Film 101: Some Like It Hot at Real Art Ways

You’re Killing Me Susana centers on Eligio (Gael García Bernal), a narcissistic Mexico City soap actor whose wife Susana (Verónica Echegui) has left him without uttering a word. Discovering she’s enrolled in a writing program at an Iowa university, he decides to go after her and persuade her to return to him, but upon arriving soon discovers she’s already moved on. Eligio soon learns it’s going to take a lot more than his usual boyish charisma and sweet talk to win her back.

Based on the novel Deserted Cities (Ciudades Desiertas) by José Agustín, it’s directed by by Roberto Sneider (Tear This Heart Out) and cowritten by Sneider and Luis Camara. You’re Killing Me Susana also stars Ashley Grace, Jadyn Wong, Björn Hlynur Haraldsson and Adam Hurtig.

2017 Academy Award Nominee for Best Animated Feature Film

Through the story of a man shipwrecked on a tropical island inhabited by turtles, crabs and birds, The Red Turtle recounts the milestones in the life of a human being.

2017 Academy Award Nominee for Best Foreign Language Film.

Tanna is set in the South Pacific where Wawa, a young girl from one of the last traditional tribes, falls in love with her chief’s grandson, Dain. When an intertribal war escalates, Wawa is unknowingly betrothed as part of a peace deal.

The young lovers run away, but are pursued by enemy warriors intent on killing them.

They must choose between their hearts and the future of the tribe, while the villagers must wrestle with preserving their traditional culture and adapting it to the increasing outside demands for individual freedom.

Tanna is based on a true story and performed by the people of Yakel in Vanuatu.

Tanna, an extraordinary Australia/Vanuatu co-production, is a Romeo and Juliet story set in one of the world’s last true tribal societies. It is the first feature film shot entirely in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, in a village called Yakel.

The people of this remote community, high in the mountain rainforests near a spitting volcano, truly wear grass skirts and penis sheaths and have rejected colonial and Christian influences in favor of their traditional and pure “Kastom” system of laws and beliefs. Their customs and lifestyle have changed little for centuries.

Before Tanna, they had never before seen a movie or a camera, yet welcomed the filmmakers to live with the tribe for seven months where they absorbed stories and observed ceremonies, with the input and collaboration of the local people.

None of the ‘cast’ had ever acted before, but astonishingly, they passionately and naturally re-created this real-life story from recent tribal history as if they had had years of training.

The movie recently won the Directors Guild of Australia award for Best Director. Earlier, the movie premiered at the Venice Film Festival this past fall, where it won the Audience Award in the International Critics Week sidebar as well as the Best Cinematography prize.

Awards:
Audience Award – Venice Critics’ Week
Best Cinematography – Venice Critics’ Week
Gold Medal, Bentley Dean – Australian Cinematographers Society Victoria Tasmania
Best Director – Skip City International D-Cinema Festival
Longscapes Competition Award – Lake Como Film Festival

Held over for a fourth smash week!

2017 Academy Award Nominee, Best Documentary Feature

In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project, Remember This House. The book was to be a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and successive assassinations of three of his close friends—Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

At the time of Baldwin’s death in 1987, he left behind only thirty completed pages of his manuscript.

Now, in his incendiary new documentary, master filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished. The result is a radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race in America, using Baldwin’s original words and flood of rich archival material.

I Am Not Your Negro is a journey into black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of #BlackLivesMatter. It is a film that questions black representation in Hollywood and beyond. And, ultimately, by confronting the deeper connections between the lives and assassination of these three leaders, Baldwin and Peck have produced a work that challenges the very definition of what America stands for.

HELD OVER – Starring Isabelle Huppert, 2017 Academy Award Nominee for Lead Actress

French writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve (Eden, Goodbye First Love) directs the great Isabelle Huppert in this delicate and affecting tale about a middle-aged professor whose carefully structured life is thrown into disarray when her husband leaves her for another woman, and who finds an unlikely new companion in a former student and radical young communist.

Nathalie (Huppert, also appearing in Souvenir and Elle) is a dedicated and demanding teacher, wife, and mother. She runs her relationships with the same rigor she brings to her study of philosophy. But when Nathalie’s husband announces that he’s leaving her for another woman, the meticulously crafted structures on which her existence is founded begin to crumble.

Truly on her own for the first time, except for a less-than-grateful cat, Natalie is daunted by this new world — until she finds an unlikely friend in a former student, the radical young communist Fabien (Roman Kolinka).

The film is infused with a generous patience. Huppert brings a quiet strength to the character of Nathalie, and Hansen-Løve films her tale with elegance and grace.

Things to Come is heartbreaking but never sentimental, wry but never ironic. It shows that, even though life may never get any easier, it nevertheless offers ceaseless opportunities for growth.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2016 Venice International Film Festival.

From writer/director Tom Ford comes a haunting romantic thriller of shocking intimacy and gripping tension that explores the thin lines between love and cruelty, and revenge and redemption.

Academy Award nominees Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal star as a divorced couple discovering dark truths about each other and themselves.

Hundreds of thousands of Turkish cats roam the metropolis of Istanbul freely. For thousands of years they’ve wandered in and out of people’s lives, becoming an essential part of the communities that make the city so rich.

Claiming no owners, the cats of Istanbul live between two worlds, neither wild nor tame –and they bring joy and purpose to those people they choose to adopt.

In Istanbul, cats are the mirrors to the people, allowing them to reflect on their lives in ways nothing else could.

Critics and internet cats agree – this cat documentary will charm its way into your heart and home as you fall in love with the cats in Istanbul. This film is a sophisticated take on your typical cat video that will both dazzle and educate.

Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.

The latest from legendary director Ken Loach is a gripping, human tale about the impact one man can make.

Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) has worked as a joiner most of his life in Newcastle. Now, for the first time ever, he needs help from the State. Gruff but goodhearted, Blake is a man out of time: a widowed woodworker who’s never owned a computer, he lives according to his own common sense moral code.

But after a heart attack leaves him unable to work and the state welfare system fails him, the stubbornly self-reliant Daniel must stand up and fight for his dignity, leading a one-man crusade for compassion.

He crosses paths with a single mother Katie (Hayley Squires) and her two young children, Daisy and Dylan. Katie’s only chance to escape a one-roomed homeless hostel in London has been to accept a flat in a city she doesn’t know, some 300 miles away.

Daniel and Katie find themselves in no-man’s land, caught on the barbed wire of welfare bureaucracy as played out against the rhetoric of ‘striver and skiver’ in modern day Britain.

Graced with humor and heart, I, Daniel Blake is a moving, much-needed reminder of the power of empathy from one of the world’s greatest living filmmakers.

Toshiro Mifune (1920-97) was the most prominent actor of Japan’s Golden Age of Cinema in the 1950s and 60s. He appeared in nearly 170 films, but his most compelling work was with director Akira Kurosawa with whom he made 16 films.  Together they created enduring works of art — RASHOMON, SEVEN SAMURAI, THRONE OF BLOOD, YOJIMBO, THE BAD SLEEP WELL, RED BEARD — that thrilled audiences and influenced filmmaking around the world. Without them, there would be no MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, Clint Eastwood wouldn’t have A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, and Darth Vader wouldn’t be a samurai.

Just as John Ford and John Wayne elevated the American Western, exploring the human side of America’s violent expansion, Kurosawa and Mifune transformed the chanbara film, the period sword fighting movie, into bold, provocative narratives that pushed beyond the boundaries of the genre and examined the role of the individual in society. Mifune – wry, charismatic and deadly — was the first non-white action star to attract international attention.

MIFUNE: THE LAST SAMURAI explores the evolution of Chanbara movies; Mifune’s World War II experience; his accidental entry into moviemaking; and fortuitous collaboration with Kurosawa. The film is narrated by Keanu Reeves; directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Steven Okazaki; and produced by Toshiaki Nakazawa (13 ASSASSINS and the Academy Award-winning DEPARTURES) and Toichiro Shiraishi.  It focuses on six of Mifune’s greatest films and features interviews with Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Teruyo Nogami (Kurosawa’s longtime script supervisor), Kyoko Kagawa (RED BEARD), Yoshio Tsuchiya (SEVEN SAMURAI), Takeshi Kato (THRONE OF BLOOD), Yoko Tsukasa (YOJIMBO), and many others.

October, 2008. Young nun Colleen (Addison Timlin) is avoiding all contact from her family, until an email from her mother announces, “Your brother is home.”

On returning to her childhood home in Asheville, NC, she finds her old room exactly how she left it: painted black and covered in goth/metal posters.

Her parents (Ally Sheedy & Peter Hedges) are happy enough to see her, but unease and awkwardness abounds. Her brother (Keith Poulson) is living as a recluse in the guesthouse since returning home from the Iraq war.

During Colleen’s visit, tensions rise and fall with a little help from Halloween, pot cupcakes, and GWAR.

Little Sister is a dark comedy about family – a schmaltz-free, pathos-drenched, feel good movie for the little goth girl inside us all.

In this vibrant portrayal of Australian adolescence, Greta Driscoll’s bubble of obscure loserdom is burst when her parents throw her a surprise 15th birthday party and invite the whole school!

Perfectly content being a wallflower, suddenly Greta’s flung far from her comfort zone into a distant, parallel place – a strange world that’s a little frightening and a lot weird, but only there can she find herself.

Equal measures Wes Anderson and Lewis Carroll, GIRL ASLEEP is an enchanting journey into the absurd – and sometimes scary – depths of the teenage mind.

Based on the critically acclaimed production by Windmill Theatre (Adelaide, Australia), Girl Asleep is a journey into the absurd, scary and beautiful heart of the teenage mind.

Also on the bill is the short film, “Pickle.”
Amy Nicholson’s award-winning short “Pickle” has no business being as funny as it is. The award-winning 15-minute short is an energetic and amusing overview of what sounds like an entirely traumatizing experience, as it chronicles 25 years of Tom and Debbie Nicholson’s unbelievably bad luck with a bevy of rescue animals, from the eponymous Pickle the fish to an entire flock of ill-fated fowl.

The film’s official synopsis strikes the appropriate balance between off-kilter humor and almost overwhelming heartache: “Let us reflect on the brief existence of Pickle the fish. Although he could not swim, he was lovingly cared for by a couple that kept him propped up in a sponge. Along with an obese chicken, a cat with a heart condition, and a paraplegic possum, his life is a celebration of man’s eternal capacity to care for all creatures. He will be dearly missed.”

The audacious and grandly entertaining new film from multi-award winning director Pablo Larraín, Neruda is a lavishly-mounted reimagining of the Nobel Prize-winning poet’s pursuit into political exile, and notably marks his reunion with No star Gael García Bernal.

It’s 1948, and the Cold War has reached Chile. In Congress, Neruda (Luis Gnecco) accuses the left-wing government of betraying the Communist Party and is swiftly impeached. The bumbling Police prefect Oscar Peluchonneau (Bernal) is appointed to arrest him.

Neruda tries to flee the country with his wife Delia, but they are forced into hiding. Yet the poet is somehow inspired by the dramatic events of his new life as a fugitive, and uses this struggle as an opportunity to reinvent his work and life, leaving clues for his nemesis designed to make their game of catand- mouse more dangerous, more intimate. Indeed in this ingeniously-crafted tale of the persecuted poet and his implacable adversary, Neruda discovers his own heroic possibilities: a chance to become both a symbol for liberty, and a literary legend.

Gripping, funny and ingeniously conceived, Neruda is undoubtedly Larrain’s finest accomplishment to date, and not to be missed.

HELD OVER!

In Deconstructing The Beatles’ White Album,  composer/producer Scott Freiman takes Beatles fans young and old into the studio with The Beatles as they create their bestselling album, The Beatles (commonly referred to as the White Album).

Released in 1968, the White Album’s thirty songs span almost every style of music—from hard rock to country to chamber music to avant garde. Its recording took place during a remarkable year in Beatles history that included the death of Brian Epstein, the creation of Apple Corps, and a trip to India to study meditation.

In this multimedia presentation, Mr. Freiman transports his audience into Abbey Road Studio for a look at the revolutionary techniques used during the production of “Revolution,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Blackbird,” and other songs from the White Album.

It will be an educational journey into the creative process of The Beatles performances and recording sessions, allowing the audience to see and hear the evolution of these groundbreaking songs and their lasting influence on popular music.

THE BRAND NEW TESTAMENT begins with one simple conceit: God exists, and He’s a jerk. He lives in a high-rise apartment in Brussels and never gets out of His pajamas. He takes sadistic delight in dreaming up new “laws” to torment humanity, and He’s a petty tyrant to his wife and ten year-old daughter, Ea.

Like her brother before her, Ea has had enough of her Father’s abuse and when she spies the right opportunity, she hacks into His computer and leaks to the entire world—by text message—the only thing He has over them: their inevitable death date.

Ea, after escaping and with her Father in pursuit, gathers apostles and writes her own New Testament to try to fix the mess her Father has made of humanity.

Her six apostles —a one-armed woman, a sex maniac, a killer, a woman who has been left by her husband, an office worker, and a gender dysphoric child—learn to celebrate life and love, and provide us with Jaco Van Dormael’s dark, witty and eccentric answer to the loaded question: what would you do if you knew exactly how much time you had left to live?

FINAL WEEKEND!

THE EAGLE HUNTRESS follows Aisholpan, a 13-year-old girl, as she trains to become the first female in twelve generations of her Kazakh family to become an eagle hunter, and rises to the pinnacle of a tradition that has been handed down from father to son for centuries.

Set against the breath-taking expanse of the Mongolian steppe, THE EAGLE HUNTRESS features some of the most awe-inspiring cinematography ever captured in a documentary, giving this intimate tale of a young girl’s quest the dramatic force of an epic narrative film.

While there are many old Kazakh eagle hunters who vehemently reject the idea of any female taking part in their ancient tradition, Aisholpan’s father Nurgaiv believes that a girl can do anything a boy can, as long as she’s determined.

The story begins after Aisholpan has been training with her father’s eagle for many months. As every eagle can only have one master, the time has come for Aisholpan to capture an eagle of her own. Clambering down a sheer rock cliff with a rope, Aisholpan retrieves a fledgling eagle from its nest as its mother circles overhead. Her eagle will live, train, and hunt with her, until she releases it into the wild years later, so the cycle of life can continue.

After months of training her eagle with her father, Aisholpan is ready to test her abilities. She enters a renowned competition, the Golden Eagle Festival, and faces off against 70 of the greatest Kazakh eagle hunters in Mongolia.

The most arduous challenge is yet to come, as the rite-of-passage for every young eagle hunter is to take part in a hunt. Aisholpan must ride with her father deep into the frigid mountains and endure 40 below zero temperatures and perilous landscapes to prove she is a true eagle huntress.

THE EAGLE HUNTRESS is executive produced and narrated by STAR WARS’s Daisy Ridley. Like Ridley’s character “Rey,” Aisholpan never doubts her ability to be as strong or brave as any boy. She recognizes no obstacles and refuses to have her ambition denied.

While she practices an ancient art, Aisholpan’s story is a modern and inspiring one because she represents a world where a young girl’s dreams-no matter how challenging-can come true.

Directed by Otto Bell, THE EAGLE HUNTRESS is narrated by Daisy Ridley, executive produced by Ridley, Morgan Spurlock and Jeremy Chilnick, and produced by Stacy Reiss, Sharon Chang and Otto Bell. The director of photography is Simon Niblett, the editor is Pierre Takal and the film features a stirring end credits song, “Angel by the Wings,” by Sia.