Watch Optimus Prime, Megatron, and Unicron battle it out in the 1986 animated movie TRANSFORMERS. A 35mm presentation!

Beyond good. Beyond evil. Beyond your wildest imagination. Years before Michael Bay entered into the transforming robot arena, this animated film based on the animated television program delighted (and maybe even scared) a generation of kids. And, set to a synth and metal based soundtrack, Transformers: The Movie has a decidedly dark tone. It’s the year 2005 and there’s a battle raging between the two warring factions of the planet Cybertron: heroic Autobots (led by Optimus Prime) and the evil Decepticons (led by Megatron). While the Autobots try to save their planet from an evil entity that consumes planets hole, Unicron, they’re also defending themselves again the Decepticon’s attack.

Part of Nitehawk’s April MIDNITE MARAUDERS midnite series.

Starring: Ryan O’Neal, Bruce Dern, Isabelle Adjani, Ronee Blakley

Director Walter Hill’s The Driver is no frills filmmaking at its best with amazing car chase sequences and a main character who doesn’t speak. Ryan O’Neal stars as the illusive and silent man dubbed “The Driver” who is being heavily tracked by a tough and conceited detective (Bruce Dern). Obsessed with catching The Driver and willing to risk his career in order to do so, he goes to extensive lengths to bring him down including staging a faux bank heist. Naturally, there’s a woman in the middle who’s on board to thwart the Detective at every turn.

Starring: David Carradine, Sylvester Stallone, Simone Griffeth, Mary Woronov, Roberta Collins, Martin Kove, Louisa Moritz, Don Steele, Joyce Jameson

In the dystopic future of 2000 there’s a cross-country car race where points are earned by brutally killing pedestrians and you either finish first or not at all! Featuring characters like “Frankenstein,” “Machine Gun,” “Nero the Hero,” and “Matilda the Hun,” the Transcontinental Road Race began after the Democratic and Republican parties collapsed and a new authoritarian dictatorship run by “Mr. President” started it to keep his North American territory satisfied. All is well until a resistance group led by Thomasina Paine rebels against the dictatorship by sabotaging the race.

Part of Nitehawk’s SUMMER OF SURREALISM, LIVE SOUND CINEMA presents a program of traditional surrealist shorts with a live score by ALYSE LAMB (EULA and Parlor Walls).

Nitehawk presents a screening of short films that come from the original surrealist cannon to accompany the Summer of Surrealism program featuring contemporary surrealist cinema. Screening iconic silent films – Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (1928), Man Ray’s L’Etoile de Mer (1928), Germaine Dulac’s La coquille et le clergyman (1928) and Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) – we cover the beginning of surrealism in cinema up to the beginnings of its influence in other styles of filmmaking.

Providing the live score to our Surrealist Shorts program is Alyse Lamb (EULA and Parlor Walls). You can usually hear Alyse Lamb’s voice cutting through waves of feedback as front lady for the noise trio EULA. You can also find Alyse warping her guitar into a bass computer in experimental duo Parlor Walls. With a degree in classical composition she enjoys making her own leotards.

Part of Nitehawk’s upcoming SUMMER OF SURREALISM program. Featuring Absolut Vodka Cocktails.

Starring: Robert Englund, Johnny Depp, Heather Langenkamp, Ronee Blakley

Wes Craven taps into our worst Freudian nightmare in A Nightmare on Elm Street by presenting a spectral murderer; a child molester killed by a lynch mob of parents who has re-entered reality by stalking their children’s unconsciousness. It’s a very visceral depiction of the most terrifying invasion attack on someone at their most vulnerable: sleeping. By becoming the high school students nightmares, Freddy symbolizes the significance of dreams and of memory as well as the thin line between reality and unreality, consequence and power. Long before Freddy’s humor become a joke in subsequent sequels, his iconic sweater, burnt face, and knives for fingers have become emblematic of a figure we would only want to encounter in the cinema, never in our dreams.

Starring: Laura Dern, Justiun Theroux, Grace Zabriskie, Jeremy Irons, Harry Dean Stanton, William H. Macy, Karolina Gruszka

NEWLY REMASTERED PICTURE AND SOUNDTRACK FOR INLAND EMPIRE SUPERVISED BY DAVID LYNCH

David Lynch’s modern surrealist opus INLAND EMPIRE unfolds when an actress loses her grasp on reality as her personality begins to conflate with that of her character.

Time collapses, moves forwards and backwards in David Lynch’s Inland Empire as an actress (Nikki, played by Laura Dern) navigates the fragmentation of her existence that occurs when she delves deeper into the filming of a Polish gypsy folktale. Shot on a handheld Sony PD150 digital video recorder, Lynch’s follow up to Mulholland Drive was shot over the course of two and a half years without a formalized script and is, perhaps, the culmination of the profound lure the master of modern surrealist film has on audiences: unconventional and disorientating storytelling expressed through tantalizingly abstract imagery and bizarre symbolism. Inland Empire is an impossible film to write about or to summarize, it is only to be experienced.

ART SEEN presents the surrealist post-apocalyptic comedy THE BED SITTING ROOM with artist films by Aida Ruilova, Aldo Tambellini, and Elizabeth Price. And we’ll be having a pre-party with Brightest Young Things and complimentary Absinthe cocktails for ticket holders!

Richard Lester’s surrealist farce The Bed Sitting Room is unlike any other apocalyptic film you’ll ever experience. Showing a landscape of a post-nuclear UK, the film focuses on the remaining few people surviving strangely in London after the shortest war in history. Resorting to the old ways – riding the Tube, making BBC broadcasts, producing electricity, maintaining the monarch – looks more like a foreign future rather than a familiar past. And in their ever-changing world there becomes one unexpected more shift…some of them start turning into objects and animals! A mixture of Buñuel and Monty Python, The Bed Sitting Room is sincerely as funny as the end of the world can get.

Screening before The Bed Sitting Room:
Aida Ruilova holds various objects of the late Carlo Mollino (the legendary cult figure who was an architect, designer, race car driver, and photographer) in her two short films, 7 Things Carlo Mollino (2006). Once possessions, these things now function as artifacts of what remains of this enigmatic figure as housed in his home-come-museum in Turin.

Part of Aldo Tambellini’s Black Films series (1965-67), Black Trip 2 is a non-photographic film; a mixture of found imagery, sound, and artistic manipulation of film negatives. As Tambellini states it’s an, “internal probing of the violence and mystery of the American psyche seen through the eye of a black man and the Russian revolution.”

Turner Prize winner Elizabeth Price’s User Group Disco features the fictional architectural building the Hall of Sculptures in which objects are presented as contemplations of consumerism, role as artifacts, the archive. They draw upon philosophical and historical materialism, surrealism and institutional critique to try and understand what objects are, and what they do.

Part of Nitehawk’s upcoming SUMMER OF SURREALISM program.
ART SEEN is in partnership with frieze. Featuring Absolut Vodka Cocktails.

The screening is an encore presentation of the Keep Moving: Objects and Architecture in the Apocalypse at Toronto’s Power Plant Gallery.

Nitehawk Cinema and Greenport Harbor Brewing Company Present…
FILM FEAST: ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK.

The iconic Snake Plissken must save the President from an imprisoned, futuristic Manhattan in ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK.

Fight your way through a futuristic Manhattan with Nitehawk and Greenport Harbor Brewing Company’s Film Feast presentation of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York. As always, the screening includes delicious beverage and food menu pairings related to the film. The best part? You’ll be served each course during the specific moments that inspired the film so you can experience edible sensations while watching all of the action unfold on-screen!

Call him “Snake.” The future is 1997 and the island of Manhattan is now a maximum security prison. Unfortunately it’s also the location where convicts took down the President of the United States’ plane. So the government sends in the “not dead” eye-patch wearing bank-robbing Snake Plissken to go in to retrieve the president and his cargo. But this mission isn’t exactly on Snake’s terms and, given the violent nature of how things run now in New York, it certainly isn’t going to be easy. Escape from New York is the quintessential dystopic view of American society’s future mixed in with that Kurt Russell charm and John Carpenter score.  

MENU ($65)

NO ESCAPE OYSTERS
Kumamoto and Otter Cove oysters, lemon, asian mignionette
Drink Pairing: Greenport Summer Ale

THE TWIN TOWER DOGS
Smoked all beef dog, pineapple relish, garlic lemon sauce, potato roll
Drink Pairing: Greenport Harbor Pale Ale

DUKE’S DEEP DISH
House made marinara, roasted wild mushrooms, italian sausage, mozzarella
Drink Pairing: Greenport Cuvaison (brewed with Merlot grapes)

OX BAKER’S FINISHER 
Peanut butter cheesecake, chocolate ganache, pretzel crust
Drink Pairing: Greenport Black Duck Porter

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SecretFormula presents…
Spoons, Toons & Booze After Dark

Your Favorite Saturday Morning Cartoons + Booze & Free Cereal + a Special Menu of Prime-Time, Late Night & Adult Cartoons!

Anniversary Note: Nitehawk first welcomed the SecretFormula crew for Spoons, Toons & Booze for brunch in January 2012.

Do you miss your childhood Saturday mornings of waking up early to gorge on cereal and cartoons? If so, Secret Formula has the ultimate brunch for the kid in you…Spoons, Toons & Booze! We’ve got all your favorite Saturday morning cartoons, delicious cocktails and a free all-you-can-eat sugar cereal bar, not to mention Nitehawk Cinema’s excellent brunch menu.

For June, Spoons, Toons & Booze is sneaking around after bedtime to watch the cartoons our parents wouldn’t let us watch! In addition to our normal menu ofSaturday morning (and weekday afternoon) cartoon series, we’re adding a special menu of prime time and late night cartoons from the 1970?s through present day that are all aimed at an adult and teen audience. Sarcastic high schoolers? Doughnut-loving putzes? Heavy metal-loving social delinquents? We’ve got ’em all.

– Over 80 cartoon series from the 1930?s through the 90?s and YOU get to choose what we watch!

– A special menu of after dark episodes from cartoon prime-time & late night not normally shown at our brunch shows!

– A free all you can eat cereal bar filled with all the sugary, marshmallowy, fruity, chocolatey cereal you crave! Soy and regular milk available.

– White Russian menu including “The Sonny”, a White Russian topped with Cocoa Puffs, and the “The Complete Breakfast” with Cinnamon Toast Crunch-infused rum, Bailey’s Irish Cream and iced coffee!

– Cereal Shots! Drop a shot of Baileys or Kahlua in to booze up your cereal bowl!

– Compete in contests to choose which cartoons we watch and win sweet prizes from SecretFormula and Nitehawk Cinema.

Starring: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Michael J. Pollard, Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, Denver Pyle

Meet Bonnie and Clyde, two young lovers who just happen to be criminals in a roving gang that will kill anyone who gets in their way! Based on the true life story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker’s violent bank robbing spree in the early 1930’s, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde is a more romanticized account of the string of robberies and subsequent newspaper headlines following these two archetypal lovers to their bitter end. With its trendsetting fashions, dangerously gorgeous stars and ample mix of sex and violence, the film is regarded as one of the first in the New Hollywood era and an enduring classic.