Starring: Takashi Shimura, Akihiko Hirata, Akira Takarada

There is no better allegory for the grim implications of the atom bomb in post-WWII Japan (nor the modern day nuclear disasters) than Godzilla. Godzilla (aka Gojira) is the beginning of the longest running film series in history, the grandfather Godzilla if you will, and we’re darn happy to be showing the new restoration. It all begins with nuclear testing in the Pacific spawning a 150 foot tall monster that goes on a destructive rampage. Will man be able to destroy its own creation before it destroys us all?

Let Nitehawk be the wind beneath your wings with our special Mother’s Day 35mm presentation of BEACHES!

Did you ever know that you’re my hero? Two young girls from very different backgrounds meet one summer and then embark on a lifelong friendship. Classic sobber Beaches shows the ups-and-downs of CC Bloom (Bette Midler) and Hillary Whitney Essex (Barbara Hersey); ranging from show business success, romantic entanglements, children, and illness. Truly the loves of each others lives, the film shows how these two women deal with each other’s differences to become family. We dare you not to cry!

Can you remember a time before Nirvana? In August of 1991 New York’s Sonic Youth invited Los Angeles filmmaker David Markey along on a two week summer festival tour of Europe.  The band was excited about their opening act, a little known band from the Pacific Northwest called Nirvana. Along the way they would cross paths with Dinosaur Jr., Babes In Toyland, Gumball, and The Ramones. 1991: The Year Punk Broke also features Mark Arm, Dan Peters and Matt Lukin of Mudhoney and roadie Joe Cole, who was murdered in a robbery three months after the tour ended. The film is dedicated to him.

Starring: Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling, Porter Hall, Bob Arthur, Richard Benedict, Frank Cady

Kirk Douglas is a cynical, disgraced reporter who stops at nothing to try to regain a job on a major newspaper in Billy Wilder’s ACE IN THE HOLE.

Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole is one of the most scathing indictments of American culture ever produced by a Hollywood filmmaker. Kirk Douglas gives the fiercest performance of his career as Chuck Tatum, an amoral newspaper reporter who washes up in dead-end Albuquerque, happens upon the scoop of a lifetime, and will do anything to keep getting the lurid headlines. Wilder’s follow-up to Sunset Boulevard is an even darker vision, a no-holds-barred exposé of the American media’s appetite for sensation that has gotten only more relevant with time. -Criterion

A frustrated war correspondent finds himself on an unexpected journey after assuming the identity of a  deceased arms dealer in Michelangelo Antonioni’s THE PASSENGER. A 35mm presentation!

British/American television journalist David Locke (Jack Nicholson) runs into trouble with making his documentary on post-colonial Africa after being unable to find the rebel fighters involved in Chad’s civil war. Returning to his hotel one day, he finds his new friend Robertson has passed away. Tired of his work and personal life, Locke steals Robertson’s identity for a fresh start but only to find that he was a gunrunner for the rebels. Joining up with architecture student (Maria Schneider), Locke can’t shake his journalistic tendencies as he follows appointment dates in leads from the dead man’s diary. In classic Antonioni’s style, The Passenger shows a lonely despondent figure making his/her way through an expansive landscape in search of the truth.

Part of the Journalists in Film series by VICE News and Nitehawk Cinema.

John Wayne stars as a tough colonel who leads a squad of Green Berets and a liberal war correspondent on a dangerous mission to capture a Viet Cong general. A 35mm presentation and introduction by Andrew Kirell, Editor-in-Chief, Mediaite.

Loosely based on the novel of the same name by Robin Moore, The Green Berets is an anti-communist and pro-Saigon film produced at the height of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. It shows the conflicts and complications of warfare as cynical war correspondent George Beckworth, who works for a liberal newspaper, becomes complicent in the violence towards the Viet Cong. He joins tough-as-nails Col. Mike Kirby (John Wayne) on a special mission in South Vietnam and while he initially protests the U.S. torturous interrogation strategies, he transforms into a gung-ho fighter after witnessing the Viet Cong atrocities. In its heightened cinematic way, The Green Berets gives a voice to the stories that, at the time, people were only witnesses through media produced newsreels.

Part of the Journalists in Film series by VICE News and Nitehawk Cinema.

Starring: Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, William Holden, Robert Duvall, Beatrice Straight, Wesley Addy, Ned Beatty

I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore! Fired after twenty-five years as an anchorman on UBS, Howard Beale proclaims on his last broadcast that he was going to commit suicide and, although he doesn’t, his on-air rant of self destruction becomes an unexpected ratings sensation. Fueled by the ambitious programming executive Diana Christensen, the focus of the network takes on a new trashy but lucrative turn that is to the disappointment of the news division president Max Schumacher (Beale’s longtime friend and Christensen’s occasional lover). Forty years after release, Sidney Lumet’s satirical film about the exploitative nature of trash news television is more relevant than ever.

VICE News and Nitehawk’s Journalists in Film series launches with Haskell Wexler’s MEDIUM COOL, a film about a television news reporter who becomes involved with the political power of imagery during the violence of the late 1960s.

Special recorded introduction by Robert Forster and in-person introduction by Jason Mojica, Editor in Chief of VICE News.

It’s 1968, and the whole world is watching. With the U.S. in social upheaval, famed cinematographer Haskell Wexler decided to make a film about what the hell was going on. Medium Cool, his debut feature, plunges us into the moment. With its mix of fictional storytelling and documentary technique, this depiction of the working world and romantic life of a television cameraman (Robert Forster) is a visceral cinematic snapshot of the era, climaxing with an extended sequence shot right in the middle of the riots surrounding the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. An inventive commentary on the pleasures and dangers of wielding a camera, Medium Cool is as prescient a political film as Hollywood has ever produced. – Criterion

Part of the Journalists in Film series by VICE News and Nitehawk Cinema.