Look for love with Nitehawk and Rockaway Brewing Company’s Valentine FILM FEAST presentation of COMING TO AMERICA.

This 80s classic romantic-comedy, directed by John Landis, stars Eddie Murphy as Akeem Joffer, the crown prince of the fictional African nation of Zamunda, who comes to the United States in the hopes of finding a woman he can marry. As a prince of a wealthy country, Akeem wants to find a woman who loves him for him and not for his royal title. So he flees to New York with his sidekick, Semmi, and pretends to be a student who works in a fast food joint. There he meets a young beautiful woman but his secret is hard to keep, especially when his father comes to bring him to his senses!

As always, our Film Feasts serve each dish at the moment its inspirational scene comes on the screen!

MENU

MI-T-FINE MOMOS
Steamed Tibetan dumplings, beef, celery, Sambal, soy
Beer pairing – Rockaway Brewing Company Original ESB

THE BIG MIC
Two all-beef patties, special sauce, American cheese, lettuce, pickles, shaved onions, Martin’s roll
Beer pairing – Rockaway Brewing Company 1875 Pale Ale

Dreams enter reality and new worlds become a battleground between good and evil in NIGHTBREED.

Recurring dreams of Midan a world of monsters and strange creatures push Aaron Boone to seek the care of a psychotherapist. Enter Dr. Phillip Decker who moonlights as a masked serial killer. He manipulates Boone with LSD disguised as Lithium and convinces Boone that he is the one responsible for murders that Decker himself has committed. Ordered by Decker to turn himself in to the police Boone is hit by a truck and in the hospital learns that Midan is real and is given a way to enter. Finding the massive city under a graveyard Boone meets the monsters who inhabit Midan and begins his journey into battle between Decker, himself and the two worlds.

Part of Nitehawk’s January BECAUSE I’M EVIL midnite series.

They were all drawn to THE KEEP…tonight, they will face the evil.

Presented in 35mm.

Before his mainstream success with Miami Vice, Heat, The Insider, and Ali, director Michael Mann explored the horror genre in the early 80s with his film adaptation of F. Paul Wilson’s vampire fantasy novel set in the latter days of WWII called The Keep. The story depicts the German army’s unfortunate intersection with an epic battle between supernatural beings in a remote mountain castle in Romania. A group of Nazis led by Jürgen Prochnow is forced to join forces with an ailing Jewish historian (Ian McKellen) to prevent an ancient demon from returning to the mortal realm all taking place in a wonderfully creepy atmosphere. Mann in adapting the book created one of the best horror films of the decade, a piece almost entirely reliant on mood vs. conventional storytelling. With a cast featuring Scott Glenn, Gabriel Byrne, and a mesmerizing score from Tangerine Dream, The Keep stands as a significant achievement for its era and, with its hallucinatory imagery, it maintains a timeless quality.

Part of Nitehawk’s January BECAUSE I’M EVIL midnite series.

Enter a world beyond your wildest imagination, where anything can happen.

There’s a secret government agency for just about any nightmare scenario, and in Dreamscape, that’s just what the shady branch of big gov is researching: dreams and how to invade them. Using a group of psychics and some fancy equipment, the secret project hopes to gain a greater understanding of our subconscious (unconscious?) minds. But when an experiment goes wrong and a subject dies in his sleep, Alex, one of the psychics, begins to suspect the program isn’t all what it seems. When the President of the United States needs some help with his nuclear holocaust nightmares, it’s up to Alex to make sure the President makes it out alive.

Part of Nitehawk’s January BECAUSE I’M EVIL midnite series.

Starring: Sergi López, Maribel Verdú, Ivana Baquero, Álex Angulo, Doug Jones, Ariadna Gil

Not only does Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth begin with the ending of the young heroine dying (the rest of the story is told in flashback) but film critic Jim Emerson says that this scene actually contains the entire film in one shot. Walking the thin line between horror and fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth blurs both worlds as the young Ofelia lives in the brutal reality of post-Civil War Spain in 1944 and a fairy tale world where she must complete a series of tasks and be led through a labyrinth to rule with her father, the King. Leaving the audience to wonder what is real and what’s imagined.

A story about a perverted midlife crisis in suburbia begins with a bang in Sam Mendes’ AMERICAN BEAUTY.

Mendes’ biting and often humorous take on the mundanity of suburban life captures the disintegration of the American dream at the turn of the century. American Beauty opens with a video recording featuring a teenager wishing her perverted father dead and an off-camera voice obliging this request. As the scene shifts to aerial city views, a dead man starts narrating the story of his life and the demise the audience is now well aware of (like Sunset Boulevard). This man is Lester Burnham whose midlife crisis and sexual frustration has lead to an obsession with his daughter’s best friend and complete life overhaul which, despite his best efforts, don’t have a happy ending.

Part of Nitehawk’s January THE END IS THE BEGINNING brunch series.

Starring: Winona Ryder, Gena Rowlands, Giancarlo Esposito, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Rosie Perez, Isaach de Bankolé, Béatrice Dalle, Roberto Benigni, Paolo Bonacelli

Five cities. Five taxicabs. A multitude of strangers in the night.

Night on Earth is one of Jim Jarmusch’s most charming and beloved films. So spend the night with us and this extraordinary international cast of actors for this hilarious quintet of tales of urban displacement and existential angst, spanning time zones, continents, and languages. Stories include a no-nonsense taxi driver Corky (Winona Ryder) and a Hollywood casting agent (Gena Rowlands), a Parisian cabbie (Isaach De Bankolé) and some rowdy African diplomats, and an Italian taxi ride that finds quirky driver Gino (Roberto Benigni) making a lively confession to an ailing priest. It’s a lovingly askew view of humanity from the passenger seat which, frankly, we need to see right now.

Take a trip to the beautifully strange Memphis, Tennessee in Jim Jarmusch’s MYSTERY TRAIN.

Presented on 35mm.

Mystery Train is Jim Jarmusch’s episodic love letter to Memphis, Tennessee and one of his very best films. A beautiful pilgrimage into this wonderfully weird place, Mystery Train pays tribute to all the things that make the city sing: Stax Records, Sun Studios, Graceland, Carl Perkins, and the King himself (it is named after an Elvis Presley song, after all). Separate stories that include a kitsch-obsessed Japanese couple (heads up, look out for Paterson cameo), an Italian widow, and a trio of amateur robbers are all linked together by a seedy hotel and its night clerk played by Memphis legend by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and, of course, Elvis!

Part of Nitehawk’s January JARMUSCH AT MIDNITE midnite series.

Starring: Forest Whitaker, John Tormey, Cliff Gorman, Frank Minucci, Damon Whitaker

Roger Ebert wrote, “It helps to understand that the hero of Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is crazy. Of course he is.” The film stars Forest Whitaker as this crazy hero, a modern day mafia hit man greatly inspired by the old ways of the samurai, plus it features a soundtrack by the RZA. So, you know it’s good. It’s an inventive and surreal twist on the gangster film as Ghost Dog is a loyal contract killer who is now the target after a job gone wrong. Just remember, “The Way of the Samurai is one of immediacy, and it is best to dash in headlong.”

Starring: Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, Mia Wasikowska

Set against the desolation of the once-vibrant cities of Detroit and Tangier, an underground musician, deeply depressed by the direction the world is going, reunites with his resilient and enigmatic lover. Their love story has already endured at least several centuries, but their debauched, romantic idyll is soon disrupted by the woman’s wild and uncontrollable younger sister. Can these wise, but fragile, outsiders continue to survive as the modern world collapses around them?