE SEMBÈNE
The first film by a Sub-Saharan African filmmaker to gain an international reputation, writer-turned-filmmaker Sembène’s feature debut gives voice to the silent suffering of Diouana , a black African nanny who has followed her white French employers from her nativ Senegal to the Riviera.
In Theater
THE JOY LUCK CLUB
DIRECTED BY WAYNE WANG
The last Hollywood studio film to feature an all-Asian cast for twenty-five years, and a landmark work that finds epic scope in the most everyday of circumstances, by exploring the inner lives and cherished hopes of a San Francisco mahjong group.
In Theater
EL NORTE
DIRECTED BY GREGORY NAVA
A visually sumptuous low-budget independent epic clad in the riotous colors of the southwest, El Norte follows teenaged brother and sister Enrique and Rose on a treacherous overland journey across the whole of Mexico in search of a new life in a California.
PUNKS DON'T GO HOME FOR THANKSGIVING
NOV 17 - 30
“There’s nothing behind it—it’s a punk gesture”—so says Linda Manz’s Cebe in Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue, either describing the safety pin through her cheek or the fuse that she’s just lit. Accompanying Metrograph’s run of the restored Out of the Blue, here are a program of films from around the world offering different interpretations of what, exactly, constitutes a punk gesture or, for that matter, a punk cinema. Is it No Future nihilism? The opportunity for kids to make their own fun without consideration of any profit margin? Foppish fashion plate posing? Stoopid, stripped down rock n’ roll? There are many possible answers, but one thing’s for sure: Punks Don’t Go Home for Thanksgiving.
In Theater & At Home
BURST CITY
DIRECTED BY GAKURYŪ ISHII
Ishii’s raw, hyperkinetic riot of a film functions as a showcase for the cream of then-contemporary Japanese punk rock finding in buzzsaw montage a visual equivalent to the breakneck tempo of punk.
COMING SOON
In Theater & At Home
SUBURBIA
DIRECTED BY PENELOPE SPHEERIS
A de-glammed, downbeat drama about the kids of the black hole, a gang of teenage runaways who call themselves T.R. (for “The Rejected”) squatting in derelict suburban tract houses.
COMING SOON
At Home
RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD
DIRECTED BY DAN O’BANNON
A stupid-smart, gruesome romp, filled with impressively foul practical effects and sinister shredding.
COMING SOON
In Theater
THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
DIRECTED BY PENELOPE SPHEERIS
Shot in 1979 and ’80, Spheeris’s essential rock doc peels back the veneer of social justice solidarity that has retrospectively been slapped onto punk, to reveal the angry, antisocial truth.
COMING SOON
In Theater
REPO MAN
DIRECTED BY ALEX COX
Featuring a soundtrack filled with punk standards—including a title song by Iggy Pop—Repo Man sets its scene in a strip mall SoCal of mindless consumption, exactly the sort dead-end environment that punk was reacting against
COMING SOON
In Theater & At Home
BORN IN FLAMES
DIRECTED BY LIZZIE BORDEN
A low-budget blend of documentary and sci-fi elements shot on the streets of early ’80s New York, Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames lays its scene in the false Utopia of a U.S. ten years after the Second American Revolution
COMING SOON
In Theater & At Home
CLASS OF 1984
DIRECTED BY MARK LESTER
Lester’s Toronto-shot paragon of punksploitation begins with music teacher Perry King’s arrival at Lincoln High, an inner-city school where staff and students have grown accustomed to being menaced by the roving packs of maniacal punkers.
COMING SOON
In Theater & At Home
MY DEGENERATION
DIRECTED BY JON MORITSUGU
The story of a nascent all-girl rock act, Bunny Love, who are recruited to the service of the American Beef Institute, yowling about “beef power” for a shot at superstardom
COMING SOON
In Theater & At Home
I WAS A TEENAGE SERIAL KILLER
DIRECTED BY SARAH JACOBSON
Perhaps the quintessential riot grrrl movie, featuring the music of Heavens to Betsy and seething with feminist fury. Fed up with straight white male sexist pigs, damaged and vengeful 19-year-old Mary decides to cull the population through a killing spree.
COMING SOON
In Theater
DESPERATE LIVING
DIRECTED BY JOHN WATERS
By his own confession Waters never liked punk music half as much as its dumpster diving aesthetic and sneering, spitting attitude, and both these things are very much on display in his bad taste blowout.
COMING SOON
RUNS
In Theater & At Home
UPPERCASE PRINT
DIRECTED BY RADU JUDE
In 1981, chalk slogans demanding freedom started appearing in public spaces in the Romanian city of Botoşani. The culprit was Mugur Călinescu, a teenager who was still at school at the time and whose case is documented in the files of the Romanian secret police.
In Theater
PROCESSION
DIRECTED BY ROBERT GREENE
Six midwestern men — all survivors of childhood sexual assault at the hands of Catholic priests and clergy — come together to direct a drama therapy-inspired experiment designed to collectively work through their trauma.
In Theater
WHAT DO WE SEE WHEN WE LOOK AT THE SKY?
DIRECTED BY ALEXANDRE KOBERIDZE
After a pair of chance encounters, pharmacist Lisa and soccer player Giorgi find their plans for a date undone when they both awaken magically transformed — with no way to recognize or contact each other.
In Theater
OUT OF THE BLUE
DIRECTED BY DENNIS HOPPER
Unlikely star and bantamweight teen tough cookie Linda Manz gives one of the greatest adolescent performances in cinema as Cebe, a punkette whose disastrous home life only gets more complicated when her ex-truck driver dad (Hopper, returning to the director’s chair with swagger after a decade in movie jail) gets sprung out of the can and comes home.
COMING SOON
In Theater
I WAS A SIMPLE MAN
DIRECTED BY CHRISTOPHER MAKOTO YOGI
I Was A Simple Man is a ghost story set in the pastoral countryside of the north shore of O‘ahu, Hawai‘i. Revealed in four chapters, it tells the story of an elderly man facing the end of his life, visited by the ghosts of his past.
COMING SOON
In Theater
THE INCREDIBLE TRUE STORY OF TWO GIRLS IN LOVE
DIRECTED BY MARIA MAGGENTI
Maggenti’s justly beloved screwball comedy-inspired lesbian romance, a central work of New Queer Cinema, offers a poignant portrayal of two teenagers finding first love and coming out.
COMING SOON
In Theater
NIGHTMARE ALLEY
DIRECTED BY EDMUND GOULDING
Step right up and see this startlingly seamy noir adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s pulp classic—also the source for the forthcoming film by Guillermo del Toro—a lurid vehicle for a playing-against-heroic-type Tyrone Power that seems to have slipped past napping Production Code officials.
COMING SOON
In Theater
SATURDAY AFTERNOON CARTOONS
DIRECTED BY VARIOUS DIRS
Tommy José Stathes returns to present a new selection from his vast library of rare prints of early animated films.
COMING SOON