Starring: Steven Yuen, Yeri Han, Yuh-Jung Youn, Will Patton, Alan Kim, Noel Kate Cho
A tender and sweeping story about what roots us, Minari follows a Korean-American family that moves to a tiny Arkansas farm in search of their own American Dream. The family home changes completely with the arrival of their sly, foul-mouthed, but incredibly loving grandmother. Amidst the instability and challenges of this new life in the rugged Ozarks, Minari shows the undeniable resilience of family and what really makes a home.
Starring: Margaret Qualley, Sigourney Weaver, Douglas Booth, Seána Kerslake, Colm Feore, Brian F. O’Byrne
New York in the 90s: After leaving graduate school to pursue her dream of becoming a writer, Joanna (Margaret Qualley) gets hired as an assistant to Margaret (Sigourney Weaver), the stoic and old-fashioned literary agent of J. D. Salinger. Fluctuating between poverty and glamour, she spends her days in a plush, wood-panelled office — where dictaphones and typewriters still reign and agents doze off after three-martini lunches — and her nights in a sink-less Brooklyn apartment with her socialist boyfriend. Joanna’s main task is processing Salinger’s voluminous fan mail, but as she reads the heart-wrenching letters from around the world, she becomes reluctant to send the agency’s impersonal standard letter and impulsively begins personalizing the responses. The results are both humorous and moving, as Joanna, while using the great writer’s voice, begins to discover her own.
Starring: Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Vitaliy Khaev, Evgeniya Kregzhde, Mikhail Gorevoy, Elena Shevchenko
Matvey has just one objective: to gain entry to his girlfriend’s parents’ apartment and kill her father Andrey with a hammer to restore her honor. But all is not as it initially seems, and Matvey’s attempts to bludgeon the family patriarch to death don’t quite go to plan as Andrey proves a more formidable — not to mention ruthless — opponent than he anticipated… and Matvey, for his part, proves stubbornly unwilling to die.
Starring: Janelle Monáe, Marque Richardson II, Eric Lange, Jack Huston, Kiersey Clemons, Tongayi Chirisa
Successful author Veronica Henley (Janelle Monáe) finds herself trapped in a horrifying reality and must uncover the mind-bending mystery before it’s too late.
Starring: Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Larry Bird, Muggsy Bogues, Wayne Knight, Bill Murray, Billy West
Basketball superstar Michael Jordan and cartoon favorite Bugs Bunny team up with other basketball greats and Looney Tunes characters in this combination animated/live-action feature. Jordan must help the Looney Tunes gang with a basketball game against a group of outer space creatures whose plan, if they win, is to kidnap the Looney Tunes and take them to a failing intergalactic amusement park as the latest attraction.
Starring: Keisha Castle-Hughes, Rawiri Paratene, Vicky Haughton, Cliff Curtis
On the east coast of New Zealand, the Whangara people believe their presence there dates back a thousand years or more to a single ancestor, Paikea, who escaped death when his canoe capsized by riding to shore on the back of a whale. From then on, Whangara chiefs have always been the first-born and male. Many generations later, the contemporary tale revolves around a young mother whose male newborn twin dies in childbirth. Her young husband flees New Zealand in grief, leaving grandparents Koro and Nanny Flowers to raise the sole survivor, a feisty little girl named Pai, who radiates with life and energy. It’s no wonder that her grandmother and the entire community love her, but alas, the grandfather she worships is too busy mourning the loss of the baby boy he expected would lead the tribe to better days.
Starring: Connie Nielsen, Dougray Scott, Hermione Corfield
For marine biology student Siobhan, it was supposed to be a research excursion with a trawler crew fishing the West Irish seas. But when they hit an unseen object and become marooned, a mysterious parasite infects their water supply. Soon the oozing force infiltrates the entire vessel and turns Siobhan’s journey into a claustrophobic fight for survival.
Starring: Duane Jones, Marlene Clark, Leonard Jackson, Mabel King, Bill Gunn, Sam Waymon
What could have been a mere blaxploitation picture is elevated above the norm by two factors. The first is the performance of Duane Jones, cast as a professor of African studies who moonlights (literally as a vampire). The second is the mood-drenched, jazzy musical score, which very likely cost more than the film itself. But back to the plot: Jones continues to carry a torch for his ex-wife Marlene Clark who, before the film is over, goes “bats” herself. Featured in the cast is writer/director Bill Gunn as the villain (no, the vampire isn’t always the heavy) and the always welcome Mabel King.
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Diane Kruger, Justin Bartha, Sean Bean, Jon Voight, Harvey Keitel
Introduced by Payton McCarty-Simas, author of the new book One Step Short of Crazy: National Treasure and the Landscape of American Conspiracy Culture
To clear his family name, Benjamin Franklin Gates (Nicolas Cage) is on a lifelong quest to find the fabled Templar Treasure, which his family claims was hidden by the Freemason Founding Fathers. Armed only with his encyclopedic knowledge of American history, Gates, his conspiracy theorist/hacker sidekick, Riley (Justin Bartha), must solve riddles and find clues with the FBI hot on their trail. They quickly realize that the only way to find the treasure… is to steal the Declaration of Independence.
One Step Short of Crazy will be available for purchase at the screening.
In this book, film critic Payton McCarty-Simas explores the surprisingly tangled relationship between the thriving ecosystem of American conspiracy theory and the National Treasure franchise. Beginning with a critical analysis of the films’ own dense narrative relationships to several famous conspiracy theories, the author then turns to the way the films have themselves become a part of the framework for a range of conspiracies online, on the History channel, and in our culture more broadly.
Fantastic Fungi, directed by Louie Schwartzberg, is a consciousness-shifting film that takes us on an immersive journey through time and scale into the magical earth beneath our feet, an underground network that can heal and save our planet. Through the eyes of renowned scientists and mycologists like Paul Stamets, best-selling authors Michael Pollan, Eugenia Bone, Andrew Weil and others, we become aware of the beauty, intelligence and solutions the fungi kingdom offer us in response to some of our most pressing medical, therapeutic and environmental challenges. Narrated by Brie Larson
