In addition to our summer retrospective series, we’re also screening seven new films making their local premieres in the Dryden Theatre.
One of the most critically lauded films of the year, Gus van Sant’s Paranoid Park makes its debut on July 5. This elegant and haunting work of art, the most recent feature from the director of Drugstore Cowboy, Good Will Hunting, and Elephant, is an enigmatic mystery and an observant look at Portland, Oregon’s outsider culture. J. Hoberman of the Village Voice called Van Sant’s latest “wonderfully lucid: It makes confusion something tangible and heartbreak the most natural thing in life.”
On July 18, catch Raoul Ruiz’s Klimt, with the always-inspired John Malkovich bringing to life the famed Austrian artist whose sexually aware and erotically inspired work came to symbolize the art nouveau movement of the late 19th and early 20th century. Told in a series of visions from Klimt’s deathbed, the story veers back and forth between past and present, fantasy and reality, chronicling his battles for artistic freedom, passions for various women, and influential meeting with cinema pioneer Georges Méliès.
Stephen Chow, the zany comic auteur behind Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle, is back with his latest, CJ7, screening on July 26 & 27, a hilarious sci-fi parody about a poor man who brings home a cute but destructive alien creature he finds at a dumpsite. The fantastic CGI effects and Chow’s comic sensibility combine to make a funny and frenetic live-action cartoon.
La France (August 2) is a film best experienced and not read about, but if you must know a little, suffice to say it’s about a strong-willed young woman (Sylvie Testud) who disguises herself as a young man during World War I and becomes an indispensable member of a fighting platoon. The audacious feature directorial debut of Serge Bozon assuredly moves from heartbreaking war scenes to sweet musical numbers. Don’t miss it.
The latest film from Russian master Aleksandr Sokurov is Alexandra (August 8 & 10). Russian opera legend Galina Vishnevskaya stars as an elderly woman visiting her grandson, an officer stationed among the bored, weary troops at a desolate military outpost. Sokurov, whose acclaimed Russian Ark will screen again on August 1, has made a powerful anti-war film in which not a shot is fired.
Giuseppe Tornatore, the man behind Cinema Paradiso, returns with a change of pace, the suspense thriller The Unknown Woman (August 16). A mysterious woman (Xenia Rappoport) uses desperate means in order to be hired as nanny to an upwardly mobile couple’s young daughter. As the story slowly reveals her motives, the woman’s disturbing past comes back to haunt her. Tornatore’s usual composer, Ennio Morricone, contributes another beautiful music score.
Finally, on August 23 & 24, we’ll present John Boorman’s The Tiger’s Tail. The director of Deliverance and Hope and Glory brings us an unusually gripping and witty doppelganger thriller set in contemporary Dublin. The cast is headlined by veteran character actor Brendan Gleeson as a wealthy venture capitalist who finds his world turned upside down when a seemingly malevolent identical lookalike plots to take his place at work and at home with his beautiful but neglected wife (Kim Cattrall). You can also catch Boorman’s masterful Arthurian epic Excalibur on August 17.
