Category: Newsletters

In her follow-up to Me and You and Everyone We Know, internationally acclaimed artist, author and filmmaker Miranda July returns with her moving and fearless drama The Future. When thirty-something couple Sophie (writer/director July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) decide to adopt a stray cat, their perspective on life changes radically, literally altering the course of time and space and testing their faith in each other and themselves.

At fortysomething, straight-laced Cal Weaver (Steve Carell) is living the dream-good job, nice house, great kids and marriage to his high school sweetheart. But when Cal learns that his wife, Emily (Julianne Moore), has cheated on him and wants a divorce, his “perfect” life quickly unravels. Worse, in today’s single world, Cal, who hasn’t dated in decades, stands out as the epitome of un-smooth. Now spending his free evenings sulking alone at a local bar, the hapless Cal is taken on as wingman and protege to handsome, thirtysomething player Jacob Palmer (Ryan Gosling).

From director James Marsh and the Oscar-winning team behind Man on Wire comes the story of Nim, the chimpanzee. In the 1970s, Nim became the focus of a landmark experiment which aimed to show that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child. Under the auspices of a psychology professor at Columbia University, the chimp would be taught the sign language of the deaf and it was hoped he would soon acquire enough words and grammar to tell us what he was thinking and feeling. If successful, the consequences would be profound, forever breaking down the barrier between man and his closest animal relative and fundamentally redefining what it is to be human. Following Nim’s extraordinary journey through human society, and the enduring impact he makes on the people he meets along the way, Project Nim is an unflinching and unsentimental biography of an animal we tried to make human. What we learn about his true natureaand indeed our ownais comic, revealing and profoundly unsettling.

The exquisite Charlotte Gainsbourg (Antichrist, The Science of Sleep) stars in French filmmaker Julie Bertuccelli’s achingly beautiful follow-up to her sleeper hit Since Otar Left. Selected as the Closing Night Film at the Cannes International Film Festival in 2010, The Tree is a mystical drama of loss and rebirth in the Australian countryside. Not since classic 1970s works Picnic at Hanging Rock and Walkabout has the harshly gorgeous outback landscape been such a lyrical yet foreboding metaphor for grief and coming of age. Blindsided with anguish after her husband’s sudden death, Dawn (Gainsbourg)along with her four young childrenstruggles to make sense of life without him. Eight-year-old Simone (unforgettable newcomer Morgana Davies) becomes convinced that her father is whispering to her through the leaves of the gargantuan fig tree that towers over their house. The family is initially comforted by its presence, but then the tree’s enormous roots slowly begin to encroach on the abode and threaten their fragile existence….

Thirty years before the antics of Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears were regular gossip fodder, Miss Wyoming Joyce McKinney made her mark as a tabloid staple ne plus ultra. Academy Award-winner Errol Morris’ documentary follows the salacious adventures of this beauty queen with an IQ of 168 whose single-minded devotion to the man of her dreams leads her across the globe, into jail, and onto the front page. Joyce’s labyrinthine crusade for love takes her through a surreal world of kidnapping, manacled Mormons, risque photography, magic underwear, and celestial sex-until her dream is finally realized in a cloning laboratory in Seoul, South Korea. By turns funny, strange, and disturbing, Tabloid is a vivid portrayal of a phenomenally driven woman whose romantic obsessions and delusions catapult her over the edge into scandal sheet notoriety and an unimaginable life. From the director of The Fog of War and The Thin Blue Line.

“Beginners” imaginatively explores the hilarity, confusion, and surprises of love through the evolving consciousness of Oliver. Oliver meets the irreverent and unpredictable Anna only months after his father Hal has passed away. This new love floods Oliver with memories of his father who — following 44 years of marriage — came out of the closet at age 75 to live a full, energized, and wonderfully tumultuous gay life. The upheavals of Hal’s new honesty, by turns funny and moving, brought father and son closer than they’d ever been able to be. Now Oliver endeavors to love Anna with all the bravery, humor, and hope that his father taught him.

In the tradition of great fly-on-the-wall documentaries, Page One: Inside the New York Times deftly gains unprecedented access to The New York Times newsroom and the inner workings of the Media Desk. With the Internet surpassing print as our main news source and newspapers all over the country going bankrupt, Page One chronicles the transformation of the media industry at its time of greatest turmoil. Writers like Brian Stelter, Tim Arango and the salty but brilliant David Carr track print journalism’s metamorphosis even as their own paper struggles to stay vital and solvent, while their editors and publishers grapple with up-to-the-minute issues like controversial new sources and the implications of an online pay-wall. Meanwhile, rigorous journalism is thriving-Page One gives us an up-close look at the vibrant cross-cubicle debates and collaborations, tenacious jockeying for on-record quotes, and skillful page-one pitching that brings the most venerable newspaper in America to fruition each and every day. What emerges is a nuanced portrait of journalists continuing to produce extraordinary work-under increasingly difficult circumstances.

Fifteen-year-old Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) has two big ambitions: to save his parents’ marriage via carefully plotted intervention and to lose his virginity before his next birthday. Worried that his mom (Sally Hawkins) is having an affair with New Age weirdo Graham Purvis (Paddy Considine), Oliver monitors his parents’ sex life by charting the dimmer switch in their bedroom. He also forges suggestive love letters from his mom to dad. Meanwhile, Oliver attempts to woo his classmate, Jordana (Yasmin Paige), a self-professed pyromaniac who supervises his journal writing-especially the bits about her. When necessary, she orders him to cross things out. Based on Joe Dunthorne’s acclaimed novel, Submarine is a captivating coming-of-age story with an offbeat edge.

In the late 1970s and ’80s downtown Manhattan was the anchor of vanguard filmmaking, the undisputed center of Americanasome would say internationalaart and film. Blank City tells the long-overdue tale of the motley crew of renegade filmmakers that emerged from an economically bankrupt and dangerous period of New York history. It’s a fascinating look at the way this misfit cinema used the deserted, bombed-out Lower East Side landscapes to craft daring works that would go on to profoundly influence Independent Film today. Director CA(c)line Danhier captures the idiosyncratic, explosive energy of the “No Wave Cinema” and “Cinema of Transgression” movements, where filmmakers such as Jim Jarmusch, Eric Mitchell, Beth B, Charlie Ahearn, Lizzie Borden and Amos Poe showcased the city’s vibrant grit, and bore witness to the rising East Village art and rock scenes and the birth of hip hop. Short, long, color or black-and-white, their stripped-down films portrayed themes of alienation and dissonance with a raw and genuine spirit, at times with deadpan humor or blurring lines between fiction and reality. Also featuring Debbie Harry, Steve Buscemi, John Lurie, Thurston Moore, Richard Kern, Ann Magnuson and John Waters.

Note this is a special one-week-only engagement, so please purchase your ticket in advance at https://www.movietickets.com/purchase.asp?perf_id=644711523