Cinematheque Info on Current Films

In his latest feature, veteran maverick NYC indie filmmaker Abel Ferrara (Ms. 45, Bad Lieutenant) imagines the last day of life on earth for two New Yorkers, an actor (Willem Dafoe) and his much-younger painter girlfriend (Shanyn Leigh). The result is an end-of-the-world movie like no other—no cataclysms, no mass panic, no big-budget special effects—just a mostly ordinary day spent waiting for the final depletion of the ozone layer. Like Lars von Trier in Melancholia, Ferrara has privatized the apocalypse. A 2011 New York Film Festival selection. “An eccentric and moving portrait of souls in extremis…Though he has the visual instincts of a born filmmaker, Mr. Ferrara may be more at home alongside writers like Henry Miller, Hubert Selby Jr., Charles Bukowski and the other hard-bitten, openhearted bards of macho excess, pulp eroticism and existential defeat.” –The NY Times. Cleveland premiere. 35mm. 85 min. www.ifcfilms.com/films/444-last-day-on-earth

Asghar Farhadi’s most recent film is a masterpiece—and won a well-deserved Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. An Iranian married couple, already at odds over whether to leave the country and live elsewhere, find their lives further complicated by a parent suffering from Alzheimer’s and a sudden court case involving a possible murder. This rich and multifaceted work succeeds as domestic drama, suspense thriller, whodunit, and social critique. Great performances! Subtitles. 35mm. 123 min. www.sonyclassics.com/aseparation/

Tim McIntyre, Fran Drescher, Jay Leno, and Laraine Newman star in this rock ‘n’ roll drama inspired by the life of legendary Cleveland/NYC deejay Alan Freed. In the film, Freed organizes a rock show at the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre in 1959, only to watch the long-simmering hostility of police, politicians, and parents to his “devil’s music” finally come to a boil. Features performances by Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, et al. Never released on DVD! 91 min.

Greece’s official entry for the 2012 foreign-film Oscar is another work from the country’s ultra-strange “New Wave,” which surfaced in 2009 with Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth. (Lanthimosco-stars in Attenberg.) The movie tells of an antisocial, sexually inexperienced 23-year-old Greek woman, living in a depressing seaside factory town with her terminally-ill father, who learns about the natural world from Sir David Attenborough’s wildlife documentaries and about the birds and the bees from her GGG friend Bella. “Attenberg shares with the Oscar-nominated Dogtooth a weakness for overgrown innocence and deadpan perversity.” –Time Out Film Guide. No one under 17 admitted! Cleveland premiere. Subtitles. 35mm. 97 min. www.strandreleasing.com

The new feature from the director of Eagle vs Shark is the highest grossing Kiwi movie in New Zealand film history. Boy is a whimsical, crowd-pleasing coming-of-age saga set in a rural village in eastern New Zealand in 1984. It focuses on a Michael Jackson-loving, 11-year-old Maori boy who lives with relatives while his dad is in prison. The boy worships his father, and casts him in his fantastic daydreams as a versatile and charismatic hero. But when Dad turns up out of the blue one day, childish imagination gives way to grown-up reality. The film’s multitalented writer-director Taika Waiti plays the father. “A lovely oddity.” –Christian Science Monitor. Cleveland premiere. 87 min. www.boythemovie.co/nz

One of the five films nominated for this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, the muscular Bullhead tells of a Belgian cattle farmer and his dealings with a shady veterinarian and thugs in a “growth hormone” mafia. This ambitious, beautifully lensed first feature is at once a crime drama, a character study, and a heroic tragedy. “An intense, shattering film…A confident and accomplished, punch-in-the-gut debut.” –The L.A. Times. Cleveland premiere. Subtitles. 35mm color & scope print! 124 min. drafthousefilms.com

Chico and Rita, a bebop pianist and sexy chanteuse in pre-Castro Cuba, witness the blossoming of Cuban jazz in 1950s Havana, postwar New York, and other entertainment capitals in this intoxicating, music-filled animated feature. One of the five films nominated for this year’s animated-feature Oscar, this sensuous, swaying, dreamy movie charts Chico and Rita’s decades-long, on-again/off-again relationship. It also conjures up a pre-revolution Havana pulsating with chic nightlife. Not for kids because of nudity, sex, drug use, etc. From the Oscar-winning Spanish director of Belle Epoque. Original music by Bebo Valdés. Subtitles. 35mm. 94 min. www.gkids.tv/chico/

Tonight’s second movie at the Capitol Theatre is a low-budget homage to cheesy 1950s sci-fi movies that employs aluminum foil in ways that would make Ed Wood proud. A hit at Sundance, CLSASS (great title!) follows a female alien from the environmentally depleted planet of Zots who travels to earth and hits it off with a lovelorn NYC stationery store clerk. Filmmaker Madeleine Olneck will answer audience questions via Skype after the screening. “Enormously likable.” –The NY Times. “A hilarious date movie for couples of all orientations.” –Hollywood Reporter. Cleveland premiere. Blu-ray. 76 min. www.codependentlesbianspacealienseekssame.com Shown on the big screen at the Capitol Theatre, 1390 W. 65th St. at Detroit Ave. on Cleveland’s West Side. Regular Cinematheque prices apply, but no Cinematheque passes, twofers, or radio winners. No Cleveland Cinemas passes or discounts. $9 tickets available in advance at www.clevelandcinemas.com. Free parking available next to theatre and at other lots in the Gordon Square Arts District. Special thanks to Jon Forman and Dave Huffman, Cleveland Cinemas.

France’s official submission for this year’s foreign-film Oscar tells of two young parents, Roméo and Juliette (real-life couple Jérémie Elkaïm and director Valérie Donzelli), who mobilize every resource at their disposal in an all-out attempt to save the life of their young son, diagnosed with a brain tumor. This stylish, spirited movie with a great soundtrack was also co-written by the couple, whose own child faced a life-threatening illness. “A joy to watch…Few viewers will fail to be moved and charmed…Plays like something Jacques Demy and François Truffaut might have cooked up together.” –Screen Int’l.  “Critics” Pick…This story of two people who transform fear into action is inspiring.” –The NY Times. “Declaration of War deals with issues that may scare audiences away. Don't let it.” –Philadelphia Inquirer. Cleveland premiere. Subtitles. 35mm color & scope print! 100 min. www.ifcfilms.com/films/declaration-of-warThis film supported by a generous grant from Maison Française de Cleveland.

Adrien Brody “delivers his finest performance since The Pianist”(Hollywood Reporter) in this new drama by director Tony Kaye (American History X, Lake of Fire). Brody plays a man who chooses to work as a substitute teacher in an inner-city public high school. His status as a sub lets him observe the deep-seated problems that plague students, teachers, and administrators while also letting his keep his distance from them and not get too involved. That is, until he tries to save a teen hooker… With Marcia Gay Harden, Christina Hendricks, James Caan, Lucy Liu, Blythe Danner, and Tim Blake Nelson. “A scrappy testament…Brody, as the semi-fallen idealist, has a haggard eloquence.” –Entertainment Weekly. Cleveland theatrical premiere. 35mm. 97 min. detachment-film.com

The only film by Greece’s late, great filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos to win the top prize at Cannescharts a poetic, metaphysical journey through modern-day Europe. Bruno Ganz (Wings of Deisre, Downfall) plays a dying Greek poet who decides to go on the road and tie up his life’s loose ends before he enters the hospital. After leaving home, he encounters a refugee boy and decides also to return him to his grandmother in Albania.  As the poet crosses borders and traverses frontiers, he takes detours into his own past (via seamless flashbacks) and occasionally hits dead ends in the political present. This elegiac film has all of Angelopoulos’ stylistic signatures: an air of serenity, a stately pace, expressive long takes, serpentine camera movements, shimmering cinematography. Subtitles. 35mm. 132 min. 

The third feature by Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi (A Separation) looks at modern, middle-class marriage against the backdrop of the Persian New Year. A betrothed young woman is drawn into a heated domestic dispute involving the couple she cleans for. Is the husband carrying on an affair with the divorced beauty shop owner who lives next door? The truth comes out in a series of blistering exchanges. “Farhadi keeps us guessing…A compelling, corrosive and unjudgmental account of male-female relationships in contemporary Tehran.” -Time Out Film Guide. Cleveland premiere. Subtitles. 35mm. 102 min.

Winner of Russia’s “Oscar” for Best Picture of the Year (and an audience favorite at the 2010 Cleveland Int’l Film Festival), this candy-colored Cold War musical is set in post-Stalinist 1955 USSR. It focuses on a group of rebellious young people enamored of American fashion, dancing, and jazz (“Hipsters”), and on one outsider, a young Communist party member, who raids their hangout. But when he falls for a cute Hipster chick, he converts to the lifestyle himself, taking up the saxophone and growing a mean pompadour. Wonderful musical numbers! “An endearing curiosity.” –The NY Times. Subtitles. 35mm color & scope print! 125 min. www.leisurefeat.com

Angelina Jolie wrote and directed this love story set during the Bosnian War. A Golden Globe Nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, the movie tells of a Bosnian Serb soldier who discovers that a Muslim woman he once met at a nightclub in pre-war Sarajevo is now a prisoner in a camp he commands. He does his best to protect her from rape and other atrocities. "Rather than a glossy, superficial movie-star vanity project, In the Land of Blood and Honey feels like the sober, hard-hitting work of a humanitarian." -USA Today. Cleveland premiere. Subtitles. 35mm color & scope print! 127 min.

 www.inthelandofbloodandhoney.com 

Why is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once the richest man in Russia, currently sitting in a Siberian prison? Is it because he committed fraud, embezzlement, and tax evasion, as the Russian government claims? Or is it because he was a vocal critic and opponent of Vladimir Putin? Khodorkovsky has long argued that he is a political prisoner deprived of human rights. Dogged German filmmaker and investigator Cyril Tuschi spent years trying to get to the bottom of the case. This film is the result. “(A) blend of Greek tragedy, spaghetti western and judicial farce that defines business and politics in the New Russia.” –NPR. Cleveland premiere. Subtitles. 35mm. 111 min. www.khodorkovsky-movie.com

For his first feature in five years, Finland’s droll master of working-class comedy Aki Kaurismäki forsakes his familiar turf for the titular port city in northern France. There a poor, aging, but happy bohemian working as a shoeshine man decides to hide a young African boy, an illegal immigrant hoping to get to London, from the French authorities. Working with a superb French-Finnish cast, Kaurismäki crafts a warm, funny, humanistic parable of contemporary Europe, as well as a loving tribute to classic French cinema (Melville, Renoir, Carné, Guédiguian). One of the most acclaimed movies of 2011!  "A perfect, deadpan, impishly optimistic fairy tale…Grade A." –Entertainment Weekly. Subtitles. 35mm. 93 min. janusfilms.com/lehavre/

Chow Yun-Fat, Ge You, and Jiang Wen (star of Red Sorghum, director of Devils on the Doorstep) star in Jiang’s spectacular new film, the highest grossing domestic film in Chinese film history at the time of its release. Set in warring 1920s China, the movie is a rollicking action-comedy-western that pays loving tribute to such classics as Once Upon a Time in the West and Yojimbo. It tells of a bandit who poses as mayor of a provincial town and of the corrupt, wealthy businessman who challenges him for local control. “An entertaining hot pot of wry political commentary and general mischief.” –Variety. “Marvelously funny and visually sumptuous.” –The Wall St. Journal. Cleveland premiere. Subtitles. 35mm color & scope print! 132 min. www.letthebulletsfly.wellgomovies.com

Mexico’s official submission for this year’s foreign-film Oscar is one of the most acclaimed movies of the past year. Miss Bala is a darkly comic and stylish thriller in which an aspiring beauty queen from a poor Tijuana family accidentally falls in with a drug lord and his criminal gang. She is transformed into a glamorous and fashionable moll, so her pageant dreams kind of come true. From the fast-rising director of Drama/Mex and I’m Gonna Explode. (He won the Cleveland Int’l Film Festival’s “Someone To Watch” Award in 2009.) “Critics’ Pick…A first-rate art house thriller.” –The NY Times. Adults only! Cleveland theatrical premiere. Subtitles. 35mm color & scope print! 113 min. www.missbala.com

The young woman played by Keira Knightley in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method has her own film. Sabina Spielrein was an 18-year-old Russian-Jew suffering from “hysteria” when she became Carl Jung’s first patient in 1904 Zurich. The two of them fell in love. In time she caused a rift between Jung and his mentor Sigmund Freud, and eventually became a pioneering psychoanalyst herself. This movie uses Spielrein’s letters and diaries (discovered in Switzerland in 1977) to tell her singular story. “Engaging…Should stir psychologists and feminists.” –Variety. Cleveland premiere. Subtitles. 35mm. 90 min.

Think you don’t like modern dance? This amazing, Oscar-nominated movie might prove you wrong! Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire, The Buena Vista Social Club) celebrates the groundbreaking work of his friend and fellow German, legendary dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch (1940-2009), in this longtime dream project. Wenders’ well-positioned cameras capture Bausch and her dancers as they perform some of her most celebrated works (The Rite of Sping, Café Müller, et al.) both on stage and around the German city of Wuppertal, home of Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal since 1972. Shot in digital 3D, Pina will be shown at the Cinematheque in bright, clear 35mm 2D. In any dimension it’s a great movie. East Side Cleveland premiere! Subtitles. 103 min. www.ifcfilms.com/films/pina

Lambasted upon release as everything from a “train wreck” (Roger Ebert) to “audience abuse” (The Onion A.V. Club), this dumb, tasteless movie (derived from a sketch on The Chris Rock Show)is now considered an alt-comedy classic. A young black man rises from a small town outside Gary, Indiana to become an ultra-cool ghetto folk icon: ladies’ man, pop star, and crime-fighting superhero. But when he warns inner-city kids about foods and substances that are bad for them, white corporate America plots to compromise and emasculate him. With Lance Crouther, Wanda Sykes, and Chris Rock. 35mm. 81 min.

One of the most popular films at the 2011 Cleveland Int’l Film Festival tells of a group of guerrilla percussionists who stage anarchic public musical performances in an unnamed European city. Their goal is to realize a four-movement piece entitled “Music for One City and Six Drummers” at various undisclosed public locations. But a tone deaf cop tries to thwart these tuneful terrorists. “Sound of Noise is a dry treat—a solid, self-aware cult pleasure.” –The NY Times. Subtitles. 35mm. 102 min. www.magpictures.com

Is human progress always a good thing? Or could some advances with short-term benefits but long-term liabilities be hastening civilization’s collapse? Renowned thinkers like Stephen Hawking, David Suzuki, Jane Goodall, and Margaret Atwood address these questions in this provocative new film inspired by Ronald Wright’s bestseller A Short History of Progress. “Does a remarkable job weaving together big ideas in a crisp, coherent, easy-to-take fashion…Never becomes informational overload.” –Variety. Cleveland premiere. 35mm. 86 min. www.survivingprogress.com

The latest film by Belgium-based pantomime artists and clowns Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, and Bruno Romy (Iceberg) is another whimsical, absurdist, near-wordless, candy-colored comedy that pays tribute to the sight gags of Jacques Tati, Jerry Lewis, and Buster Keaton. Set in Le Havre (location of another recent fairy tale by Aki Kaurismäki; see 5/19), the film focuses on a hotel night clerk who registers a woman claiming to be a fairy. She even grants him three wishes, but then vanishes after Wishes 1 & 2… “Artful slapstick…Bliss.” –Slant Magazine. “The Fairy continues the French new wave of near-silent cinema.” –NPR. Cleveland premiere. Subtitles. 35mm. 94 min. www.kinolorber.com

In one of his greatest comedies, Jerry Lewis plays a misogynistic man who takes a job as handyman in a large boarding house for young, single women. The film’s enormous set is said to have inspired Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Tati, and Julien Temple. With George Raft. 35mm IB Tech print! 95 min.

#3 on Martin Scorsese’s 2009 list of the “11 Scariest Horror Movies of All Time,” this atmospheric chiller tells of a brother and sister (Ray Milland, Ruth Hussey) who buy an old Gothic mansion on the rocky Cornwall coast for an unusually low price. They soon discover why it was so cheap… This eerie classic, which has some similarities with Hitchcock’s Rebecca, has never been officially released on DVD in the U.S.  Victor Young’s lush music score produced the popular standard “Stella by Starlight.” With Donald Crisp. “An impressive supernatural thriller…Tightens the screws of tension to genuinely frightening effect.” –Time Out Film Guide. 35mm studio archive print! 99 min.

The South Korean director of The Chaser returns with another nerve-wracking, stomach-churning action epic. (At last year’s Cannes Film Festival it whipped the audience into a laughing, clapping frenzy.) The Yellow Sea tells of a debt-ridden Korean-Chinese taxi driver who goes to Seoul to bump off a gangster and also look for his absent wife, who moved there to find work. But a chain of unexpected events sends him running for his own life. Thrilling, virtuosic chase sequences! “Critics’ Pick…A rush of a movie that slips and slides from horror to humor on rivers of blood.” –The NY Times. “Pulse-pounding, mordantly funny…Yet serious and full-bodied enough to achieve a genuinely tragic dimension.” –Variety. Cleveland theatrical premiere. Subtitles. 35mm color & scope print! 136 min. www.theyellowsea.co.uk/

Francis Coppola’s long-planned dream project—about maverick automobile maker Preston Tucker, who manufactured an innovative “car of the future” in 1948—was finally realized in the late 1980s with George Lucas as co-producer. Though a box office flop, Tucker remains one of Coppola’s best and most heartfelt films, with Jeff Bridges as the optimistic, independent visionary brought down by Detroit’s Big Three. The movie is also a showroom for dazzling visuals—not surprising given the contributions of frequent Coppola collaborators cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now, One from the Heart ) and production designer Dean Tavoularis (The Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now). With Joan Allen, Martin Landau, Frederic Forrest, Lloyd Bridges, et al. 35mm. 110 min.

Johnny Depp and an unforgettable Leonardo DiCaprio star in this affecting drama about an unhappy young Iowa man (Depp) who must watch out for his mentally challenged younger brother (DiCaprio, an Oscar nominee for this performance) and provide for his family six years after his father’s suicide. (His morbidly obese mother sits on the couch all day.) This funny, melancholy, poetic movie also stars Juliette Lewis, Mary Steenburgen, John C. Reilly, and Crispin Glover. 35mm. 118 min.

The Cinematheque returns to the Capitol Theatre on Cleveland’s West Side to present a special screening of the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture (and, until The Artist, the only silent film to do so). Wings is a super-production about WWI fighter pilots that stars Buddy Rogers, Richard Arlen, “It Girl” Clara Bow, and Gary Cooper. The movie focuses on two American flyboys who love the same woman, and each other, and airplanes (not necessarily in that order). The thrilling aerial sequences and battle scenes are spectacular but also authentic; director Wellman spent the First World War as a member of the Lafayette Flying Corps, a group of American pilots who flew for the French. Wings has been fully restored for Paramount Pictures’ 100^th anniversary. The restoration preserves not only the 1927 color tinting but also the original music score by legendary silent-film composer John Stepan Zamecnik, born in Cleveland in 1872. “(Justifies) almost every adjectival extravagance.” –Time Out Film Guide. Cleveland revival premiere. DCP. 139 min. Shown on the big screen at the Capitol Theatre, 1390 W. 65th St. at Detroit Ave. Regular Cinematheque prices apply; no Cinematheque passes, twofers, or radio winners. No Cleveland Cinemas passes or discounts. $9 tickets available in advance at www.clevelandcinemas.com. Free parking available next to theatre and at other lots in the Gordon Square Arts District. Special thanks to Jon Forman and Dave Huffman, Cleveland Cinemas.