An intimate story of one of the most dramatic transitions of power in the last 2,000 years. Frustrated with the direction of the church, Cardinal Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce) requests permission to retire in 2012 from Pope Benedict (Anthony Hopkins). Instead, facing scandal and self-doubt, the introspective Pope Benedict summons his harshest critic and future successor to Rome to reveal a secret that would shake the foundations of the Catholic Church. Behind Vatican walls, a struggle commences between both tradition and progress, guilt and forgiveness, as these two very different men confront their pasts in order to find common ground and forge a future for a billion followers around the world. Inspired by true events.
Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci star in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, an epic saga of organized crime in post-war America told through the eyes of World War II veteran Frank Sheeran, a hustler and hitman who worked alongside some of the most notorious figures of the 20th century. Spanning decades, the film chronicles one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in American history, the disappearance of legendary union boss Jimmy Hoffa, and offers a monumental journey through the hidden corridors of organized crime: its inner workings, rivalries and connections to mainstream politics.
91% on Rotten Tomatoes
This is the kind of movie – independent, intelligent, moving – that you expect to see at Real Art Ways.
Jim Gaffigan, known for his stand-up, stars with the superb Marin Ireland. Light From Light has elements of suspense – it is a haunted house story, but unlike any you’ve seen; it gets at deep questions that, in the end, have no ready answers. (Also with David Cale, who has appeared on stage at Hartford Stage and Real Art Ways.)
Opening Friday, November 8 at 7 PM.
97% on Rotten Tomatoes
This moving documentary brings the viewer inside an underground hospital, where hope and safety lay for civilians in the Syrian war, and where pediatrician and managing physician Amani Ballour and her colleagues claim their right to work alongside male counterparts.
98% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.
An unpredictable documentary from a fascinating storyteller, Agnès Varda’s new feature documentary sheds light on her experience as a director, bringing a personal insight to what she calls “cine-writing”.
Agnès Varda takes a seat on a theatre stage. This professional photographer, installation artist and pioneer of the Nouvelle Vague is an institution of French cinema but a fierce opponent of any kind of institutional thinking. In this film, she offers insights into her oeuvre, using excerpts from her work to illustrate – more associatively than chronologically – her artistic visions and ideas.
Whether in front of the camera or behind it, Agnès Varda is a visual storyteller who eschews convention and prescribed approaches to drama. Together with some of her fellow travelers, she takes the audience on a journey through her world of unorthodox images.
A World War II satire that follows a lonely German boy named Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) whose world view is turned upside down when he discovers his single mother (Scarlett Johansson) is hiding a young Jewish girl (Thomasin McKenzie) in their attic. Aided only by his idiotic imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler (Taika Waititi), Jojo must confront his blind nationalism.
A cinematic meditation on humanity’s massive reengineering of the planet, ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch is a four years in the making feature documentary film from the multiple-award winning team of Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky.
Third in a trilogy that includes Manufactured Landscapes (2006) and Watermark (2013), the film follows the research of an international body of scientists, the Anthropocene Working Group who, after nearly 10 years of research, are arguing that the Holocene Epoch gave way to the Anthropocene Epoch in the mid-twentieth century, because of profound and lasting human changes to the Earth.
From concrete seawalls in China that now cover 60% of the mainland coast, to the biggest terrestrial machines ever built in Germany, to psychedelic potash mines in Russia’s Ural Mountains, to metal festivals in the closed city of Norilsk, to the devastated Great Barrier Reef in Australia and surreal lithium evaporation ponds in the Atacama desert, the filmmakers have traversed the globe using high end production values and state of the art camera techniques to document evidence and experience of human planetary domination.
At the intersection of art and science, ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch witnesses in an experiential and non-didactic sense a critical moment in geological history — bringing a provocative and unforgettable experience of our species’ breadth and impact.
A modern Mark Twain style adventure story, The Peanut Butter Falcon tells the story of Zak (Gottsagen), a young man with Down syndrome, who runs away from a residential nursing home to follow his dream of attending the professional wrestling school of his idol, The Salt Water Redneck (Thomas Haden Church).
A strange turn of events pairs him on the road with Tyler (LaBeouf), a small time outlaw on the run, who becomes Zak’s unlikely coach and ally. Together they wind through deltas, elude capture, drink whisky, find God, catch fish, and convince Eleanor (Johnson), a kind nursing home employee charged with Zak’s return, to join them on their journey.
Presented with Open Captioning
Moonlight Sonata is a deeply personal memoir about a deaf boy growing up, his deaf grandfather growing old, and Beethoven the year he was blindsided by deafness and wrote his iconic sonata. Their lives weave a story about what we discover when we push beyond loss.
89% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes
Aquarela takes audiences on a deeply cinematic journey through the transformative beauty and raw power of water. Captured at a rare 96 frames-per-second, the film is a visceral wake-up call that humans are no match for the sheer force and capricious will of Earth’s most precious element. From the precarious frozen waters of Russia’s Lake Baikal to Miami in the throes of Hurricane Irma to Venezuela’s mighty Angel Falls, water is Aquarela’s main character, with director Victor Kossakovsky capturing her many personalities in startling cinematic clarity.
The film will be shown in theaters at 48 frames-per-second, double the typical 24 frames-per-second, as projectors with the ability to project at 96-frames-per-second are extremely rare today, but when the time comes that the capacity is there, Aquarela will be one of the first films to be shown at that speed.
El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie reunites fans with Jesse Pinkman (Emmy-winner Aaron Paul). In the wake of his dramatic escape from captivity, Jesse must come to terms with his past in order to forge some kind of future. This gripping thriller is written and directed by Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad.
One of the most controversial and influential American men of the 20th Century, Roy Cohn was a ruthless and unscrupulous lawyer and political power broker whose 28-year career ranged from acting as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Communist-hunting subcommittee to molding the career of a young Queens real estate developer named Donald Trump.
Cohn formulated his playbook in the 50s, but it is all too familiar today: always attack; never admit blame or apologize; use favors and fear to ensure support for your objectives; expertly manipulate the media to gain advantage and destroy your opponents; lie shamelessly, invalidating the idea of truth; weaponize lawsuits; evade taxes and bills; and, most importantly, inflame the prejudices of the crowd by scapegoating defenseless people.
Both, for those who remember Cohn and those who were too young to have any awareness of him, Matt Tyrnauer’s Where’s My Roy Cohn? lays out who Cohn was and how his lessons to his apprentice Donald Trump have shaped contemporary American politics.
New York Times Critics Pick, 95% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes
Pain & Glory tells of a series of reencounters experienced by Salvador Mallo, a film director in his physical decline. Some of them in the flesh, others remembered. First loves, second loves, his mother, mortality, an actor with whom the director worked, the sixties, the eighties, the present and the emptiness, the immeasurable emptiness at the impossibility of continuing to film.
Pain & Glory talks about creation, about the difficulty of separating it from one’s own life and about the passions that give it meaning and hope. In recovering his past, Salvador finds the urgent need to recount it, and in that need he also finds his salvation.
Academy Award Winner: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best International Feature
New York Times Critics Pick, 100% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes
Golden Globe Winner – Best Motion Picture – Foreign Language Film
Bong Joon Ho brings his singular mastery home to Korea in this pitch-black modern fairytale.
Meet the Park Family: the picture of aspirational wealth. And the Kim Family, rich in street smarts but not much else. Be it chance or fate, these two houses are brought together and the Kims sense a golden opportunity. Masterminded by college-aged Ki-woo, the Kim children expediently install themselves as tutor and art therapist, to the Parks.
Soon, a symbiotic relationship forms between the two families. The Kims provide “indispensable” luxury services while the Parks obliviously bankroll their entire household. When a parasitic interloper threatens the Kims’ newfound comfort, a savage, underhanded battle for dominance breaks out, threatening to destroy the fragile ecosystem between the Kims and the Parks. By turns darkly hilarious and heart-wrenching, PARASITE showcases a modern master at the top of his game.
93% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes
Monos, Alejandro Landes’ third feature, is a survivalist saga set on a remote mountain in Latin America. The film tracks a young group of soldiers and rebels — bearing names like Rambo, Smurf, Bigfoot, Wolf and Boom-Boom — who keep watch over an American hostage, Doctora (Julianne Nicholson).
The teenage commandos perform military training exercises by day and indulge in youthful hedonism by night, an unconventional family bound together under a shadowy force know only as The Organization. After an ambush drives the squadron into the jungle, both the mission and the intricate bonds between the group begin to disintegrate. Order descends into chaos and within Monos the strong begin to prey on the weak in this vivid, cautionary fever-dream.
Ronstadt is our guide through her early years of singing Mexican canciones with her family; her folk days with the Stone Poneys; and her reign as the “rock queen” of the ’70s and early ’80s. She was a pioneer for women in the male-dominated music industry; an early advocate for human rights, and had a high-profile romance with California governor Jerry Brown.
Ultimately, her incredible voice was lost to Parkinson’s disease, but her music and influence remain as timeless as ever. With moving performance footage and appearances by collaborators including Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice celebrates an artist whose desire to share the music she loved made generations of fans fall in love with her – and the sound of her voice.
The Mexican-American singer spoke with Terry Gross in 2013 on NPR about her career and her Parkinson’s diagnosis. Listen to it here.
100% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes
When “Fiddler on the Roof” opened on Broadway in 1964, it explored themes of tradition, religion, and anti-Semitism against a modern backdrop of radical social change that addressed gender roles, sexuality, and race. Rare archival footage and interviews with musical luminaries explore the legacy of this long-running, award-winning musical.
A short film written and directed by Ian Ally-Seals and Jules Pitt premiering on September 5th, 2020 at Real Art Ways. Starring Jeff Tingley, Zechara Trinity Powell and Matt Hard.
99% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes – Starring Awkwafina
In this funny, uplifting tale based on an actual lie, Chinese-born, U.S.-raised Billi (Awkwafina) reluctantly returns to Changchun to find that, although the whole family knows their beloved matriarch, Nai-Nai (grandma), has been given mere weeks to live, everyone has decided not to tell Nai Nai herself.
To assure her happiness, they gather under the joyful guise of an expedited wedding, uniting family members scattered among new homes abroad. As Billi navigates a minefield of family expectations and proprieties, she finds there’s a lot to celebrate: a chance to rediscover the country she left as a child, her grandmother’s wondrous spirit, and the ties that keep on binding even when so much goes unspoken.
With The Farewell, writer/director Lulu Wang has created a heartfelt celebration of both the way we perform family and the way we live it, masterfully interweaving a gently humorous depiction of the good lie in action with a richly moving story of how family can unite and strengthen us, often in spite of ourselves.
When the reclusive Christian (Franz Rogowski, Transit) takes a job working the night shift at a big box store, his new manager, Bruno from the Beverage Department (Peter Kurth, Babylon Berlin), teaches him the lay of the land and the delicacy it takes to operate a forklift. Christian becomes enamored by his charming but mysterious co-worker “Sweets Marion” (Sandra Huller, Toni Erdmann), with whom he begins to share flirtatious break room coffees and conversations. But Marion has secrets of her own and when she suddenly goes on sick leave, Christian is tempted to fall into habits of his dark past. An affecting and bittersweet glimpse into the shared connections of a motley group of workers, In The Aisles quietly celebrates the beauty in the day-to-day and the collective pride we take in our jobs with dark humor and nuance.
