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| His gangster movie Gomorrah tipped its hat to Scorsese; his new film, a bold satire on our fixation with celebrity, would amuse Fellini. | |||||||||||||
| Luciano (Aniello Arena) is a charming and affable fishmonger whose children egg him on to audition for the Roman version of Big Brother. Sure that he’s nailed it, he announces as much to the entire neighborhood, as his obsession with being a contestant leads him down a rabbit hole of skewed perceptions and paranoia. So overcome by his dream of fame, his own life spirals out of control. Winner: Grand Prix, Cannes Film Festival. In Italian and Neapolitan with subtitles. |
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| A testament to ingenuity, willpower, and endurance against all odds, No Place on Earth tells the extraordinary tale of thirty-eight Ukrainian Jews who, to protect their lives, lived underground in caves for eighteen months – the longest underground survival in recorded human history. | |||||||||||||
| In 1993, Chris Nicola, an American cave enthusiast, was exploring the Ukraine’s “gypsum giants,” some of the longest horizontal caves in the world. Within this labyrinth, he came across signs of former human habitation: buttons, an old house key, a woman’s dress shoe. Locals told him that during World War II, there were rumors of Jewish families hiding in the caves, but no one knew what happened to them. After Nicola spent nine years searching for survivors, director Janet Tobias brings their memories to life. Touching on the present as well as the past, her film combines artful re-enactments that vividly recreate an unimaginable struggle for existence with a trip leading a group of survivors back into the caves on a journey of remembrance. As living memory of this story will soon disappear, Tobias’ film records it in a way that is as moving as it is unforgettable. In English, German, and Yiddish with subtitles. | |||||||||||||
| Trailer forthcoming | Reviews forthcoming | ||||||||||||
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| In 1980, Stanley Kubrick unleashed The Shining upon an unsuspecting public. Revered by many as a masterpiece of the genre, castigated by others as the lazy result of a legendary director working far below his talent level, The Shining has held claim on viewers’ imaginations for over three decades ever since. | |||||||||||||
| Named for the haunted room that holds the key to the Overlook Hotel’s deadly mystery, director Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 is not a behind-the-scenes making-of or a tribute to Kubrick’s film. Rather, it’s a cinematic soapbox for a group of obsessive cineastes whose theories about the themes and hidden messages in The Shining are outrageous, and maybe — just maybe — true. Ascher repeats key scenes from The Shining and other films to illustrate the theories, as the self-proclaimed experts (or “Shiners”) expound on their incredibly close readings of the film. Both a kaleidoscopic deconstruction of a horror classic and a portrait of truly fanatical obsession, Room 237 is one of the year’s most fascinating documentaries. | |||||||||||||
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| Now in their eighties, the Tavianis, responsible for such art house hits as Padre Padrone and Night of the Shooting Stars, blur the line between fiction and reality in their powerful drama-within-a-drama about inmates in Rome’s Rebibbia prison who stage Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. | |||||||||||||
| After a competitive casting process, the roles are allocated, and the prisoners – murderers, drug dealers, Mafiosi – begin exploring the text, finding in its tale of fraternity and betrayal parallels to their own lives. The play’s air of menace comes through with an eerie gravity, lending ancient history a jolt. Shot in mostly black-and-white, while a few color sequences reconnect the prison, and the prisoners, to the surrounding world. Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. In Italian with subtitles. |
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| Setting its story in Yokohama in 1963, Studio Ghibli (the Japanese animation house co-founded by Hiyao Miyazaki, the visionary director of My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Spirited Away) lovingly brings to life the bustling seaside town, with its misty harbor, sun-drenched gardens, and some of the most mouthwatering Japanese home-cooking set to film. | |||||||||||||
| Opening the year before the Olympic Games in Tokyo, From Up on Poppy Hill captures a period when Japan was eager to present the world with a bright, modern, revitalized image. But the past still weighs heavy on Umi (voiced by Sarah Bolger), a high-school student who raises flags for her father each morning as a gesture of hope for his safe return. Though a wallflower at school, Umi attracts the attention of Shun (voiced by Anton Yelchin), a brash and popular roustabout. Shun brings Umi into the “Latin Quarter,” a dilapidated mansion that serves as a lively clubhouse for the students (otherwise all boys) interested in chemistry, drama, philosophy, journalism and other pursuits. With administrators eager to demolish the old building in the spirit of the new, Umi and Shun rally to keep the wrecking ball from dropping while embarking on a relationship with roots in a shared past. Poppy Hill could be a live-action drama without the staging’s being altered in the least, yet its gorgeous, hand-drawn images bring the story a wondrous light and grace. | |||||||||||||
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| Hannah Arendt is an attempt, in director Margarethe von Trotta’s words, to transform “thought into a film.” Fittingly, the film focuses on one of the crucial moments in Arendt’s life and career: her visit to Jerusalem in 1961 to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where Arendt begins to formulate what would be her most controversial contribution to contemporary political thought, the concept of the banality of evil. | |||||||||||||
| “The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons,” says Arendt. In the mousy, petty-bourgeois beaurocrat Eichmann, she sees the face of this uniquely modern malevolence. Introduced sitting alone, silent and smoking, Barbara Sukowa fully inhavits the role of Arendt. Without speaking a word she conveys the isolation, the spirit and the fierce intellect of this formidable woman — one who sought to bring what her mentor and lover Heidegger once described as “the lonely business of thinking” directly into the public realm, to transform philosophy from intellectual abstraction into practical political action. Using footage from the actual Eichmann trial and weaving an involving narrative that spans three countries, von Trotta turns the often invisible passion of thought into immersive, dramatic cinema. | |||||||||||||
| View Trailer | Review forthcoming | ||||||||||||
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| There is love, laughter and whisky galore in Ken Loach’s (The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Kes, Bread and Roses) latest film. Winner of the 2012 Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize, The Angels’ Share is a comic fable about wasted talent and what happens when we are given a chance in life. | |||||||||||||
| The story hinges on Robbie, a young Glasgow man caught in a destructive cycle of violence, criminality and long-term unemployment. Soon to become a father, Robbie is sent by a lenient court judge to atone for his latest crimes on a “community payback” scheme. Here he meets a friendly gang of fellow misfits supervised by Harry (John Henshaw), a kindly Englishman and Scotch whisky aficionado. Discovering he has a natural nose as a whisky connoisseur, Robbie spots a chance to turn his life around. As he moves from a world of court cases, dust-ups in stairwells, street chases and knife fights to a different universe of jokey neds in kilts and rarefied folk discussing single malts, he learns that a share of whiskey is lost to evaporation each year, a little fact that makes a rare cask of whiskey the perfect target for a heist. A hilarious story about second chances, The Angel’s Share is ultimately a heart-warming celebration of kindness, friendship and forgiveness. | |||||||||||||
| View Trailer | Review forthcoming | ||||||||||||
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| Jake Haisley’s staff pick. | |||||||||||||
| The third feature from director Louis Malle (Au Revoir Les Enfants, My Dinner With Andre), Zazie Dans le Metro is a delightfully frenetic romp through the streets of early 60s Paris, following the exploits of Zazie, a precocious, irreverent, and eminently mischievous ten year old looking to make the most of her weekend in the city. | |||||||||||||
| A mix of light-hearted satire and old brash slapstick with a healthy dose of surrealistic weirdness, Zazie‘s bright, fluid cinematography and wildly playful editing style capture a more off-color Paris that belies the romance and mystique that frequently characterize the city on film. With puckish disregard for conventions of cinematic storytelling, Zazie packs dual punch of inventiveness and attitude that sets it apart even among the boundary-pushing films of the French New Wave. – Jake Haisley. In French and Russian with subtitles. |
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| This event is organized by Occupy Northern Dutchess and co-sponsored by Occupy New Paltz and Occupy Poughkeepsie. STRIKE DEBT: ROLLING JUBILEE is a strategy originating with Occupy Wall Street to strike at the heart of the debilitating role of debt in today’s economic life. Andrew Ross, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and Astra Taylor, filmmaker and author, will speak on the purpose and activities of Rolling Jubilee Initiative. Satirist and poet, Mikhail Horowitz, and musician Gilles Malkine will provide entertainment. |
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| Our world is permeated by debt at every level. In the US, 62% of all bankruptcies are due to medical debt; student debt reached the one trillion dollar mark over a year ago; rising costs and stagnant wages have thrown millions into debt simply to maintain their livelihood; the housing crash, driven by predatory lending, led to millions of foreclosures and the concomitant loss of equity. For every $100 of income today, there is $154 of debt in the average U.S. household. Bundling individual debt into “packages,” financial institutions sell debt on an open market at a fraction of the value of the original loans, while buyers seek to collect on the debt or some profitable percentage of it. But “Jubilee” is the age-old practice of debt forgiveness, and today, Rolling Jubilee purchases these packages and abolishes individuals’ debt. Thousands have already had their medical debt disappear in this way. Contributions from liberated debtors and donations from supporters of the initiative make it possible for more loan packages to be purchased and more debt abolished — hence the name “Rolling” Jubilee. Occupy Northern Dutchess, Occupy New Paltz, and Occupy Poughkeepsie invite folks in the Hudson Valley to join the campaign. Suggested donation is $15. Proceeds will go toward the Occupy Wall Street STRIKE DEBT initiative. |
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| Occupy Northern Dutchess | |||||||||||||
| Rolling Jubilee | Strike Debt | ||||||||||||
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| Devin Pickering’s staff pick. | |||||||||||||
| Dreams die hard in wintery Atlantic City. | |||||||||||||
| For his electrifying follow-up to the smash success of Five Easy Pieces, Bob Rafelson dug even deeper into the crushed dreams of wayward America. Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern play estranged siblings David and Jason, the former a depressive late-night-radio talk show host, the latter an extroverted con man; when Jason drags his younger brother to a dreary Atlantic City and into a real-estate scam, events spiral toward tragedy. The King of Marvin Gardens, also starring a brilliant Ellen Burstyn as Jason’s bitter aging beauty-queen squeeze, is one of the most devastating character studies of the seventies. – Devin Pickering |
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