cinema | independent film & video 7 nights a week
Admission:Film Fieldtrips Available for School Groups
Schedule subject to change. Call 860.232.1006 to confirm.
2 for 1 on Monday & Tuesday with the GHAC Let*s Go! Arts Card
"I'm telling you here and now to seek out Fish Tank ...because it's absolute dynamite... It's an explosive female coming-of-age story set against a dreary backdrop of poverty, abuse and neglect." - Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com
"In Fish Tank, nothing goes right, yet Mia’s fate never seems preordained. Her constant motion might or might not be her salvation, but it keeps you in suspense until the last frame—and beyond." David Edelstein, New York Magazine
(UK, 123 mins)
Fri 3/12: 7 PM
Sat 3/13: 2 PM; 4:30 PM; 7 PM
Sun 3/14: 4:30 PM; 7 PM
Mon 3/15 - Weds 3/17: 7 PM
An intimate portrait of soul legend Bill Withers, best known for his classics “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Lean On Me,” “Lovely Day,” “Grandma’s Hands,” and “Just the Two of Us.”
"Still Bill is about a man who topped the charts, walked away from it all in 1985 and is pleased that he did...Withers seems as close to everyday Zen as I can imagine. He talks a great deal about his philosophy, to be sure, but it's direct and manifestly true: Make the most of your chances, do the best you can, stop when you're finished, love your family, enjoy life." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times
"Offstage Bill Withers, the eternal hero of karaoke baritones, exhibits the same gift for aphorism and general soulfulness that informed hit songs like “Lean on Me” and “Ain’t No Sunshine.” This makes much of the biographical documentary Still Bill pleasant and even moving. Looking out the window of a car, pondering his place in the culture, Mr. Withers says: 'I think I’m kind of like pennies. You have ’em in your pocket but you don’t remember they’re there.'”
- Mike Hale, The New York Times
(USA, 78 min.)
A triptych of films from directors Julian Jarrold, James Marsh (Man on Wire) and Anand Tucker.
We'll be screening each part separately. Please see below for running times and showtimes, when available.
"To view this gritty, gripping series is to enter a devil's bargain: Watch and you'll never forget."
- Kenneth Turan, LA Times
"Red Riding Trilogy is an immersive experience like The Best of Youth, Brideshead Revisited or Nicholas Nickleby. Over the course of 302 minutes, we sink into a virtual world: the corrupt police and establishment figures of West Yorkshire in England, at the time of the real-life "Yorkshire Ripper." Peter Sutcliffe, the Ripper, was convicted of killing 13 women, and may have killed more. The fictional Ripper here enjoys the same inexplicable immunity to police investigation."
- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (4 stars)
A neo-noir epic based on horrific, factual events and adapted for the screen from David Peace's series of groundbreaking novels. The Red Riding Trilogy follows controversial stories revolving around the manhunt for the brutal Yorkshire Ripper.
Red Riding Trilogy: 1974 (Part 1)
Opens Friday, March 26
(UK, 102 mins)
directed by Julian Jarrold
Red Riding Trilogy: 1980 (Part 2)
Opens Friday, April 2
(UK, 93 mins)
directed by James Marsh
Red Riding Trilogy: 1983 (Part 3)
Opens Friday, April 2
(UK, 100 mins)
directed by Anand Tucker
"Full of wit, subtle humor, sorrow and insight, bootleg showcases songwriter/poet at peak of his stripped-down powers." - Paste Magazine
"Dressed in a tan safari jacket and playing an acoustic guitar, staring into the night and putting a largely unseen yet palpably present, often audible audience under a spell, Mr. Cohen was a man on a mission and somewhat of a missionary from another world. And, as he sings one dark thought and feeling, his long, lyrical, at times surrealistic words chasing one another, you experience the ancient arts of the shaman one more time." - Manohla Dargis, New York Times
"Murray Lerner's brief but enjoyable Leonard Cohen Live at the Isle of Wight 1970 ... combines his intimate 40-year-old footage of Cohen - mostly performing songs from his first two albums - with shots of the crowd and new interviews with four witnesses, including Joan Baez and Kris Kristofferson." - Peter Hartlaub, San Francisco Chronicle
(64 mins)
"[A] skillfully assembled history of the civil rights movement, with musical interludes. It’s civil rights’ greatest hits: Montgomery, Selma, Birmingham; “Eyes on the Prize,” “We Shall Not be Moved,” “We Shall Overcome.” It’s the kind of film that will have audiences clapping and singing along. And why not? The images and stories may be familiar, but it’s history worth retelling." - Mike Hale, The New York Times
"The film puts a fresh spin on the issues and struggles of the civil-rights movement." - Jennie Punter, The Globe And Mail
(USA/FRANCE/UK, 82 mins)
"Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell’s absorbing, low-key documentary Until the Light Takes Us recounts how a few Norwegian musicians hijacked an obscure offshoot of heavy metal and made it world famous." - Mike Hale, The New York Times
(USA, 93 mins.)
"A straight-ahead, enthralling story of moral courage ... So many people risked their livelihoods to put the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers out there... We have not celebrated Daniel Ellsberg enough. Let’s begin."
- David Edelstein, New York Magazine
"Fortunately, the staunchly committed and controversial Ellsberg, now 78, is still around to tell his history-making tale, and he lends the film gravitas as both its persuasive narrator and primary talking head."
- Gary Goldstein, LA Times
"Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith's film deserves recognition as an exemplary piece of nonfiction filmmaking, it pulses with the suspense and momentum of a sleek thriller -- a wily caper flick that just happens to revolve around one of the most crucial chapters in recent American history."
- Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post
"This is meaty, dramatic stuff - see this movie with your teenagers and watch their jaws hit the floor."
- Ty Burr, Boston Globe
(USA, 82 mins)
"A hard-hitting documentary about a high-cultural brawl."
- Manohla Dargis, New York Times
"Calculated to enrage and pulling it off like gangbusters, Don Argott’s documentary The Art of the Steal pits the legacy of the late Albert C. Barnes’s Barnes Foundation (which boasts arguably the world’s finest collection of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art) against the social-climbing, philistine, downright Nixonian machinations of Philadelphia’s wealthiest—who gamed the system and pried the collection loose in defiance of Barnes’s legal will." - David Edelstien, New York Magazine
"It is perfectly clear exactly what Barnes specified in his will. It was drawn up by the best legal minds. It is clear that what happened to his collection was against his wishes. It is clear that the city fathers acted in obviation of those wishes, and were upheld in a court of appeals. What is finally clear: It doesn't matter a damn what your will says if you have $25 billion, and politicians and the establishment want it." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
"An operatic tour de force." - Mark Peranson, The Globe and Mail
"A fascinating, powerfully acted period drama" - Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
(Italy/France, 128 mins)
in Italian and German with English Subtitles
"Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher's October Country is a beautiful evocation of a time and place -- Mohawk Valley in upstate New York, spanning from one Halloween to the next -- and a loving but unflinching probing of the lives of Mosher's family in the course of a year."
- Kevin Thomas, LA Times
(USA, 80 min)
"A rich, heady fictionalized biography of the exiled Russian poet Joseph Brodsky..." - Stephen Holden, The New York Times (Critic's Pick!)
(Russia, 130 mins) In Russian, with English subtitles.
See more info on our Education programs
Made possible with the support of Real Art Ways Members, Travelers, the George A. and Grace L. Long Foundation, the Fisher Foundation, the Hartford Courant Foundation, the Kohn-Joseloff Foundation and Lincoln Financial.
More Film Field Trip offerings can be found on our education page.
See more info on our Education programs
Made possible with the support of Real Art Ways Members, Travelers, the George A. and Grace L. Long Foundation, the Fisher Foundation, the Hartford Courant Foundation, the Kohn-Joseloff Foundation and Lincoln Financial.
More Film Field Trip offerings can be found on our education page.
