New Year’s Eve and Day Specials:
-Crab cakes served over mixed greens with spicy remulade
-Smoked salmon on rye toast with cream cheese, tomato, cucumbers and fresh dill
-Vegetable lasagna served with a side green salad
-Chicken parmesan over penne pasta

Soups:
-Lobster bisque
-Mushroom barley

Café will be open from 10 a.m. – 9 p.m. New Year’s Eve and 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. New Year’s Day with a full menu as well as these specials.

Shutter Island, due for wide release in February, brings the number of director Martin Scorsese’s features starring actor Leonardo DiCaprio up to four. That’s only half the number made with the performer many fans would consider Scorsese’s most important collaborator, the dynamic powerhouse Robert DeNiro. Like the quartet of DiCaprio films, the eight DeNiro/Scorsese movies focus attention on obsessed characters who vainly try to adjust the world according to their vision of how it should be, no matter what destruction it brings.

In DeNiro and Scorsese’s first collaboration, the semi-autobiographical Mean Streets, the film’s principal obsessive, Charlie, is played by Harvey Keitel. The religious and sensitive Charlie is a small-time hood who desperately tries to rein in his best friend (and id) Johnny Boy (DeNiro), an irrepressible and irresponsible prankster who could not care less about his debts to the mob. DeNiro was promoted to leading man for Taxi Driver, and his Travis Bickle, driven to violence he thinks will help purify a trash-filled New York City, is one of the most disturbing characters ever depicted on film.

Though prone to volatile moments, Jimmy Doyle, the jazz saxophonist in New York, New York, might be the most likeable character DeNiro ever assayed for Scorsese, but Jimmy’s search for a “major chord” keeps him from being happy in his marriage to singer Francine (Liza Minnelli). Likewise, it’s an all-consuming but groundless jealousy that destroys the marriage of boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, still the director and star’s most celebrated film together.

Perhaps the most underrated of their combined efforts, The King of Comedy remains the most relevant for today’s audiences in its depiction of marginally talented comedian Rupert Pupkin’s unstoppable quest for fame through television.

After a seven-year hiatus from Scorsese, DeNiro took a secondary role in the now-classic mob epic Goodfellas. Though Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill provides the film with its comically uninhibited and amoral spirit, it’s DeNiro’s greedy and paranoid thug Jimmy Conway who raises the specter of death.

Cape Fear’s revenge-obsessed and Bible-quoting ex-con Max Cady just might literally be the Angel of Death, and DeNiro put himself through a punishing physical regimen that makes the sinewy and tattoo-covered Max all the more frighteningly real. Casino brought Scorsese back into gangster territory for his eighth and (to date) final pairing with DeNiro, whose Ace Rothstein is the classic control freak brought down by loyalty to his less-than-reputable friends and wife.

These stories of obsession can also be viewed as allegories for the filmmaking process and the director’s difficult task of keeping everything under control. Scorsese’s reliance on the spontaneous, unpredictable, and often improvisatory behavior of DeNiro offers an example to any single-minded director who might resist creative input from his cast. Scorsese, with his powerful editing, pulsating soundtracks, and constantly roving cameras, will always be a technically dazzling auteur, but he understands that it’s the actors’ performances that really bring his films to life.—Jim Healy, Assistant Curator, Exhibitions, Motion Picture Department

Screenings: All films are at 8 p.m. unless otherwise listed.

Wednesday, January 6

MEAN STREETS (Martin Scorsese, US 1973, 110 min.)

Wednesday, January 13

TAXI DRIVER (Martin Scorsese, US 1976, 113 min.)

Wednesday, January 20

NEW YORK, NEW YORK (Martin Scorsese, US 1977, 164 min.)

Wednesday, January 27

RAGING BULL (Martin Scorsese, US 1982, 129 min.)

Wednesday, February 3

THE KING OF COMEDY (Martin Scorsese, US 1983, 109 min.)

Wednesday, February 10 20th Anniversary!

GOODFELLAS (Martin Scorsese, US 1990, 146 min.)

Wednesday, February 17

CAPE FEAR (Martin Scorsese, US 1991, 128 min.)

Wednesday, February 24

CASINO (Martin Scorsese, US 1995, 182 min.)

Perhaps the best-reviewed film released in 2009, The Hurt Locker is the story of an addicted-to-danger bomb-defusing expert (a star-making performance by Jeremy Renner) in the current Iraq war. By bringing an unusual amount of suspense to this well-acted story of men in action, the award-winning film not only revitalizes the war movie genre, it also serves to re-introduce audiences to the considerable storytelling skills of critically acclaimed director Kathryn Bigelow. The Hurt Locker will screen twice on January 1 and 3, and on the last three consecutive Sundays in January, we’ll present three more of Bigelow’s features in excellent archival prints that were personally deposited in George Eastman House’s vaults by the filmmaker after her visit in 2003. The Weight of Water (January 17) is Bigelow’s dramatic tale of murder and deception, told on two temporal planes, starring Sean Penn and Elizabeth Hurley; K-19: The Widowmaker (January 24) is a Cold War tale of men (including Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson) under pressure during a crisis in a nuclear-powered submarine; and Bigelow’s cult classic, Point Break (January 31), is another study of adrenaline junkies, this time personified by a group of surfers/bank robbers led by the late Patrick Swayze, in one of his quintessential performances.

Our annual season of pre-talkie cinema with live musical accompaniment has moved from the fall to winter/spring, and a new series commences on January 19 with Douglas Fairbanks in The Mark of Zorro. The series continues over the next five Tuesdays with Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet classic The Battleship Potemkin (January 26); a classic from sophisticated comedy specialist Ernst Lubitsch, Three Women (February 2); American physical comedy genius Buster Keaton’s Our Hospitality and The Play House (February 9); a delicately beautiful Italian adaptation of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (February 16); and a pair of academically related films from Japanese master Yasujuro Ozu, I Graduated, But… and I Flunked, But… (February 23). Each film features live piano by Philip C. Carli. The series continues on Tuesdays in March and April.

As we leave behind the first decade of 21st-century cinema, South America, with its many diverse countries and cultures, has emerged as a leader in artistic achievement in film. During January and February, you’ll be able to see the first area theatrical screenings of four highly acclaimed recent releases from the continent.

Argentina has produced the largest number of highly regarded features, and the two most celebrated Argentine filmmakers, Lucrecia Martel and Lisandro Alonso are represented here by their most recent work, Alonso’s enigmatically enthralling Liverpool (screening January 15) and Martel’s equally mysterious and poetic The Headless Woman (January 22).

The new century has seen the first significant Uruguayan productions, the pinnacle of which just might be Adrián Biniez’s funny and oddly romantic Gigante (February 12). Brazilian cinema enjoyed the unprecedented success of City of God, and former documentary filmmaker José Padilha delivered a response of sorts to that gangland saga with his own film Elite Squad (February 19), which deals with the problems that law enforcement faces in fighting the drug lords in Rio’s slums.

But these South American discoveries aren’t the only new films available exclusively to Dryden audiences in the first two months of 2010. The New Year begins with lots of laughs when we bring you the hilarious blaxploitation parody Black Dynamite (January 2 & 3). The Beaches of Agnès (January 8 & 10) is the most touching essay film so far from Agnès Varda, godmother of the French New Wave. Big Fan (January 9 & 10), the feature film directorial debut of The Wrestler screenwriter Robert Siegel, stars comedian Patton Oswalt in a very funny and surprising character study of an American loser. Joe Berlinger, the award-winning documentarian who brought you Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, is back with Crude (January 16), the inspiring story of the poor Ecuadoran Amazonians who brought suit against the goliath Chevron Oil. A must for music lovers, They Came to Play (January 23 & 24) brings us all the suspense and lovely sounds from the fifth Van Cliburn Amateur Piano Competition. We Live in Public (February 6 & 7), winner of the Grand Jury Prize for American Documentaries at the Sundance Film Festival, tells the compelling and often unsettling story of Josh Harris, the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of. And The Missing Person (February 20) brings the classic film noir into a post 9/11 world with the tale of a private detective (Michael Shannon) who unexpectedly learns something about himself when he’s asked to follow a man and child from Chicago to Los Angeles.

Robert Siegel, who also co-founded The Onion, will appear in person to present Big Fan on January 9 only; and Oscar®-nominated character actor Michael Shannon will be on hand for our screening of The Missing Person on February 20.