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Tuesday 9/23 Winged Migration 5:15, I Capture the Castle 7:00, Northfork 9:00 Wednesday 9/24 Winged Migration 5:15, I Capture the Castle 7:00, Northfork 9:00 Thursday 9/25 Winged Migration 5:15, Northfork 7:00, I Capture the Castle 9:00 Last Shows for Winged Migration & Northfork!
--Dirty Pretty Things, I Capture the Castle, When Night is Falling
Coming Soon: Lost in Translation – Opens Friday October 3rd
Dirty Pretty Things
"Director Stephen Frears and his writer, Steve Knight, use the power of the thriller and avoid the weaknesses in giving us, really, two movies for the price of one." -- Roger Ebert. "A suspenseful, entertaining movie." –Newsday. "It offers as its hero an extraordinary fellow: He's an authentic moral being who, though the universe has gone all twisty-crazy into greed, mendacity and manipulation, nevertheless clings to his own code." –Washington Post. "Fueled by gripping suspense, dark humor and outraged humanity, the film is a modern horror story that means to shake you, and does." --Rolling Stone. 107 min., Rated R. Friday at 8:30PM, Saturday at 6:30PM & 8:30PM, Sunday at 4PM, Monday at 8:30 PM, Tuesday at 6:30PM, Wednesday at 8:15PM, Thursday at 8:30PM
I Capture the Castle
Last Shows! "Neither conventionally told nor resolved, and able to make the most eccentric situations believable, I Capture the Castle is both an ordinary story and a special one -- and that, finally, is the secret of its success."-- Los Angeles Times. "A refreshingly mature look at first love and life's often-rough transitions." – Dallas Morning News. “3 1/2 Stars.”—Roger Ebert. "It may be best to think of I Capture the Castle as a kind of comfy chair with a few frayed edges and telltale leaks in its upholstery. Perfect furniture, in other words, for a lazy summer afternoon." – Newsday. 113 min., Rated R. “The R rating ("for brief nudity") is another attempt by the MPAA to steer teenagers away from useful and sophisticated entertainments, and toward vulgarity and violence. If this movie is R and "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" is PG-13, then the rating board has no shame. Better the Angels as strippers than an innocent nipple during a swim in the castle moat?”—Roger Ebert Friday 6:15PM, Saturday at 4PM, Sunday at 2PM, Monday at 6:30PM, Thursday at 6:30PM
When Night is Falling
When Night is Falling is being presented as part of our Lesbian-Gay Film Series 94min., Unrated (intended for mature audiences) Saturday at 2PM, Sunday at 6PM, Tuesday at 8:30PM, Wednesday at 6:30PM
Dirty Pretty Things
For director Stephen Frears, the plight of immigrants in London certainly isn't virgin territory. He explored the subject with a bold sensuality in 1985's "My Beautiful Launderette." Frears returned (less successfully) a couple of years later with bombastic gusto in "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid" (1987). But those pictures were made during the frosty days of Margaret Thatcher. In "Dirty Pretty Things," Stephen Frears arrives in post-Thatcher London and dauntlessly seizes on the delicate subject of illegal immigrants--and he does it with a stunning assurance. Frears opens us up to a colorful world in which Chinese, Turks, Africans and Indians, existing in the shadows of mainstream life, find ingenious ways to protect each other from the Immigration authorities. But where most directors would wring their hands over the misery and exploitation of illegals, Frears seizes on their drive rather than their despair. This gives "Dirty Pretty Things" a vitality that's both audacious and tragic. Take Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a Nigerian doctor who was forced to flee his homeland. He finds himself illegally working two jobs as a cab driver and a night porter at a hotel. Living in dread of being caught, he befriends Senay (Audrey Tautou "Amelie"), a Muslim chambermaid who is eventually forced to take a job at a sweatshop, delivering sexual favors to her boss in exchange for protection. "Dirty Pretty Things" is about how Okwe and Senay keep their integrity despite the extreme measures required to help them escape. Newcomer Chiwetel Ejiofor gives an engaging and strongly dignified performance that never once becomes pious. Audrey Tautou, who was too self-consciously precious in "Amelie," gives a richer performance here. Tautou's Senay hides her wisdom and beauty behind an invisible veil that Okwe soon parts. "Dirty Pretty Things" is a shimmering gem of a movie. Rated R for sexual content, disturbing images and language. 107 min.
I Capture the Castle
"I have relived this particular day many times. It is a golden memory, and I am suspicious of it.... Perhaps it really was a happy day." With that intriguing voiceover, accompanied by sunny visuals of a young and hopeful English family in an open car on their way to an old Suffolk castle that will become instead their dank, cold and unhappy home for the next 10 years, begins the story of younger daughter Cassandra ("Nicholas Nickleby's" Romola Garai, simple perfection), a diary-keeper who dreams of becoming a writer like--well, not quite like--her creatively burned-out father Mortmain ("Fairy Tale's" Bill Nighy, a bit given to dramatics). And Cassandra, like older sister Rose ("City of Ghosts'" Rose Byrne, quite good as a desperate gold-digger: "I’d marry a chimpanzee if he had money"), dreams of falling in love--although there are no boys living anywhere near the impoverished family's far-flung outpost. Until, that is, two young and rich American gentlemen ("Gangs of New York's" Henry Thomas and "We Were Soldiers'" Marc Blucas, both convincingly good-hearted) come on scene. First-time feature director Tim Fywell brings a certain literate sensibility from his BBC TV work to "I Capture the Castle,” which itself is based on a 1948 novel by British writer Dodie Smith, who later penned "The Hundred and One Dalmatians." Despite its high-class producer imprimatur (David Parfitt won an Oscar for "Shakespeare in Love"), as captured here the tale seems less aimed for the older art-house crowd than for teenaged girls eager for discerning and intelligent drama--in the same "serious" way that, say, Franco Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet” was; however, an inexplicable R rating--for a momentary scene in which Cassandra’s bohemian-painter stepmother ("Siren's" Tara FitzGerald) disrobes to better experience an evening countryside rain--will bar most of that prime distaff demographic. What could bring a specialized buzz to "I Capture the Castle" is the performance by Garai, whose plain but passionate face proves fertile ground for Fywell's camera and whose voice seems perfectly attuned to Smith's text as adapted by screenwriter Heidi Thomas (who paired with Fywell on the BBC's "Madame Bovary"). Although much of her character’s activity is reactive, Garai provides the film’s heart; every key action or decision of her family or the fellows seems to seep through her and become imprinted on her soul, and her most effective work occurs in the silent registrations of their lighter or darker moralities on Garai’s argent face. 113 min., Rated R.
When Night is Falling
A sexual journey for grown- ups, ``When Night Is Falling'' introduces Pascale Bussieres, a Quebecois actress making her English- speaking debut, as Camille. A teacher at a Christian college, Camille is engaged to Martin (Henry Czerny), a fellow theologian who represents security and stalwartness -- but doesn't know beans about cutting loose. When her dog dies, Camille falls apart, and is comforted in a launderette by Petra (Rachael Crawford), a beautiful young circus performer with enormous eyes. The women accidentally switch their laundry bags, prompting Camille to seek out the circus tent and deliver the goods to Petra. Two women work out on the trapeze, a man on a unicycle juggles fire batons, and Petra dances with a ball of light. Like Dorothy stumbling upon Oz, or Alice falling into a sexual Wonderland, Camille enters a thrilling, unknown world when she crosses that portal to the circus. When Petra invites Camille to her trailer and brazenly tells her, ``I'd love to see you in the moonlight with your head thrown back and your body on fire,'' Camille freezes and leaves. What follows is a struggle -- not only between heterosexuality and homosexuality, but between obligation and fulfillment, convention and experiment. The circus, which resembles Cirque du Soleil, is Rozema's metaphor for freedom, spontaneity and personal change, while the halls of Christian academia represent repression and uniformity. These are fairly simplistic symbols -- as is the hang gliding that Petra introduces to Camille -- but not ill-fitting the overall spirit of ``When Night Is Falling.'' It's a romantic fairy tale, really: about confronting our fears, seen and unseen, and making that journey, over enormous barriers and unseen terrain, to our essential selves. When Martin learns that his fiancée has strayed, Camille tells him, simply, ``She answered a wordless question in me.'' Rozema is a fabulist with a strong visual sense, and she creates a distinctive, enclosed world to illustrate Camille's odyssey. The look of her film isn't ``authentic,'' even though it was shot in urban Toronto, but subtly distorted and playfully surreal. Bussieres and Crawford both give delicately shaded performances in ``When Night Is Falling,'' but it's Czerny, a startling and precise actor, who impresses most deeply. The subject of a dispute with the Motion Picture Association of America, ``When Night Is Falling'' was given an NC-17 rating earlier this month, apparently on the basis of two lesbian sex scenes -- neither particularly graphic. Rozema chose to release the film uncut, with no rating. 94 min.
Coming Soon: Lost in Translation
Opens Friday October 3rd
Any lingering accusations of nepotism that may have followed Sofia Coppola in the wake of her 1999 directing debut "The Virgin Suicides" should be entirely dispelled by "Lost in Translation," a brave and accomplished study of love and human connections that establishes the young Coppola as one of the most acute talents of her generation. Patterning her film on the time-honored premise of lonely strangers in strange surroundings finding solace in each other's company (the current Claude Lelouch film "And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen" is another variation), Coppola manages to transcend all the usual romantic clichés, almost daring the audience to second-guess her by framing the picture around two figures who would normally have nothing in common if not for the fact that they're both Americans simultaneously suffering the culture shock of a first-time visit to Japan. Aging movie star Bob Harris (Bill Murray) has arrived in Tokyo to shoot a whiskey commercial while recent college grad Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is simply tagging along on a job with her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi). Both manifest obvious feelings of alienation in this neon-encrusted, digitized collision of modernity and antiquity, but it's their shared alienation from life and love that brings them together. In stark defiance of formal narrative, Coppola's film follows a course more akin to the movies of the French New Wave than anything American; it's directionless but not aimless, the course of the story dictated by the spontaneous evolution of a relationship that transcends sex, romance and even friendship. Given that so much of the picture must be shouldered by the two performers, one cannot help but be awed by what Murray and Johansson have crafted, generating the kind of on-screen chemistry that rarely graces American cinemas without the intermediary of subtitling. It's been years since Murray has been this funny or this affecting, and he has certainly never been this understated. Johansson is equally impressive, measuring Murray scene for scene with a canny blend of soulful sadness and cunning confidence. But this is still, first and foremost, Coppola's film. At 32, she is roughly the same age as her father was when he made "The Godfather," and there is no reason to doubt that she is any less in command of the medium than he was at the same stage. Her voice is distinctive, her style utterly unique. It is her understanding of things far beyond her years, however, that impresses most--her ability to convincingly tap into the rarest of emotions and communicate them to a mass audience. Ostensibly, "Lost in Translation" is a film about love, albeit one which has the audacity to ask what love is--and the courage to leave the question unanswered. "Tart and sweet, unmistakably funny and exceptionally well observed."-- Kenneth Turan, LOS ANGELES TIMES. "Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson give performances that will be talked about for years." -- Peter Travers, ROLLING STONE. "How to sing the praises of Lost in Translation without drowning out its subtle pleasures?"-- Lisa Kennedy, DENVER POST. “Four Stars!” Roger Ebert. 102 min., Rated R.