Starring: Cassie Hamilton, Zarif, Lisa Fanto, Chris Asimos
The Future of Film is Female presents the NY premiere of Outfest 2023’s emerging talent award, fiercely independent Australian trans icon Alice Maio Mackay’s fourth feature film, SATRANIC PANIC. This screening includes a recorded introduction by the director. To make an additional $10 donation to The Future of Film is Female, select the “Event + Donation” ticket on the checkout screen.
A bloody, demon-infested road movie about the power of claiming one’s identity and the importance of chosen family, Satranic Panic exposes the hypocrisy of the status quo with biting wit, killer drag, and incredible tits.
When Max, trans queen Aria’s found brother and the love of artist Jay’s life, is ruthlessly slaughtered by a shadowy cult in a ritual to summon a cadre of demons, two friends will follow a mysterious note promising answers and hit the road. Together they will slay the demons that oppose them, perform at drag gigs, make uncertain allies, and uncover a conspiracy of prejudice and self-hatred that leads closer to home than they’d ever imagined.
Starring: Barbara Sukowa, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Mario Adorf
Germany in the autumn of 1957: Lola, a seductive cabaret singer-prostitute (Barbara Sukowa) exults in her power as a temptress of men, but she wants out—she wants money, property, and love. Pitting a corrupt building contractor (Mario Adorf) against the new straight-arrow building commissioner (Armin Mueller-Stahl), Lola launches an outrageous plan to elevate herself in a world where everything, and everyone, is for sale. Shot in childlike candy colors, Fassbinder’s homage to Josef von Sternberg’s classic The Blue Angel stands as a satiric tribute to capitalism.
Starring: Marie-Laure Dougnac, Dominique Pinon, Jean-Claude Dreyfus
4K restoration
Unemployed circus clown Louison (Dominique Pinon) applies for a job as a handyman at an apartment building in post-apocalyptic France, unaware that the ad is meant to lure people to slaughter. The butcher/landlord Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) provides human meat for his tenants. When Louison and Julie (Maire-Laure Dougnac), the butcher’s daughter, fall in love, it takes all their wits to escape the knife.
Starring: Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger, Warren Oates, Quentin Dean
African-American Philadelphia police detective Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) is arrested on suspicion of murder by Bill Gillespie (Rod Steiger), the racist police chief of tiny Sparta, Mississippi. After Tibbs proves not only his own innocence but that of another man, he joins forces with Gillespie to track down the real killer. Their investigation takes them through every social level of the town, with Tibbs making enemies as well as unlikely friends as he hunts for the truth.
Starring: Alicia Silverstone, Benicio del Toro, Christopher Walken, Jack Thompson, Harry Connick Jr.
Using Clueless caché to produce her first feature, Alicia Silverstone optioned this romcom vehicle, starring alongside rising 90s actor’s actor du jour—the smoldering Benicio del Toro (in his first leading role)—in director Marco Brambilla’s Demolition Man follow-up, Excess Baggage.
In a b-side to Clueless’ Cher, Silverstone expands on her rich girl mythos to play Emily, who stages a kidnapping to win her dad’s affections. When hunky thief (Del Toro) inadvertently steals a luxury auto holding the staged ransom (Emily) in the trunk, the two are left to deal with the repercussions of an accidental abduction, while navigating mutually budding romantic interests. Coasting on strong chemistry between the leads, and leaning into very 90s-specific needle drops, Excess Baggage also stands as a fascinating attempt at transforming one of the decade’s most idiosyncratic screen actors into a poster boy.
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer, Xzibit, Fairuza Balk, Shawn Hatosy
Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) isn’t doing so well. He has a nasty painkiller addiction, courtesy of an injury he sustained while rescuing a prisoner during Hurricane Katrina. Plus, there’s his alcoholic father (Tom Bower), boozy wife (Jennifer Coolidge) and prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes). And, he’s just been saddled with a rookie partner (Shawn Hatosy). Now Terence must pull himself back from the edge of insanity to investigate a series of murders that has the city on edge.
Starring: Tsutomu Tatsumi, Ayano Shiraishi, Yoshiko Shinohara, Akemi Yamaguchi
A devastating meditation on the human cost of war, this animated tale follows Seita (Tsutomu Tatsumi), a teenager charged with the care of his younger sister, Setsuko (Ayano Shiraishi), after an American firebombing during World War II separates the two children from their parents. Their tale of survival is as heartbreaking as it is true to life. The siblings rely completely on each other and struggle against all odds to stay together and stay alive.
Starring: Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany, Billy Boyd, James D’Arcy, Lee Ingleby, George Innes
In 1805, aboard the H.M.S. Surprise, the brash Captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) and his trusted friend, the ship’s scholarly surgeon, Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany), are ordered to hunt down and capture a powerful French vessel off the South American coast. Though Napoleon is winning the war and the men and their crew face an onslaught of obstacles, including their own internal battles, “Lucky Jack” is determined that nothing will stop the Surprise from completing its mission.
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Charles Parnell, Arliss Howard, Tilda Swinton, Kerry O’Malley, Monique Ganderton
After a fateful near-miss an assassin battles his employers, and himself, on an international manhunt he insists isn’t personal.
Warning: Images are not from the movies we’re showing. Trust us, you can’t imagine what we’re showing!
For the final Sunday on Fire, we present a major Hong Kong movie that’s not just the last word on the men behind bars genre, it closes the book, and sets it on fire. By the time this flick is over everything there is to say about violent men being locked up with one another has been said. Loudly. Featuring a break-out role for one of Hong Kong’s most famous actors, it’s a prison movie where everyone is between a rock and a hard place, and there are no good choices, just a series of less terrible options where violence is continual and catastrophic.
Like a slow-blooming flower this movie unfolds and unfolds and finally blossoms into apocalyptic hysteria, and then it expands even further until it becomes clear that it’s not just indicting prisons and prisoners but all of us who think we need them, and all of us who think they work.
