HEAVEN ADORES YOU is an intimate, meditative inquiry into the life and music of Elliott Smith. Director Nickolas Dylan Rossi will be in attendance for a Q&A.
By threading the music of Elliott Smith through the dense, yet often isolating landscapes of the three major cities he lived in — Portland, New York City, Los Angeles — Heaven Adores You presents a visual journey and an earnest review of the singer’s prolific songwriting and the impact it continues to have on fans, friends, and fellow musicians.
What kind of person was Elliott Smith? Since his death in 2003, many media-makers have attempted to tell the story of his creative “sad-sack” genius, often through the lens of struggle, heartache and addiction. Director Nickolas Rossi employs a different lens, placing music center-stage, creating a framework for Elliott to narrate the story of his life himself, through the filter of recorded conversations and interviews, with support from friends along the way. With great care, Rossi expertly weaves together 30+ interviews to create an intimate and personal history like never seen before.
Part of Nitehawk Cinema’s MUSIC DRIVEN signature series.
ART SEEN presents Wes Anderson’s THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL and the painting at the center of its story (part of Nitehawk’s two-month celebration of Jeff Goldblum).
Wes Anderson’s Academy Award Winning film The Grand Budapest Hotel recounts the adventures of Gustave H, a legendary concierge at a famous European hotel between the wars, and Zero Moustafa, the lobby boy who becomes his most trusted friend. Against the back-drop of a suddenly and dramatically changing Continent, the story involves the theft, a murder mystery, romance, and the battle for an enormous family fortune; at the center is a priceless Renaissance painting bequeathed to Gustave.
ART SEEN is in partnership with frieze. Part of Nitehawk’s THE WORKS: JEFF GOLDBLUM (BARELY GOLDBLUM & FULL GOLDBLUM) brunches and midnites throughout May and June!
HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT blends fiction, formalism and raw documentary as it follows a young heroin addict who finds mad love in the streets of New York.
Harley loves Ilya. He gives her life purpose, sets her passion ablaze. So when he asks her to prove her love by slitting her wrists, she obliges with only mild hesitation, perhaps because of her other all-consuming love: heroin. Directed by celebrated filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie, the film is based on Arielle Holmes’ soon-to-be-published memoir Mad Love in New York City.
Jeff Goldblum is Steve Zissou’s money-flushed sea-bound nemesis in THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU.
Co-written with Noah Baumbach, The Life Aquatic is Wes Anderson’s parody and homage to Jacques-Yves Cousteau. The film features the eccentric oceanographer Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) who sets out to get revenge on the mythical “Jaguarshark” that ate his partner Esteban…and he’s going to make a documentary about it. Along for the ride is Zissou’s crew of misfits including his estranged wife, a journalist, and his successful, well dressed arch-rival, Alistair Hennessey. So put on your red beanie to set out on the quirky underwater expedition that is much more than a shark hunt. It always is.
Part of Nitehawk’s THE WORKS: JEFF GOLDBLUM (BARELY GOLDBLUM & FULL GOLDBLUM) brunches and midnites throughout May and June!
Nitehawk’s Live Sound Cinema presents a special one nite screening and New York premiere of PARTIR TO LIVE featuring a live score by director Domingo Garcia-Huidobro and Jozef Van Wissem.
Partir to Live is a non-standard audiovisual event at the intersection of experimental film and music. This is a non-narrative journey, an experiment with viewing sensuality, fascination with beauty and pain of loss. It’s a search for new possibilities of cinema with means of direct perception and abstraction as the main understanding tool.
Garcia-Huidobro is an aficionado of paranormal experiences and Partir to Live sees him attempting to reconstruct the previous moments of what could have been one of these episodes. High-tension cables, a forest, an abandoned church, a barefoot woman; past, present and future become confused, and in this dissolved reality, he is not sure to have found what he was looking for.
The film’s soundtrack was composed by Chilean director and musician Domingo Garcia-Huidobro (who also plays in Sacred Bones Records’ band Föllakzoida) and Jozef Van Wissem (composer and musical collaborator for Jim Jarmusch).
ADULT BEGINNERS just can’t seem to handle growing up.
A young, hipster entrepreneur (Nick Kroll) crashes and burns on the eve of his company’s big launch. With his entire life in disarray, he leaves Manhattan to move in with his estranged pregnant sister (Rose Byrne), brother-in-law (Bobby Cannavale) and three year-old nephew in the suburbs — only to become their manny. Faced with real responsibility, he may finally have to grow up — but not without some bad behavior first.
Starring: James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, Rosanna Arquette
Film producer James Ballard (James Spader) has a pretty plush life, but even with his wealth and beautiful wife, things are starting to feel a little mundane. Late one night, Ballard’s life changes in a flash, a terrible, twisted car wreck that only he and another passenger (Holly Hunter) survive. The two strangers meet in recovery, and they obsess over one-another’s gruesome scars and the white hot memory of hard impact, twisted metal and supple flesh. They aren’t alone, either. As the two start an affair, they fall in with a cult of other crash survivors who are hellbent on recapturing the intense, sexual fusion of flesh with steel.
Starring: Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar, Art Hindle, Henry Beckman
Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar) is finally getting help. After spending years trying to overcome a childhood of abuse, Nola begins seeing Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed) after her husband, Frank, threatens to take away custody of her daughter. Raglan practices an unconventional therapy method where mental disturbances are released through physical changes in the body. The therapy isn’t perfect, for starters, anyone who crosses Nola meets a grizzly end at the hands of a seemingly endless stream of angry, toothless, asexual murder-happy children. As the bodies begin piling up, Frank begins investigating the source of these kill-crazy kiddies and all signs point to trouble brewing between Nola and Dr. Raglan.
Starring: Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer, Denise Richards, Jake Busey, Neil Patrick Harris, Clancy Brown
Flipping the script on its pseudo-fascist source material, director Paul Verhoeven’s (Robocop, Total Recall) blood-and-guts space age war film Starship Troopers cranks up the ra-ra militarism and heavy-handed propaganda of Robert Heinlein’s novel to frenzied, farcical levels. Taking place in the distant future where only military service earns a person citizenship, the Earthbound Terran Federation comes under attack by a distant race of evil, sentient bugs out to squash humanity. Seeking retribution, the Terrans send off their best, brightest and most Aryan looking to take on the bugs in an epic interstellar meat grinder.
Every bit as funny, smart and exciting as Verhoeven’s best work, Starship Troopers works as both an eye-popping, FX driven cornball action flick and a send-up of eye-popping, FX driven cornball action flicks.
Starring: Stephen Lack, Jennifer O’Neill, Patrick McGoohan, Lawrence Dane, Adam Ludwig, Michael Ironside
In Scanners, David Cronenberg introduces a new advancement in human evolution: a race of telepaths with the ability to ‘scan’ other humans, reading their thoughts, controlling their movement and even taking over their consciousness. Most Scanners are harmless, purposefully withdrawn from society, driven to the brink of insanity because of the constant stream of outside thoughts streaming through their minds. However, there’s one Scanner who’s none too nice, and becomes hellbent on building a psychic army to take over the world. The fate of the world rests on the powerful mind of a Scanner on the fringes, which kicks off a psychic battle of wills that will Blow. Your. Mind. (Get it? Because it’s Scanners.)
