Category Archive: Uncategorized

  1. “Funny & Brutal”: What Critics are Saying About Two New Works By Romanian Auteur Radu Jude

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    From AFS Head of Film & Creative Media Holly Herrick

    The Romanian director Radu Jude popped on the radar for Austin audiences when his second feature, EVERYBODY IN OUR FAMILY, became a surprise favorite of Fantastic Fest in 2013. A filmmaker who works outside of traditional genre conventions to make expansive and gorgeously cinematic narratives, Jude has had a prolific couple of years.

    He brought home the Best Director Prize at the Berlinale for his pitch black comedic saga set in 1800s Romania, AFERIM!, and followed it up with the equally dark and beautifully funny and intellectual SCARRED HEARTS, which won a jury prize at Locarno in 2016. Now we await his next film, his first feature documentary that, like his two past narratives, deals in open secrets of Romania’s past.

    While we wait, AFS is catching up with his latest two films that are making their first appearances in Austin, and we’ve rounded up some words from the critics about why you should mark your calendars for our screenings of AFERIM! And SCARRED HEARTS:

    On AFERIM!:

    “‘AFERIM!” — the title translates more or less as “Attaboy!” — is Radu Jude’s sublime new feature, a funny and brutal costume drama with a potent contemporary kick … [the movie] might be described as a perverse folk tale set in the present day. Its dry, wry minimalism will be familiar to devotees of the Romanian New Wave. Mr. Jude, while he shares with his contemporaries an unsentimental interest in human folly and failure, departs from the naturalism that has been their collective signature for the last decade… [AFERIM!] casts a fierce, revisionist eye on the past, finding the cruelty and prejudice that lie beneath the pageantry.” – The New York Times, A.O. Scott

    “Somehow, this movie, with all its full-frontal historical horror, is still loaded with laughs. It’s gallows humor reminiscent of Robert Altman’s best work.” – The Guardian, Jordan Hoffman

    “[Jude] has created an uncommonly beautiful film (shot in 35mm widescreen and in the glory of black and white) that at times evokes the simple beauties of classic Westerns.” – RogerEbert.com, Peter Sobczynski

    Catch up on Radu Jude’s work with us by coming to our screening of AFERIM! at AFS Cinema on Sun, Feb 18 only.

    On SCARRED HEARTS:

    “SCARRED HEARTS is the most interesting production I’ve seen from [Romania] this year…. Despite its bleak theme, the film brims with anarchic life… Marius Panduru’s Academy-ratio photography, each scene staged in mainly fixed tableaux, makes the film as memorable formally as it is dramatically.” –Film Comment, Jonathan Romney

    “Alternately funny, raunchy and sad, SCARRED HEARTS is an intimate look at one writer making the best of awful conditions. Starring extraordinary newcomer Lucian Tedor Rus in his first lead role, the movie tracks the experiences of 20-year-old Emanuel, who spends nearly the entire film hospitalized with a spinal disease — specifically, bone tuberculosis, which looks as awful as it sounds— that leaves him mostly immobile and bed-ridden. The source’s author M. Blecher was himself afflicted by such a condition during the final decade of his life, perishing from the disease in his twenties and only finding posthumous acclaim. (SCARRED HEARTS is based on his semi-autobiographical novel.) But the movie focuses less on the plucky young man’s literary ambitions than the insular world that becomes his natural habitat. Set in 1937, as Adolf Hilter rose to power and the early stirrings of WWII put Europe on edge, the movie lingers with Emanuel and the various patients and doctors he befriends while lying around.…By chronicling Emanuel’s perseverance, SCARRED HEARTS successfully makes the case for the author’s work. But with its endearing characters and poignant themes, the movie doubles as a discovery for the filmmaker as well. Blecher’s career came to a sudden end early on, but SCARRED HEARTS suggests that Jude’s just getting started.” – Indiewire, Eric Kohn 

    “Filmed on 35mm and in the Academy Ratio, SCARRED HEARTS feels almost literally like a window into the past. If it wasn’t for the richness of the colors and the precision of the framing, we might almost take these as precious home movies, a notion underlined by the succession of black and white photographs from the 1930s which are among the first things we see on screen.” – Screen International, Allan Hunter

    Catch up on Radu Jude’s 2016 award-winning film SCARRED HEARTS with AFS Cinema on Wed, Feb 21.

    Watch the trailers for AFERIM! and SCARRED HEARTS here.

  2. The Anti-Commercial Odyssey of Seijun Suzuki’s Taisho Trilogy

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    KAGERO-ZA (1981) aka HEAT SHIMMER THEATER

    The incorrigible Japanese filmmaker Seijun Suzuki is well known for having been basically banned from making films at all after 1967’s explosion of bullets and butterflies BRANDED TO KILL. The stated reason from his bosses at Nikkatsu Studios was that his films “made no sense and no money.”

    You can see the BRANDED TO KILL trailer here:

    He was able to sneak back into the industry 10 years later with A TALE OF SORROW AND SADNESS, an adaptation of a popular manga about a teenage girl golfer. In Suzuki’s hands it became a violent, operatic condemnation of modern Japanese culture. This wasn’t what the producers at Shochiku Studios had in mind, and he was on the skids again.

    We showed the film in 2015. Here’s our trailer for it.

    Three years later he had hustled together some independent funding for his next project. Since he was still only 56 years old, the prudent thing for him to do was surely to prove his commercial viability as a maker of films that could recoup their investments. Right?

    Care to guess what he did with the money? If you guessed, “he made an obtuse and surreal metaphysical trilogy about the nature of artistic creation, with ghost sex and phantom musical recordings” you are absolutely right.
    As you might predict, the films did not make money at the box office, but they did score big with critics, and these three films are considered among his best and most important. They also tended to place his earlier work in perspective for audiences who may not have had much of a unified opinion about his works.

    Now, nearly 40 years after their making, we are finally able to revisit these unusual films on the big screen in a new restoration. They will be playing over three successive Saturdays at the AFS Cinema starting with ZIGEUNERWEISEN Saturday, February 10.

    The films constitute a trilogy in name and theme only so if you miss one, it won’t affect your ability to grasp subsequent titles.

    Watch the trailer for Suzuki’s Taisho Trilogy here:

     

  3. BOMB CITY is the Austin Chronicle Pick Of The Week – Opens at AFS Cinema This Weekend

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    “First-time director Jameson Brooks’ BOMB CITY reads like a recipe pulled from “The Anarchist Cookbook”: Everyday items which, when assembled, create a dangerous product capable of wreaking havoc and destruction.” – Danielle White, Austin Chronicle

    A tragic 1997 incident that took place in Amarillo, Texas forms the backbone of an exciting new film called BOMB CITY. Made by a team of filmmakers with Amarillo roots, BOMB CITY revisits the controversial death of 19-year old Brian Deneke which occurred during a period of volatile conflict between punks and jocks.

    The film, which pulses with a hardcore punk beat, juxtaposes both tribes and lets us see the events with the clarity of hindsight. In this week’s Austin Chronicle, Danielle White gives the film a 4-star “AC Pick” review and Marc Savlov contributes a much longer piece with a lot of interesting backstory and followup reviews.
    Watch the trailer here:

  4. A CIAMBRA Director Jonas Carpignano on Being Robbed Blind By His Cast (& Being OK with It)

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    A remarkable new film called A CIAMBRA opens at the AFS Cinema this Friday.

    Produced by Martin Scorsese and directed with assurance and improvisational flair by New York-based Italian American filmmaker Jonas Carpignano (MEDITERRANEA), it takes us into the lives of some pretty rough kids who hustle and scrap in the tough Southern Italian enclave of Gioia, in Calabria.

    The hero of the piece, such as it stands, is a Romani boy named Pio Amato (he plays himself here), who has to grow up and become the man of the family at age 14. Since most of his coping mechanisms revolve around stealing and other petty crimes, he faces some serious challenges. It’s thrilling and compelling viewing.

    Recently Steven Saito of The Movable Feast talked to Carpignano about A CIAMBRA, how he cast the roles, and the specific skills needed to make a film without a traditional script, set in a high-crime milieu, and still have it emerge as one of the best movies of the year. The part about how he met the family that formed the backbone of his cast (when they stole his car) is priceless.

    We encourage you to come see the film, opening on February 9 at AFS Cinema.

    Watch the trailer for A CIAMBRA here. Enjoy.

  5. Agnès Varda Wants You to Watch Her Movies (and Jacques Démy’s, Too)

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    Here’s AFS Head of Film & Creative Media Holly Herrick on the Agnès Varda Essential Cinema series running through February. By popular demand we have added additional FACES PLACES screenings starting Friday February 2.

    It is the year of Agnès (again). After completing her brilliant new documentary, FACES, PLACES, the nearly 90-year-old filmmaker seems unstoppable—premiering her new film at festivals internationally, accepting one honorary Oscar and while also landing a nomination for Best Documentary, and attending retrospectives of her work around the world. We had the opportunity to chat with Agnès during her most recent visit to Premiers Plans Festival d’Angers, where she had an important message to send to her Austin fans:

     

     


    We could write a novel about our love of Agnès Varda. She is a singular artist always ahead of her time by a mile. We had to narrow this series selection to five films, but each of these offers a jumping off point to the discovery of other work. Here are the big ideas behind each movie we’re showing this month.

     LA POINTE COURTE (1955) – Camera eye, cinema eye
    Screening February 8 & 13

    When LA POINTE COURTE premiered at Cannes in 1955, Varda had her very first interactions with the film world. She had never been to a festival before, had seen very few films, and had limited exposure to cinephilia. Varda discovered filmmaking through artistic exploration that stemmed from still images. A photographer first, she began experimenting with moving images to create a portrait of Pointe Courte in Sète, a fishing village on the Mediterranean coast where she had lived during her adolescence. Varda spent months observing the town, and how the townspeople moved through it. Those observations and Varda’s trained camera eye, along with a light storyline borrowed from a Faulkner novel, became LA POINTE COURTE. Varda’s imagination was instinctively cinematic. The images in the film are almost like renaissance portraits, conveying the relationship dynamics and the cultural detail that are story’s fabric. Varda’s very direct replacement of her own eye with a camera, and the deeply personal and humanist point of departure of each of her films, is present here.

     CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7 (1962) – a person and a place in time
    Screening February 1 & 4


    After growing up in Belgium and spending her teenage years in the small French village of Sète, Agnès Varda went to Paris to study, ending at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris to work on her photography. Paris, which was bursting with art, youth, activity, motion and political discontent, became the new focus of her camera eye. It was the first time Varda would make a film at home, and the film reflected the images that she would see every day, the outdoor locations were on her regular route, and the cineastes that were shaping her and Jacques Démy’s Paris (for example, the cameo appearances of Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina). Varda places the Cléo character, the famous beauty facing her own mortality, at the center of a world that Varda had observed deeply. The radical gesture here is Cléo coming into herself and beginning to see that world, once she learns to look beyond the image of herself in the mirror. As Varda commented at a recent AFI retrospective in speaking about Cléo: “Women become real when they stop looking at themselves, and start looking at other people.”

    VAGABOND (1985) – the female protagonist
    Screening February 15 & 18

    CLÉO was an absolutely feminist narrative, but VAGABOND (titled in French SANS TOIT NI LOI / WITHOUT ROOF OR RULE) would allow Varda to stretch her imagination about gender paradigms and female personhood. Casting the established young actress and beauty Sandrine Bonnaire against type, Varda created Mona, a woman who shuns every expectation of femininity—an anti-domestic rambler who is wild at the core. To place Mona’s lifeless body in the frame at the outset of the film, Varda challenges every conceit of women on camera while creating an explosive female-centered narrative. By telling Mona’s story, Varda is suggesting that there is every possibility in the world when a woman is inside of the frame.

    FACES, PLACES (2017) – A cinematic life
    Starting Friday, February 2 with a special Member Discount screening on February 22

    FACES, PLACES has to be the greatest tribute an artist has made to her own life and work. Because Varda doesn’t slow, the film is not about looking back, but the forward momentum of creation. Varda glides from one town to another, her latest collaborator JR in tow, to meet new people and make new images, confronting her past in unexpected places along the way. Varda continues a frequent theme of her work here, addressing her own mortality, now from the perspective of her career’s end. Even in what is likely a farewell film, the artistic work takes another leap forward in ambition and insight. Fans may find that each new Agnès Varda film that they discover becomes more beloved than the last—with each work, a new window into one of cinema’s most extraordinary imaginations.

    Sources:
    The films of Agnès Varda
    La Grace Laïque: Entretien avec Agnès Varda, Jean-André Fleschi & Claude Ollier. Cahiers du Cinéma no. 165, April 1965.
    Portrait of a Vagabond by Lynn Littman, IDA Journal, January 2003.
    AFI: Agnes and “Cleo”, Anne Marie Kelly. The Film Experience, November 2013.

  6. Best AFS Cinema Screenings of 2017 – Intern Edition

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    Everyone loved SUSPIRIA, of course.


    Here at the Austin Film Society we are blessed with some of the best interns in the business. We are proud to have a chance to work with these talented young people who not only learn a lot about the film industry, but sometimes teach us grizzled old pros as well.

     
    I asked AFS Senior Programming Intern Lisa Dreyer to ask around over the holidays and find out which films the interns had appreciated the most in 2017. Here is her report. Please note that all the trailers embedded here were cut by our talented AFS interns.
     

    At any given time, AFS has around 20 interns working tirelessly to support the mission of bringing awesome films to Austin. While our tasks vary widely, from making coffee to filming live events, AFS interns all have one thing in common: a love of great movies.
    Here are some favorite films we caught at the AFS CInema in 2017:

     

    Justin Shamlian, an aspiring filmmaker responsible for many of our trailers, has seen over 100 films at the cinema this year, but says his favorite was the over-the-top Johnnie To action film A HERO NEVER DIES.

     

    Emily Andujar, who’s interested in making a career in prop styling, nominates the beautiful restoration of SUSPIRIA, which was a sensation, filling up the theater for weeks.

     


    Julia Allen, editor and video artist, appreciated the more experimental offerings, especially THE EYESLICER ROADSHOW, a presentation of boundary-pushing shorts.


    Lisa Dreyer, who’d like to make a 2nd career out of film programming, loved CARPINTEROS, and found the live Q&A with the star Jean Jean afterwards to be especially illuminating.

     

    Jennifer Bracy, a whiz at social media who’s starting out in marketing, loved the entire Jewels in the Wasteland series, hosted by Richard Linklater, but says “I haven’t laughed that hard during a movie in a long time” about Elaine May’s ISHTAR, a film that’s getting a second look by contemporary audiences after being widely panned in the 80s.  

     


    Other standouts of the year included DOLORES, the documentary about activist Dolores Huerta, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ENDLESS POETRY, and the newly restored version of Kubrick’s THE SHINING.

    Thanks to Lisa for the report and we look forward to seeing all of you at the AFS Cinema in 2018.

  7. “Electrifying” Critical Smash GOD’S OWN COUNTRY Opens Friday 12/29

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    It’s the time of the season for Year-End lists. In which critics, filmmakers and – well, everyone – is posting their lists of what the best movies or 2017 were. If you’ve been reading a lot of these, one title that has shown up a lot and that you may not be familiar with is GOD’S OWN COUNTRY, the first feature by writer/director Francis Lee. The drama takes us into the lives of a pair of gay farm workers in Britain, the aimless and self-destructive Johnny, played by Josh O’Connor (of the British TV series THE DURRELLS OF CORFU), and Gheorge (Alec Secareanu), a Romanian migrant worker who teaches Johnny to slow down and appreciate the finer aspects of life and love.

    Winner of multiple British Independent Film Awards, including Best Picture, GOD’S OWN COUNTRY has also appeared on multiple critic’s year end lists, including Sight & Sound’s Best Films of 2017 and Empire’s  Top 10 Films of 2017, as well as on numerous individual lists.

    Here’s what the critics are saying about GOD’S OWN COUNTRY:

    NPR’s Ella Taylor says, “At its heart, GOD’S OWN COUNTRY is an intensely full-throttle, grand love story and a coming-of-age parable in which an emotionally stunted boy finds his path to manhood eased through the tenderness and care of a lover.
    Cary Darling of the Houston Chronicle calls the film “an electrifying feature debut” and “a haunting meditation on love blooming in rocky terrain, one that lingers long after the lights have gone up.”

    From David Lewis of the San Francisco Chronicle, “This is not a movie about coming out and the collateral damage that ensues. It’s a universal tale about giving yourself over to love, even when you seem hopelessly broken.”
    Isaac Feldberg of the Boston Globe says, “O’Connor and Secareanu give such aching performances that their romance feels real.”

    Tickets for GOD’S OWN COUNTRY, opening 12/29 at the AFS Cinema, are now on sale.

     

  8. What They’re Saying About: BOMBSHELL: THE HEDY LAMARR STORY, Opening 12/22

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    The actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr, born Hedwig Kiesler (1914) in Austria, possessed a beauty that defied belief. Her life story is equally hard to believe.

    In 1933 she starred in the Czech erotic film ECSTASY, which became a controversial worldwide sensation. Later she married a wealthy munitions manufacturer and when he began to cozy up to the Nazis and Fascists, she (who was born into a Jewish family), fled to France. There she was “discovered” by Hollywood mogul Louis B. Mayer and brought to Hollywood, where she became a major movie star.

    At the same time, she was working away as an inventor, developing various aerodynamic airplane wing innovations and other designs. But it was her plan for a frequency-hopping radio spectrum transmitter that has given her a place in technological history forever though, as it provided the basis for modern cellular telephony. Seriously.

    It’s a wild story, and the new film BOMBSHELL: THE HEDY LAMARR STORY, directed by Alexandra Dean, tells the whole tale through interviews and archival footage. It’s fascinating. But don’t just believe us, believe the critics.

    And come see it with us at the AFS Cinema where it opens on Friday, December 22.

    Here are a few excerpts from the reviews:

    “What makes “Bombshell” intriguing is not just Lamarr’s gift for invention, it’s also what a fiery individualist she was, someone who had no regrets about her eventful life (“You learn from everything”), not even its racy, tabloid elements.” – Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

    “Recognition (and compensation) proved elusive in Lamarr’s lifetime, but in this marvelous documentary, a brilliant woman – “I’m a very simple, complicated person” – finally gets her due.” – Chuck Wilson, Village Voice

    “Ms. Dean relates Lamarr’s ventures, those onscreen and off, with savvy and narrative snap, fluidly marshaling a mix of original interviews and archival material that includes film clips, home movies and other footage.” – Manohla Dargis, New York Times

    “A thoroughly engaging, eye-opening showbiz doc.” – John DeFore, Hollywood Reporter

  9. Don’t Miss! NOTHING LASTS FOREVER with Writer/Director Tom Schiller in Person

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    Tom Schiller is a comedy legend many times over for his work as one of the original writers of Saturday Night Live and as the filmmaker behind the SNL-featured shorts called Schiller’s Reels. In 1984, he made a comedy film unlike any other. Titled NOTHING LASTS FOREVER, it tells the story of a young man (Zach Galligan) who seeks to become an artist in a dystopian alternate-universe Manhattan – a black and white Manhattan that seems to be cobbled together from late night movie memories. It’s a bold, unusual and very funny film, featuring star turns from the likes of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and legends like Imogene Coca, Sam Jaffe and Eddie Fisher (as himself.)

    Then, for reasons that are still obscure, Metro Goldwyn Mayer withdrew the film from its release plans, and it has never been subsequently released except for a screening on TCM in 2015.

    It would be a tough break for any film, and filmmaker, but it especially stung because, as Richard Brody of the New Yorker has noted, the film is a “Lost Comedic Masterpiece.” Everyone who sees it seems to love it, and the peals of laughter from the lucky audiences who have seen it tell us that it has not dated at all.

    The studio-held 35mm print of NOTHING LASTS FOREVER has been shown around several times, but for the last few years a rights issue has prevented it from being shown. Which makes the upcoming AFS screening on Saturday, December 23 all the more special. Schiller, a funny and eloquent storyteller, will appear in person with the inside scoop on the making of the film and the personalities involved. Additionally, we will screen some of Schiller’s short films.

    There are tickets remaining for this screening. We hope to see you there.

  10. Home For The Holidays? Join Us at the AFS Cinema for Holiday Classics

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    Nick & Nora Charles, doing what comes naturally at Christmas-time

    We all have our favorite holiday classics. During the holiday season this year at AFS we are reaching way back into Hollywood’s Golden Age to present some of our favorites, some very well known, some less so, but all great.

    Come celebrate the season with AFS, as we present our favorite classic holiday films from December 22nd to the 30th.

    The great Barbara Stanwyck stars as a newspaper columnist whose public image is that of the perfect, affluent housewife but who meanwhile is a single workaholic who rarely leaves her typewriter and lives on takeout food. When a young soldier wins a contest to spend CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT with America’s Perfect Homemaker, she has to scramble to create the real-life illusion for an entire Christmas weekend. Does she succeed? Watch the movie! As always, Barbara Stanwyck is one of the great screen stars, and you’ll fall in love with her, just like… Oh I’ve said too much.


    Image result for barbara stanwyck christmas in connecticut
    The main thing is: STANWYCK

    In the raucous classic comedy THE THIN MAN, we meet Nick and Nora Charles, a happily married (and generally soused) couple who spend the Christmas holidays in New York, where reformed detective Nick (William Powell) becomes reluctantly involved in a murder mystery and amateur sleuth Nora (Myrna Loy) enjoys every minute of it. Full of great dialogue, a truly ludicrous amount of alcohol consumption, and lots of pre-code filthy humor. Oh, and the world’s cutest dog, Asta. Top recommendation!

    Image result for the thin man dog
    The inclusion of the adorable dog is almost too much.


    Speaking of altered consciousness, there’s something truly transporting about a classic ’50s Technicolor musical. WHITE CHRISTMAS certainly fits the bill there, with Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Danny Kaye and Vera-Ellen in a romance-filled, eye-popping, let’s-put-on-a-show classic featuring like a thousand great Irving Berlin songs.

    If you can resist two hours of THIS, more power to you

    And then there’s IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, such a perennial holiday classic that we can almost forget that it was a relative flop upon release, and is super dark. Remember that in 1946, mortality and the search for meaning in life weren’t exactly just abstractions. For millions of Americans, filmmaker Frank Capra, and star Jimmy Stewart included, coming back home after the ordeal of war was fraught with all kinds of conflicting emotions, and IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, often chided as sentimental or corny, is in fact a pretty honest dramatic reckoning with many of these forces. It’s a great, great film, and we’re eager to share it anew. 
    As a matter of fact, I am crying. So are you. That’s OK.


    As always, we will be serving our full menu and seasonal cocktails to help get you in the holiday spirit. Bring friends. Hang out. Have fun. It’s a time for togetherness.

    Check out the entire series and showtimes HERE.

  11. ‘Transcendent Masterpiece’ THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC Coming to AFS Cinema in New Restoration

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    In 1928, just a few years after the canonization of Joan of Arc, the great Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer was approached to create a film biography of St. Joan. Dreyer, who could have gone in many directions, chose to show the spiritual struggle of the Maid of Orleans. To that end he cast the stage actress Maria Falconetti, whose performance has routinely been cited as one of the greatest in all of cinema history. Dreyer’s depiction of the trial of Joan is intense, deeply spiritual, and a triumph of cinema.

    As J. Hoberman says in his excellent New York Times piece about the film:

    “If novels like “Madame Bovary” or “Crime and Punishment” are must-reads, then “The Passion of Joan of Arc” is a cinematic must-see.”

    The AFS Cinema will present the film with two soundtracks. On Saturday, December 16 at 2pm the version with composer Richard Einhorn’s acclaimed Voices Of Light score will play. The version with its alternate score, by Adrian Utley and Will Gregory (Goldfrapp/Portishead) screens on Sunday, Dec. 17. See showtimes for details.

  12. AFS January/February 2018 Calendar of Events is Live!

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    Agnes Varda’s CLEO FROM 5 TO 7

    AFS Signature and Specialty programs are now on sale through the end of February. There are many films to choose from: special series, old favorites, the best of new docs, and a visit from a filmmaking legend. You can see all the events here.

    Bong Joon-Ho’s MEMORIES OF MURDER

    In January we present an Essential Cinema retrospective of the films of Bong Joon-Ho, all on 35mm except the brand new digital restoration of MEMORIES OF MURDER.

    Agnès Varda

    Then, in February, we present four of Agnès Varda’s greatest films, including her newest, FACES PLACES and more.

    Bette Gordon’s VARIETY

    Legendary filmmaker Bette Gordon will join us to present several of her films, including the groundbreaking 1983 independent classic VARIETY.

    Terrence Malick’s DAYS OF HEAVEN

    Our SPIRIT OF ’78 series will celebrate the 40th anniversary of pivotal classics DAYS OF HEAVEN, COMING HOME and MIDNIGHT EXPRESS.

    Leos Carax’ MAUVAIS SANG

    The ongoing LATES series returns, with Sion Sono’s new film ANTIPORNO, the outrageous horror farce BITCH, and classics by Carax, Almodovar and Rollin.

    Our favorite film professor Caroline Frick, of the University of Texas and the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, will join us for a series called CLASSIC CHEMISTRY, which features some of the greatest examples of couple-chemistry of Hollywood’s golden era.

    James Bidgood’s PINK NARCISSUS

    Also, the HOMO ARIGATO series comes to the AFS Cinema for the first time in 2018, with the new ballroom culture doc KIKI and Queer Cinema classic PINK NARCISSUS.

    Seijun Suzuki thinks you’re going to like his surreal TAISHO TRILOGY

    All this plus DOC NIGHTS, the cutting edge DEEP END series, the family friendly SUNDAY SCHOOL program, a Special OSCILLOSCOPE PICTURES RETROSPECTIVE, New restorations of films from Jacques Becker, Seijun Suzuki, and more, and just LOTS AND LOTS OF OTHER STUFF that you can’t miss.

    As always, no need to be a member, but it’s a lot cheaper if you are. The LOVE membership is $20 a month and you get dozens of free screenings every month. Become a member here.

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