Runs & Limited Engagements

Released in 1980 in Britain, this hard-hitting semi-documentary drama set amid the Jamaican/reggae subculture of South London achieved critical acclaim and cult status despite being slapped with an X rating. Considered too incendiary and culturally specific for American import, it is just now receiving its first U.S. release in a newly restored version. Set against a background of rising racial tensions in Thatcher's England, the loose narrative centers on Blue (Forde, front man of the leading reggae group Aswad), DJ for the "sound system" crew Ital Lion, as he and his mates cruise through London in their lion-emblazoned van, cadge sound equipment by hook or by crook, barter for the latest records, and prepare for a musical showdown with the rival crew Shaka. Co-scripted by Martin Stellman (QUADROPHENIA) and first-time director Rosso, lensed by Oscar-winner Chris Menges (THE KILLING FIELDS), and scored by top reggae producer Dennis Bovell, BABYLON presents a sympathetic but unsanitized view of the rude boy world, acknowledging its shortcomings (sexism, homophobia, retaliatory racism) alongside the pervasive white racism and police brutality that finally drives the easygoing Blue to the brink. In English and Jamaican patois with English subtitles. DCP digital. (MR)

Banned in its home nation of Kenya just prior to its international premiere at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, RAFIKI dares to confront African cultural, religious, and legal taboos in order to celebrate the star-crossed but passionately inevitable love story of two young Kenyan women. With political rival fathers running against each other for public office, tomboy Kena (Mugatsia) and pink-braided fashion-conscious Zika (Munyiva) find themselves on opposite sides of the political divide. They are drawn together nevertheless, with a conspicuous magnetism that will rile Kena’s religiously devout mother and Zika’s powerful and vengeful father, and set tongues wagging maliciously in Nairobi’s Slopes neighborhood. Basing her script on the story “Jambala Tree” by Ugandan author Monica Arac de Nyeko, director Kahiu communicates the irrepressible joy of first love, even as her heroines bravely choose to face the consequences of being different. In English and Swahili with English subtitles. DCP digital widescreen. (BS)

Director Garrone (GOMORRAH) returns to the Neapolitan underworld with a vengeance, with this tragic portrait of a fawning little man who hitches his star to a force he can’t control. Marcello (Fonte, winner of Best Actor at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival) is a nerdy divorced dog groomer with a boundless love for canines. He keeps a shop in a shabby backwater port outside of Naples and deals cocaine on the side to supplement child support for his beloved daughter. His inexplicable fealty to his best coke customer Simoncino (Pesce), a hulking mad-dog of a former boxer, will be his downfall, ultimately destroying his reputation, his livelihood, and his family. The downward spiral of this dark story is a shivery, self-destructive thrill ride, as the trajectory of its David and Goliath relationship plays out with mythic inevitability. Garrone sets the stage for an intense and powerful day of reckoning, when master and dog will trade places. Note: No dogs were harmed in the making of this film. In Italian with English subtitles. DCP digital widescreen. (BS)

Announcing itself as "based on an absurd but true story," STOCKHOLM mixes humor, heart, and high tension in a rambunctious thriller loosely based on the 1973 hostage crisis that gave rise to the term "Stockholm syndrome." Lars Nystrom (Hawke) bursts into Stockholm's biggest bank with a machine gun and takes two female employees hostage. In the first of several stranger-than-fiction twists, he thanks one of the terrified hostages, Bianca (Rapace), for setting off the alarm. Lars's plan is more eccentric and elaborate than robbing the bank, and, as a cat-and-mouse standoff develops, a growing rapport develops between captor and captives, especially the seemingly strait-laced housewife Bianca. After his widely praised portrait of constraint in FIRST REFORMED, Hawke cuts loose with one of his most flamboyant performances as the hotheaded criminal whose bluster is worse than his bite. Rapace, in her best role since the DRAGON TATTOO films, effectively counterpoints Hawke with a subtle, interiorized performance that keeps us guessing as to what extent her bond with Lars stems from calculation, compassion, or passion. In English. DCP digital widescreen. (MR)

The most comprehensive film on the subject to date, BAUHAUS SPIRIT celebrates the 100th anniversary of the German art school whose fusion of utopianism and functionalism has had an enormous influence on modern life. The history of Bauhaus is explored—from its founding in 1919 by Walter Gropius through its relocations in Dessau and Berlin to its closure in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi regime—but the film's primary focus is on the Bauhaus's methods and principles. Although associated mainly with architecture, the Bauhaus approach was radically interdisciplinary, with architects and designers instructed in dance and theater in order to understand how space is created by movement. Bauhaus is shown to be more than a museum, and much of the film is set in the present day, where its principles continue to impact housing, design, and urban planning, from a "school without classrooms" in Stockholm to a barrio in Medellin. In German, English, and Spanish with English subtitles. DCP digital. (MR)

In this boldly unorthodox take on the Manson murder rampage, killers Leslie Van Houten (Murray), Patricia Krenwinkle (Sosie Bacon), and Susan Atkins (Marianne Rendon) dream away their lives on Death Row awaiting the otherworldly deliverance that Charlie (Smith) has promised them, until curious and gutsy prison teacher Karlene Faith (Wever) moves to provide them with a reality check. Director Harron ("Alias Grace," AMERICAN PSYCHO) reconstructs the Manson family dynamic in flashback, depicting Charlie as a wannabe rock star and angry loser lording it over a dysfunctional harem of lost girls who crave the skewed discipline of an authoritarian hippie. Karlene functions as the pivot point in the plot, marking the before and after for the three deluded murderers, whose back-stories as virtual puppets under Manson’s command begin to flip to a new narrative under her compassionately confrontational probing. DCP digital widescreen. (BS)

This eye-opening documentary plunges us into a courtroom probably unlike any other we have ever seen. The people in it, from the judge on down, are nearly all women. Devoid of confrontational histrionics, the atmosphere is congenial and compassionate. The defendants are African Americans and Asian immigrants who have been arrested for prostitution, but they are not treated as criminals. It is difficult to distinguish the defense from the prosecution, because all are working toward the common goal of moving the defendants out of the revolving-door system and into more normal lives. This is the Queens Human Trafficking Intervention Court in New York City, which has been operating since 2004. Following three of its key players, including Judge Toko Serita, director Wang-Breal's fluid, up-close camerawork provides us with an inside look at a radically innovative and remarkably effective (although recently threatened) approach to justice. In English, Mandarin, and Japanese with English subtitles. DCP digital. (MR)

There are epic films, and then there is WAR AND PEACE. Winner of the 1968 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, this mammoth production took five years to complete, employing over 200,000 extras. Its cost in today's dollars has been estimated at $700 million. It tops several categories in the Guinness Book of Records.

But this WAR AND PEACE is much more than statistics and spectacle. Adapting Tolstoy's classic novel faithfully but dynamically, Bondarchuk balances the epic and the intimate, charging the film with vivid characterizations and powerful emotional climaxes. Bondarchuk himself plays the insecure intellectual Pierre, and Vyacheslav Tikhonov is a dashing Prince Andrei. As Natasha, the enchanting woman they both love against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, Lyudmila Savelyeva is not only a beautiful and talented actress but a trained ballerina whose exquisite grace contributes to a show-stopping ball sequence (Part II). The staggering Battle of Borodino sequence (Part III) deploys a good chunk of the Red Army.

Any home video viewing of this legendary achievement is bound to be inadequate. You don't want to see the biggest film of all time on a small screen. All screenings of WAR AND PEACE have been scheduled for our larger theater with its 32-foot screen. In Russian with English subtitles. New DCP digital widescreen restoration. (MR)

Gregg Bordowitz presents two films, one by himself, and one he admires:

TONGUES UNTIED

1989, Marlon Riggs, USA, 55 min.

A quarter of a century after its release, director Marlon T. Riggs’s documentary TONGUES UNTIED, winner of the Los Angeles Film Critics Award and the Best Documentary prize at the Berlin Film Festival, is as relevant as ever. The stories are fierce examples of homophobia and racism: the man refused entry to a gay bar because of his color; the college student left bleeding on the sidewalk after a gay-bashing; the loneliness and isolation of the drag queen. Yet they also affirm the black gay male experience: protest marches, smoky bars, “snap diva,” humorous “musicology” and Vogue dancers. ProRes digital. (Description courtesy of Frameline)

FAST TRIP, LONG DROP

1993, Gregg Bordowitz, USA, 55 min.

In the spring of 1988, video-maker/activist Gregg Bordowitz tested HIV-antibody positive. He then quit drinking and taking drugs and came out to his parents as a gay man. FAST TRIP, LONG DROP, his imaginative autobiographical documentary, began as an inquiry into these events and the cultural climate surrounding them. While writing the film, a close friend was diagnosed with breast cancer, and his grandparents were killed in a car accident. The cumulative impact of these events challenged his sense of identity, the way he understood his own diagnosis, and the relationships between illness and history. ProRes digital. (Description courtesy of the Video Data Bank)

This program is presented in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago’s monographic exhibition "I Wanna Be Well" (April 4-July 14), a retrospective of the film, video, and interdisciplinary work of Gregg Bordowitz, exploring the artist’s Jewish, gay, and bisexual identities within the context of the ongoing global AIDS crisis. Visit
https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/9170/gregg-bordowitz-i-wanna-be-well for additional information. Bordowitz's 1996 film THE SUICIDE will be shown at the Film Center on a June date TBA.

This poetic documentary movingly evokes the life and career of the charismatic Rudolf Nureyev, the Russian dancer who singlehandedly transformed the stuffy image of ballet with an athleticism and airborne grace that was unprecedented in the history of the art. Front and center is a previously unseen trove of early and rare VHS performance footage from the collection of the Rudolf Nureyev Foundation, plus extended dance sequences charting the artist’s relationship with the Danish dancer Erik Bruhn, and career-changing partnership with the London Royal Ballet’s prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn, a made-in-heaven pairing that imbued classics including "Swan Lake" with a new and daring eroticism and passion. The filmmakers structure Nureyev’s personal history around the dance, utilizing interpretive modern ballet sequences to trace the details of a life that begins with an impoverished childhood in the postwar Soviet Union and early training under the great A.I. Pushkin, and explodes artistically with stardom in the West, the political bomb of defection, celebrity notoriety, and a tragically early death from AIDS. DCP digital. (BS)

Immersive and inspiring, this acclaimed documentary has established itself as the definitive film on its momentous subject. Drawing upon recently discovered caches of NASA audio recordings and stunningly crisp 65mm film footage, APOLLO 11 provides a fresh perspective on the first moon landing that captivated the world in July 1969. From the crowds of spectators thronging the beaches to the endless rows of white-shirted technicians at Mission Control to the cramped interior of the space capsule, the events are depicted entirely in the moment, as they happened, without retrospective commentary by talking heads or voiceover narrators (the only commentary we hear is on-the-spot reports by newscaster Walter Cronkite and Mission Control spokespersons). This awesome moviegoing experience gains immeasurably from big-screen viewing; all screenings of APOLLO 11 have been scheduled for our larger theater with its 32-foot screen. DCP digital widescreen. (MR)

Spare, precise, and evocative, German auteur Petzold makes films with a unique ability to get under the spectator's skin. Following up on his international hits BARBARA and PHOENIX, this revisionist riff on CASABLANCA is his richest and most resonant film to date. The story is based on a 1944 novel, set in Nazi-occupied France, by Anna Seghers. The main character, Georg (Rogowski), is a German fugitive who makes his way to Marseilles, where he assumes a dead man's identity in order to obtain an exit visa to Mexico. While waiting to depart, he becomes involved with some of the desperate immigrants and refugees thronging the port city, including the dead man's wife (Beer). Petzold's audacious gambit is to place the story in an indeterminate time period that combines elements of past and present, adding another layer to the characters' ghostly, in-between status and opening the door to suggestive parallels between rampant fascism then and now. In German and French with English subtitles. DCP digital widescreen. (MR)

Both a cause célèbre and a bête noire of art-house cinema, MARIENBAD has survived parody, controversy, and endless interpretation to stand as one of the great tours de force of film history. Amid the mirrored corridors and manicured gardens of a European chateau, a nameless man (Albertazzi) encounters a woman (the stunning Seyrig) who denies his claim that they had an affair the previous year. Around this question mark, Resnais and screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet construct a dazzling maze of permutations, possibilities, and prestidigitations. In French with English subtitles. New 4K DCP digital widescreen restoration. (MR)