UPCOMING FILMS

OUT OF THE PAST

Crime – Drama – Film Noir

Jacques Tourneur

US, 1947, 97′, English

“”Out of the Past” (1947) is one of the greatest of all film noirs, the story of a man who tries to break with his past and his weakness and start over again in a town, with a new job and a new girl. The movie stars Robert Mitchum, whose weary eyes and laconic voice, whose very presence as a violent man wrapped in indifference, made him an archetypal noir actor. The story opens before we’ve even seen him, as trouble comes to town looking for him. A man from his past has seen him pumping gas, and now his old life reaches out and pulls him back.”
Roger Ebert

WILD TALES

Comedy – Drama – Thriller

Damián Szifron

Argentina | Spain | France | UK, 2014, 122′, Spanish with English subtitles

A movie full of injustice that make people stressed and depressed. It’s complete and full of irresistible episodes indulging in storm feelings with intense, dark humour, Tragedy, and violence are predominant in WILD TALES.
The film is divided into six different pieces:
(1) (Pasternak) is a person who is bullied all his life until he decides to unknowingly gather everyone on the same plane. What will happen? (2) (The Rats) A waitress decides to put poison in a client after she realizes that he has caused an economic tragedy in her family. (3) (The Strongest) Two drivers on a lone highway fall in a big alteration to an inspectable tragic end. (4) (Little Bomb) A demolition engineer had parked in the wrong place which made him turn mad against society. About that fack destroying his private and professional life. How come? (5) (The Proposal) An incautious son of a wealthy family has driven over a pregnant woman when he was drunk. The parents try to pay the groundkeeper to take the blame for the boy. During the investigation, everybody became part of the extortion. (6) (Until death do us apart) During a wedding party, the bride realises that the new husband has been unfaithful then she turns everything tragic in revenge.

VI HAR VÅR EGEN SÅNG

Documentary – Music

Tommy Goldman | Dick Idestam-Almquist | Stefan Jarl

Sweden, 1976, 100′, Swedish | English | Danish | Spanish

I protest mot Eurovison song contest i Stockholom 1975 arrangerades Alternativfestivalen. Vi har vår egen sång är dokumentärfilmen om denna festival. Filmen bjuder på klassiska band och låtar från den svenska och europeiska alternativa musikrörelsen. Exempelvis Doing the omoralsik schlagerfestival framförda av Nationalteatern under namnet Sillstryparen från Göteborg.

Introduktion av Fredrik Egefur från Arbetarrörelsens arkiv.

QUADROPHENIA

Drama – Music

Franc Roddam

UK, 1979, 120′, English with English subtitles

The Who’s classic rock opera Quadrophenia was the basis for this invigorating coming-of-age movie and depiction of the defiant, drug-fueled mod subculture of early 1960s London. Our antihero is Jimmy (Phil Daniels), a teenager dissatisfied with family, work, and love. He spends his time knocking around with his clothes-obsessed, pill-popping, scooter-driving fellow mods, a group whose antipathy for the motorcycle-riding rockers leads to a climactic riot in Brighton.

Director Franc Roddam’s rough-edged film is a quintessential chronicle of youthful rebellion and turmoil, with Pete Townshend’s brilliant songs (including “I’ve Had Enough,” “5:15,” and “Love Reign O’er Me”) providing emotional support, and featuring Sting and Ray Winstone in early roles.

(The Criterion Collection)

****** STYLISH MISFITS: WE ARE MODS! ********

This May we will show three films “Quadrophenia” (1979), “They Call Us Misfits/ Dom Kallar Oss Mods” (1968) and “A Respectable Life/ Ett Avständigt Liv” (1979), all exploring mods subculture and the drive behind it.

Emerging in the early 60s, the ‘Modernists’ were an aspirational subculture of young men and women who dressed smartly and beautifully as a statement of rebellion against the austerity of their parent’s generation. Eventually morphing into the Swinging Sixties, this generation of youngsters helped define the teenager.

THE ZONE OF INTEREST

Drama – History – War

Jonathan Glazer

US | UK | Poland, 2023, 105′, German | Yiddish | Polish with Swedish subtitles

“It begins in birdsong. A summer idyll. The plucking of wild strawberries, bathing in a lazy river, a family picnic with the bucolic beauty and old-world charm of a Carl Larsson painting.

Paradise.

The etymological origin of the word is “walled garden.” And this is where we find ourselves in Jonathan Glazer’s extraordinary film “The Zone of Interest.” Within that wall you will smell, taste and, most importantly, see and hear what it contains.

In just 10 minutes, Glazer achieves what one could argue is the most chilling cinematic depiction of the Holocaust ever committed to film — through the simple act of Hedwig Höss applying another woman’s lipstick. A woman we will never meet, yet whose absence is stomach-turning to the extreme. The thief, and Frau Höss as played by Sandra Hüller supplies new meaning to the word, lives in a house whose guestbook glows with reviews dutifully read aloud by children following their parents’ goosesteps. But Glazer doesn’t point or give us signposts, he simply adopts us into the family where we take up residence in the most quotidian and intimate manner.

The experience is naked, and he trusts we will pay attention much in the way a child listens to their parents from the backseat of a car. And while Glazer’s use of sound is masterful, so is his eye, the way it forces us to see the world through the Höss family’s, ultimately making us complicit when what we really want to do is scream at the screen.

Stop. Please God, make them stop.

For those familiar with Glazer’s films it’s no surprise his approach here is unencumbered by tropes, genre conceits, or the cinematic shorthand we often take for granted. Over his twenty-four-year career as one of our finest filmmakers, Glazer has consistently executed high-wire interpretations of genre, and in the process completely reinvented them: crime (“Sexy Beast”), the paranormal (“Birth”), science fiction (“Under the Skin”). His pictures within these frames are mind-blowingly unique, as if he’d never seen anything that had been done before.

“The Zone of Interest” is just as enigmatic and urgent. For we live in a time fraught with all kinds of walls used to ghettoize the other. A paradise from which it feels harder and harder to escape.

Glazer’s art drives us to a place where we have no choice but to try.”

Todd Field (director of Tàr, In the Bedroom and Little Children)

WHIP IT

Drama – Sport

Drew Barrymore

US, 2009, 111′, English

“Whip It” is an unreasonably entertaining movie, causing you perhaps to revise your notions about women’s Roller Derby, assuming you have any. The movie is a coming-together of two free spirits, Drew Barrymore and [Elliot] Page, and while it may not reflect the kind of female empowerment Gloria Steinem had in mind, it has guts, charm, and a black-and-blue sweetness. Yes, it faithfully follows the age-old structure of the sports movie, but what a sport, and how much the Derby girls love it.

Yes, the movie has cliches. Yes, it all leads up to a big game. Yes, there is a character’s validating appearance near the end. Yes, and so what? The movie is miles more intelligent than most of the cream-of-wheat marketed to teenage girls. Funnier, more exciting, even liberating.

(Roger Ebert)

DOM KALLAR OSS MODS
||
THEY CALL US MISFITS

Documentary

Stefan Jarl | Jan Lindqvist

Sweden, 1968, 100′, Swedish with English subtitles

The first in Stefan Jarl’s Mods Trilogy, this film documents the life of two teenagers, Kenta and Stoffe. With interviews from the two boys and their friends about their hedonistic lifestyle, and what their future holds, the film explores the highs and lows of mod lifestyle in 1960s Stockholm, Sweden.

Mods Trilogy consists of three feature films shot over a quarter of a century. A chronicle of the tattered proletariat, with Kenta and Stojfe and their chilclren in the leading roles. With Death as the most important subordinate character and the welfare society’s decline as foundation.

****** STYLISH MISFITS: WE ARE MODS! ********
This May we will show three films “Quadrophenia” (1979), “They Call Us Misfits/ Dom Kallar Oss Mods” (1968) and “A Respectable Life/ Ett Avständigt Liv” (1979), all exploring mods subculture and the drive behind it.

Emerging in the early 60s, the ‘Modernists’ were an aspirational subculture of young men and women who dressed smartly and beautifully as a statement of rebellion against the austerity of their parent’s generation. Eventually morphing into the Swinging Sixties, this generation of youngsters helped define the teenager.

FAHRENHEIT 11/9

Documentary – Drama – War

Michael Moore

US, 2018, 128′, English | Arabic with English subtitles

Fahrenheit 11/9, is a provocate and comedic look at the times we are currently living in. Referring to the two highlights of the most important issues of the presidential elections 2016 in the United States of America; How the-fuck did we get here? and how the-fuck do we get out of this era of Donald Trump?
The filmmaker Michael Moore is best known for controversial documentaries. Moore`s films are predominant in producing political subjects such as attacks on corruption and greedy business corporations…
Let’s enjoy this current and criticism masterpiece.

ALL OF US STRANGERS

Drama – Fantasy – Romance

Andrew Haigh

US | UK, 2023, 105′, English

Partway through of All of Us Strangers, the neighbors-turned-lovers played by Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal are draped across jostled sheets, trading intimacies. Harry (Mescal), who’s young enough to have grown up unafraid of AIDS, is out to his parents, but caught in a sort of no man’s land between acceptance and rejection. They don’t say much about Harry being gay and he mostly stays away from home.

“I’ve always felt like a stranger in my own family,” he says, more resigned than melancholy as he reflects that his parents are closer with his siblings. Adam (Scott), a generation Harry’s senior, looks at him with pain and affection. Isn’t it sad to be cast into orbit, far from the love that once seemed so certain?

The collision of traumatic loss with childhood innocence is the deeply affecting throughline of the film, directed by Andrew Haigh and based on the 1987 novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada. Early on, Adam reveals that own parents were killed in a car crash just before he turned 12. “It was a long time ago,” he says, shrugging off Harry’s condolences with a half-smile. “I don’t think that matters,” Harry responds.

Haigh’s film makes the persuasive case that it’s essential to face the pain our families have inflicted, no matter how much time has passed since the first blow. Whether we contend with the people who hurt us in reality or wrestle with the inner demons they instilled in us, trauma must be confronted, one way or the other. The ripple effects of those formative experiences extend far beyond their circumstances and often outlive the people we once expected to love us without exception.

(Naveen Kumar, Them)

12 ANGRY MEN

Crime – Drama

Sidney Lumet

US, 1957, 96, English

A movie classic does not get much more ‘must see’ than this!
One of those rare movies with an IMDB rating over 9 (there are just six other), it’s placed number five on IMDBs 250 highest rated movies ever.

Twelve people, locked in a room, deciding over life and death. Taking place almost entirely in one room and containing no gunfights, car chases or other action set pieces, it has still managed to put countless viewers at the edge of their seats since it’s release in 1957, thanks to it’s acting, script and clever camerawork.

Director Sidney Lumet used the camera in a progressive way.
At the beginning of the film, the cameras are positioned above eye level and mounted with wide-angle lenses, to give the appearance of greater depth between subjects, but as the film progresses the focal length of the lenses is gradually increased. By the end of the film, nearly everyone is shown in closeup, using telephoto lenses from a lower angle, which decreases or “shortens” depth of field. Lumet stated that his intention in using these techniques with cinematographer Boris Kaufman was to create a nearly palpable claustrophobia.

HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH

Comedy – Drama – Music

John Cameron Mitchell

US | Canada, 2001, 95′, English | German with English subtitles

It’s been a decade since I first wrote about John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I was just a baby at 22, casually failing a number of my university classes due to a mix of laziness, day-job exhaustion (which has gotten worse since), and a greater interest in scrolling down iCheckMovies. At this age, I still thought of myself as cis, not so far removed from my high school days, when I thought leaning into masculinity would make me “not like those other gays” and more appealing and accessible to those around me.

Revisiting that essay, I see the seeds of whom I’d become down the road, not just in the writing but also in the feeling behind the writing. Like Hedwig never imagined having to truly reflect on the cards life had dealt them, wandering aimlessly or purposefully (depending on your reading of the ending), I never imagined that my perspectives on queerness and cinema would one day be so challenged. Every queer film I encounter today is a new chance for me to reassess what queerness can look like in cinema. With such a malleable term as “queer cinema,” we have to create our own definition and understanding: for me, it is not to fall in line with the status quo, trying to blandly mimic convention, but to dive into what it means to exist as the “other” in any given situation.

But Hedwig is why I’m here. 

In Hedwig, transition is less about gender and more about how these myriad identities are all part of a whole. The film reminds me that each discovery in our lives allows us to transition to the next stage, to again and again reshape our engagement with everything from gender to art.

In “Wig in a Box,” Hedwig may sing that she turns back to herself as soon as she wakes up, but her dreams are part of her waking reality. I once referred to film and character alike as “an over-the-top mess,” but never took the time to reflect on why that “mess” was a feature, not a bug. To be queer is to be a mess, to be strange, to be an oddity in the face of normalcy, to be the abject in a populace that seeks exaltation. Every perfectly manicured personality is a piece of her. If “The Origin of Love” posits that each of us is two individuals, I challenge that by suggesting that maybe our identities are a lot more like some grotesque mound of flesh out of a Clive Barker novel: each person, or piece of art, or life experience we ingest becomes an indispensable part of us, for better or worse. It may look like a mess, but it sure is a lot more fun. Hedwig is so much more complicated than the “scarred person” I once dismissed her as; she deserves more than the simple labels prescribed to her.

(And I Turn Back to Myself. Juan Barquin Revisits Hedwig and the Angry Inch. REVERSE SHOT | SYMPOSIUM)