94% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes
“Destined to be a cult classic, this absorbing second feature from Iran-born, Denmark-based director Ali Abbasi is based on a short story by “Let the Right One In” author John Ajvide Lindqvist” – Alissa Simon, Variety
Read the positive reviews from Glenn Kenny, New York Times and Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times.
Customs officer Tina is known for her extraordinary sense of smell. It’s almost as if she can sniff out the guilt on anyone hiding something.
But when Vore, a suspicious-looking man, walks past her, her abilities are challenged for the first time ever.
Tina can sense Vore is hiding something she can’t identify. Even worse, she feels a strange attraction to him. As Tina develops a special bond with Vore and discovers his true identity, she also realizes the truth about herself.
Tina, like Vore, does not belong to this world. Her entire existence has been one big lie and now she has to choose: keep living the lie or embrace Vore’s terrifying revelations.
100% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes; New York Times Critic’s Pick
2018 Sundance Film Festival – Winner: Directing Award, U.S. Documentary
The 2018 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege “for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict,” according to the Norwegian Nobel Committee announcement on 5 October 2018 in Oslo, Norway. Nadia Murad is the first Iraqi to be awarded a Nobel prize.
Twenty-three-year-old Nadia Murad’s life is a dizzying array of exhausting undertakings-from giving testimony before the U.N. to visiting refugee camps to soul-bearing media interviews and one-on-one meetings with top government officials.
With deep compassion and a formal precision and elegance that matches Nadia’s calm and steely demeanor, filmmaker Alexandria Bombach follows this strong-willed young woman, who survived the 2014 genocide of the Yazidis in Northern Iraq and escaped the hands of ISIS.
Nadia has become a relentless beacon of hope for her people, even when at times she longs to lay aside this monumental burden and simply have an ordinary life.
100% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes
This genre-defying film weaves an original animated hero’s journey with poetic documentary scenes to create an inspiring tale of perseverance.
★★★★★
“A joyous, affecting, and incredible piece of documentary filmmaking.”
–Chris Olson, UK Film Review
Under the guidance of acclaimed South African storyteller Gcina Mhlophe, five orphaned children from Swaziland collaborate to craft a collective fairytale drawn from their darkest memories and brightest dreams.
Their fictional character, Liyana, is brought to life in innovative animated artwork as she embarks on a perilous quest to rescue her young twin brothers. The children’s real and imagined worlds begin to converge, and they must choose what kind of story they will tell – in fiction and in their own lives.
LIYANA is a tribute to creativity, the strength of the human spirit, and the healing power storytelling.
LIYANA has won more than 25 jury and audience awards and screened at more than 80 film festivals around the world.
94% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes
THE GREAT BUSTER celebrates the life and career of one of America’s most influential and celebrated filmmakers and comedians, Buster Keaton, whose singular style and fertile output during the silent era created his legacy as a true cinematic visionary.
Filled with stunningly restored archival Keaton films from the Cohen Film Classics library, THE GREAT BUSTER is directed by Peter Bogdanovich, a filmmaker and cinema historian whose landmark writings and films on such renowned directors as John Ford and Orson Welles have become the standard by which all other studies are measured.
Keaton’s beginnings on the vaudeville circuit are chronicled, as is the development of his trademark physical comedy and deadpan expression that earned him the lifelong moniker of “The Great Stone Face”, all of which led to his career-high years as the director, writer, producer and star of his own short films and features.
Interspersed throughout are interviews with nearly two-dozen collaborators, filmmakers, performers and friends, including Mel Brooks, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, Dick van Dyke and Johnny Knoxville, who discuss Keaton’s influence on modern comedy.
Bogdanovich briefly covers Keaton’s loss of artistic independence and later career decline before focusing more deeply on his extraordinary output from 1923 to 1929, which yielded 10 remarkable feature films (including The General and Steamboat Bill, Jr.). These enduring films have immortalized him as one of the greatest actor-filmmakers in the history of cinema.
Nina Geld (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is an up-and-coming comedian in New York City. She’s funny, smart and has worked hard to build a career for herself in the male-dominated world of stand-up.
But when it comes to romantic relationships, Nina’s life is a mess. Random guys in bars, abusive married men (Chace Crawford), and an inability to stand up for herself finally convince Nina it’s time for a change.
She packs up and moves to Los Angeles, for a once in a lifetime opportunity to audition for Comedy Prime — the end all, be all of late night comedy.
After killing it in Los Angeles, she meets chill contractor Rafe Hines (Common), who tempts the brash New Yorker into considering commitment. Sublimating her own desire to self-destruct, Nina has to answer the question, once and for all, of whether women can indeed have it all.
91% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes
Now the top-selling female artist in the world, Yayoi Kusama overcame countless odds to bring her radical artistic vision to the world stage. For decades, her work pushed boundaries that often alienated her from her peers and those in power in the art world.
Kusama was an underdog with everything stacked against her-the trauma of growing up in Japan during World War II, life in a dysfunctional family that discouraged her creative ambitions, sexism and racism in the art establishment, mental illness in a culture where that was a particular shame, and eventually growing old and continuing to pursue and be devoted to her art full time.
In spite of it all, Kusama has endured and has created a legacy of artwork that spans the disciplines of painting, sculpture, installation art, performance art, poetry, and novels.
After working as an artist for over six decades, people around the globe are experiencing her Infinity Mirrored Rooms in record numbers, as Kusama continues to create new work every day.
97% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes
A darkly comic fable set in contemporary Zambia, Rungano Nyoni’s debut feature is a bold satire of the often contradictory nature of traditional beliefs and modern culture.
When eight-year-old Shula turns up alone and unannounced in a rural Zambian village, the locals are suspicious. A minor incident escalates to a full-blown witch trial, where she is found guilty and sentenced to life on a state-run witch camp. There, she is tethered to a long white ribbon and told that if she ever tries to run away, she will be transformed into a goat.
As the days pass, Shula begins to settle into her new community, but a threat looms on the horizon. Soon she is forced to make a difficult decision – whether to resign herself to life on the camp, or take a risk for freedom.
At times moving, often funny and occasionally surreal, I Am Not a Witch offers spellbinding storytelling with flashes of anarchic humor. Audacious and unforgettable, it showcases Rungano Nyoni as a fresh and fearless new voice in British film.
95% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. This irreverent documentary delivers an environmental message with a dose of local lore and bayou wisdom.
Hard headed Louisiana fisherman Thomas Gonzales doesn’t know what will hit him next. After decades of hurricanes and oil spills he faces a new threat – hordes of monstrous 20 pound swamp rats.
Known as “nutria,” these invasive South American rodents breed faster than the roving squads of hunters can control them. And with their orange teeth and voracious appetite they are eating up the coastal wetlands that protects Thomas and his town of Delacroix Island from hurricanes.
But the people who have lived here for generations are not the type of folks who will give up without a fight. Thomas and a pack of lively bounty hunters are hellbent on saving Louisiana before it dissolves beneath their feet.
It is man vs. rodent. May the best mammal win.
HELD OVER!
Starring Gael García Bernal, Leonardo Ortizgris, Alfredo Castro, Simon Russel Beale, Bernardo Velasco, Leticia Brédice, Ilse Salas and Lisa Owen.
Well into their 30s, Juan Nuñez and Benjamín Wilson still can’t seem to finish veterinary school or leave their parents’ homes. Instead, they wallow in comfortable limbo in the district of Satelite, Mexico City’s version of an American suburb. On a fateful Christmas Eve, however, they decide it’s finally time to distinguish themselves by executing the most infamous cultural artifacts heist in all of Mexican history.
Excusing themselves from the traditional family dinners and seizing on the holiday’s lax security – not to mention the sheer improbability of their crime – they loot Mexico’s iconic National Anthropology Museum of its most precious pieces and embark upon a misadventure that will forever change their lives.
The magnitude of the theft exceeds the amateur thieves’ expectations, and by the very next morning they realize, too late, the full scope and implications of their actions. Stumbling through the next steps of their ill-conceived plan, they leave everything behind and set off on a journey that takes them from the Mayan ruins of Palenque to the decadent underworld of Acapulco Bay in a futile effort to fence treasures so valuable and recognizable that no one dares acquire them.
HELD OVER!
100% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes
This documentary follows a litter of puppies from the moment they’re born and begin their quest to become guide dogs for the blind.
**On Wednesday, October 10, stay for a Post-film Talk after the 5:10 PM screening, with West Hartford resident and Guide Dogs for the Blind Graduate Andrea Giudice.
Cameras follow these pups through an intense two-year odyssey as they train to become dogs whose ultimate responsibility is to protect their blind partners from harm. Along the way, these remarkable animals rely on a community of dedicated individuals who train them to do amazing, life-changing things in the service of their human.
The stakes are high and not every dog can make the cut. Only the best of the best. The pick of the litter.
Directors Dana Nachman and Don Hardy (who previously co-directed the feature docs The Human Experiment, Witch Hunt, and Love Hate Love) introduce us to a group of unique canine characters along with their human counterparts.
Pick of the Litter is a wonderful reminder of the extraordinary relationships we have with our dogs, especially those that we work beside each day.
October 7 | 5 PM: Film Screening and Post-film Panel Discussion
Three lives changed forever.
Mark Newman is talking to his wife when a stray bullet from a teenager’s gun suddenly strikes him in the chest. As Newman fights for his life in the hospital, the young perpetrator must decide whether to take responsibility for his actions.
Panelists
–Tyrek Marquez, gun shot survivor, 17 years old, Hartford Resident.
–Dr. David Shapiro, Chief of Surgery Critical Care; Vice Chairman Surgery Service Line; Interim Chief Quality Officer Saint Francis Hospital, Hartford.
–Brent Peterkin, Statewide Coordinator for Project Longevity, a Dept. of Justice gun violence prevention program initiated here in Connecticut. Brent is also a Board Member of Connecticut Against Gun Violence.
#UNLOAD is an arts-based initiative in Connecticut that seeks to drive consensus around the divisive issue of gun violence. This screening and discussion at Real Art Ways are one of the many events taking place across the state this year to create the conversation.
For Freedoms is a hub for artists and arts institutions who want to be more engaged in public life. They believe art can be a vehicle that broadens participation and deepens public discussions of civic issues and core values.
Additional Unload Foundation Inc. events happening:
– Guns in the Hands of Artists
Exhibition through Oct. 13, Fairfield University Art Museum.
– Unload: Pick Up the Pieces Opening Reception
Exhibition opening Oct. 11, Ely Center of Contemporary Art.
DARK MONEY, a political thriller, examines one of the greatest present threats to American democracy: the influence of untraceable corporate money on our elections and elected officials.
The film takes viewers to Montana—a frontline in the fight to preserve fair elections nationwide—to follow an intrepid local journalist working to expose the real-life impacts of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.
Through this gripping story, DARK MONEY uncovers the shocking and vital truth of how American elections are bought and sold.
This Sundance award-winning documentary is directed/produced by Kimberly Reed (Prodigal Sons).
When filmmakers Elan and Jonathan Bogarín lose their beloved grandmother Annette, they face a profound question: When a loved one dies, what do we do with the things they leave behind?
Turning documentary on its head, the Bogaríns embark on a magical-realist journey to discover who their grandmother really was, transforming her cluttered New Jersey home of 71 years into a visually exquisite ruin where tchotchkes become artifacts, and the siblings become archaeologists.
With help from physicists, curators and archivists-and the added inspiration of a decade of interviews with the vivacious octogenarian herself-they excavate the extraordinary universe contained in Annette’s home.
306 Hollywood playfully transforms the dusty fragments of an unassuming life into an epic metaphor for the nature of time, memory and history.
Madeline (newcomer Helena Howard) has become an integral part of a prestigious physical theater troupe. When the workshop’s ambitious director (Molly Parker) pushes the teenager to weave her rich interior world and troubled history with her mother (Miranda July) into their collective art, the lines between performance and reality begin to blur. The resulting battle between imagination and appropriation rips out of the rehearsal space and through all three women’s lives.
Writer/director Josephine Decker has long been an independent filmmaker to admire, utilizing a welcome expressionistic approach that imbues her subjects with a vibrant sense of urgency. Anchored by a virtuoso performance from newcomer Helena Howard, whose powerful screen presence commands attention, Decker’s film displays a rare sensitivity for capturing the messy struggles of discovering a sense of one’s self that defies easy narrative categorization.
Roxane Coss, a famous American soprano, travels to South America to give a private concert at the birthday party of rich Japanese industrialist Katsumi Hosokawa.
Just as a handsome gathering of local dignitaries convenes at Vice-President Ruben Ochoa’s mansion, including French Ambassador Thibault and his wife, Hosokawa’s faithful translator Gen, and Russian trade delegate Fyorodov, the house is taken over by guerrillas demanding the release of their imprisoned comrades.
Their only contact with the outside world is through Red Cross negotiator Messner.
Starring Julianne Moore, Ken Watanabe, Sebastian Koch, Thorbjørn Harr and Christopher Lambert.
One Week Only: Friday August 31-Thursday, September 6
Written and directed by Julien Faraut and narrated by Mathieu Amalric, JOHN MCENROE: IN THE REALM OF PERFECTION revisits the rich bounty of 16-mm-shot footage of the left-handed tennis star John McEnroe, at the time the world’s top-ranked player, as he competes in the French Open at Paris’s Roland Garros Stadium in 1984.
Close-ups and slow motion sequences of McEnroe competing, as well as instances of his notorious temper tantrums, highlight a “man who played on the edge of his senses.”
Far from a traditional documentary, Faraut probes the archival film to unpack both McEnroe’s attention to the sport and the footage itself, creating a lively and immersive look at a driven athlete, a study on the sport of tennis and the human body and movement, and finally how these all intersect with cinema itself.
Real Art Ways celebrates Art House Theater Day – Sunday, September 23.
Real Art Ways is part of the Art House Convergence, a nationwide organization of Art House Theaters. Your Real Art Ways membership entitles you to discounted admission at participating Art House Theaters through the Art House Visiting Members Program. Your support matters – you are part of this effort to keep art house cinemas thriving.
About Art House Theater Day
Art House Theater Day 2018 is Sunday, September 23. Theaters across the nation will have special film presentations on this day. Real Art Ways will present the film, Foreign Body.
From the Art House Theater Day website: “Art House Theater Day celebrates the art house theater and the cultural role it plays in a community. It is a day to recognize the year-round contributions of film and filmmakers, patrons, projectionists, and staff, and the brick and mortar theaters that are passionately dedicated to providing access to the best cinematic experience.”
About Foreign Body
Seeking refuge from her Islamist radical brother whom she informed on, a young woman arrives in France illegally following Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution and discovers a new world of both hope and danger, in the fourth feature from writer-director Raja Amari.
In the turbulent aftermath of the Tunisian revolution, young Samia (Sarra Hannachi) flees her homeland. She braves hostile seas in the crossing to France, but once there she finds that her struggles have only just begun. With no friends, no family, and – most crucially – no immigration papers, Samia has to figure out how to make a life and a living in a foreign land.
She meets a young man, Imed (Salim Kechiouche, Blue is the Warmest Color), and soon finds work in the employ of the elegant Leila (the inimitable Hiam Abbass, The Lemon Tree). But her presence in Leila’s middle-class household triggers a shift in its dynamics, and soon Samia is enmeshed in a web of sexual tension.
In Emmanuel Finkiel’s haunting adaptation of Marguerite Duras’s semi- autobiographical novel, The War: A Memoir, famed author (Mélanie Thierry) recounts an emotionally complex story of love, loss, and perseverance against a backdrop of wartime intrigue.
It’s 1944 Nazi-occupied France, and Marguerite is an active Resistance member along with husband Robert Antelme and a band of fellow subversives. When Antelme is deported to Dachau by the Gestapo, she becomes friendly with French Nazi collaborator Rabier (Benoît Magimel) to learn of her husband’s whereabouts.
But as the months wear on with no news of her husband, Marguerite must begin the process of confronting the unimaginable. Using subtly expressionistic imagery and voiceover passages of Duras’s writing, Finkiel evokes the inner world of one of the 20th century’s most revolutionary writers.
Starring: Mélanie Thierry, Benoît Magimel, Benjamin Biolay, Shulamit Adar, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet, Emmanuel Bourdieu.
Set in the Hasidic enclave of Borough Park, Brooklyn, 93QUEEN follows a group of tenacious Hasidic women who are smashing the patriarchy in their community by creating the first all-female volunteer ambulance corps in New York City.
With unprecedented — and insider — access, 93QUEEN offers up a unique portrayal of a group of empowered women who are taking matters into their own hands to change their own community from within.
96% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.
100 years ago 1,200 immigrant miners were violently deported from Bisbee, Arizona.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 21: Local people’s historian and activist Steve Thornton (pictured left) will lead a post-film discussion to compare the intersection of work, immigration and union organizing in 1917 and the present.
Combining documentary and genre elements, the film follows several members of the close knit community as they collaborate with the filmmakers to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Bisbee Deportation, where 1200 immigrant miners were violently taken from their homes by a deputized force, shipped to the desert on cattle cars and left to die.
When the last copper mines closed in 1975, the once-booming Bisbee nearly became another Arizona ghost town, but was saved by the arrival of a generation of hippies, artists and eccentrics that give the place its strange vibe today. Bisbee is considered a tiny “blue” dot in the “red” sea of Republican Arizona, but divisions between the lefties in town and the old mining families remain. Bisbee was once known as a White Man’s Camp, and that racist past lingers in the air.
As we meet the townspeople, they begin to confront the violent past of the Deportation, a long-buried secret in the old company town. As the 100th anniversary of Bisbee’s darkest day approaches, locals dress as characters on both sides of the still-polarizing event, staging dramatic recreations of scenes from the escalating miner’s strike that lead to the Deportation. Spaces in town double as past and present; reenactors become ghosts in the haunted streets of the old copper camp.
Richard plays the sheriff in a Western, Fernando portrays a Mexican miner in a Musical, a local politician is in her own telenovela. These and other enacted fantasies mingle with very real reckonings and it all builds towards a massive restaging of the Deportation itself on the exact day of its centennial anniversary.
