Nitehawk’s LIVE SOUND CINEMA and ART SEEN time travel with Jean Cocteau’s TESTAMENT OF ORPHEUS and a live original score by PARLOR WALLS.
In his last film, legendary writer/artist/filmmaker Jean Cocteau portrays an 18th-century poet who travels through time on a quest for divine wisdom. In a mysterious wasteland, he meets several symbolic phantoms that bring about his death and resurrection. With an eclectic cast that includes Pablo Picasso, Jean-Pierre Leáud, Jean Marais and Yul Brynner, Testament of Orpheus (Le Testament de Orphée) brings full circle the journey Cocteau began in The Blood of a Poet, an exploration of the torturous relationship between the artist and his creations. – Criterion
Parlor Walls is an experimental group featuring Alyse Lamb (guitar/sounds), Chris Mulligan (drums/keys), Kate Mohanty (sax), and Jason Shelton (clarinet).
Nitehawk’s BOOZE & BOOKS presents a 35mm screening of GRAND HOTEL in celebration New York Review Books’ revised translation of Vicki Baum’s novel. Introduction by Noah Isenberg.
Booze: THE BERLIN (Bourbon, Barenjäger, Underberg Bitters) – $10
Books: Copies of GRAND HOTEL will be for sale days before release!
In the great 1932 screen drama, Grand Hotel, based on the novel by Vicki Baum, the glitz and glitter of Berlin’s opulent Grand Hotel comes alive with the personal stories of its guests and employees. Set in a single day in Berlin’s Grand Hotel, jewel thief Baron Felix von Geigern (John Barrymore) covets both prima ballerina Grusinskaya’s (Greta Garbo) jewels and the beautiful Flaemmchen (Joan Crawford), who is the mistress of the Preysing (Wallace Beery), boss to the terminally ill Otto Kringelein (Lionel Barrymore). In just 24 hours, the lives of these people will change forever in this Hollywood classic and winner of the “Best Picture” Academy Award.
Featuring an introduction by Noah Isenberg, the New York Review Books’ revised translation of Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel is officially released on June 7. Isenberg is director of screen studies at the New School and the author, most recently, of Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins (California, 2014). His new book, We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie, is due out from W.W. Norton in 2017.
This June – a rarity un-earthed! A prize catch worth the fight to finally land! THE DEUCE Boys turn up the temperature when it gets to be 92 IN THE SHADE, at that rat-trap known as the ANCO Theatre – where it screened – un-advertised – for one week only in 1976!! Perfect for the sweat-sticky seats of Summer – keep your cool if you can – this one is 100% HOT! Don’t let it slip through your fingers!
Plus: Prizes and surprises, a Fernet-Branca sponsored after-party, and music by Maestro Jeff! Hosted and presented by THE DEUCE JOCKEYS: Jeff, Andy, and Joe!
THE DEUCE heats it up with the rarely – pretty much NEVER – screened Florida fishing face-off fun of 92 IN THE SHADE! Delicious dark comedy set amongst the kooks of sun-bleached Key West … Flip-floppin’ blue-blood bum Peter Fonda bungles his way into treacherous territory when he decides to take up the charter trophy fishing guide biz against bonkers boat captains Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton … Tenuous friendships and tensions in the Tropical heat! A temptress in a tutu! Rich in ribald dialogue and raucous raconteuring … With a cast that can’t be beat! The sole directorial effort of cult hero/author Thomas McGuane – adapted from his own 1973 National Book Award winning novel – mining the minutiae of Eastern Seaboard eccentricities and mannerisms with maniacal precision and pointed poeticism … Languid, laid-back, and looney as they come – 92 IN THE SHADE was “dumped” in Times Square’s most decrepit depot – the Anco – by a studio too stumped to know what to do with it – and it’s a trip you won’t want to miss! Did you look at that cast list?!? What else would you need?!?
A boy growing up in Dublin during the 1980s escapes his strained family life by starting a band and moving to London in SING STREET.
Sing Street tells the story of a 14-year-old named Cosmo growing up in 80’s Dublin who must break free of a home strained by his parents’ relationship and money troubles, deal with his drop-out older brother’s antics, and survive a new public school where the kids are rough and the brothers are tougher. Cosmo writes a song, forms a scrappy band with some school mates, writes more songs, and shoots some wicked music videos. How to shoot pop videos in a recession ridden country? Beg, borrow and steal. And steal. But when he realizes he can’t save his family, he must make a family of his own.
Ethan Hawke lights up the screen as jazz legend Chet Baker in BORN TO BE BLUE.
In Born to Be Blue, the tumultuous life is thrillingly reimagined with wit, verve, and style to burn. In the 1950s, Baker was one of the most famous trumpeters in the world, renowned as both a pioneer of the West Coast jazz scene and an icon of cool. By the 1960s, he was all but washed up, his career and personal life in shambles due to years of heroin addiction. In his innovative anti-biopic, director Robert Budreau zeroes in on Baker’s life at a key moment in the 1960s, just as the musician attempts to stage a hard-fought comeback, spurred in part by a passionate romance with a new flame (Carmen Ejogo). Creatively blending fact with fiction and driven by Hawke’s virtuoso performance, Born to Be Blue unfolds with all the stylistic brio and improvisatory genius of great jazz.
Nitehawk’s BOOZE & BOOKS presents a screening of THE BEST OF EVERYTHING in celebration of Matt Zoller Seitz’s book, MAD MEN CAROUSEL, published by Abrams Books.
A panel discussion with leading television critics Matt Zoller Seitz (author of Mad Men Carousel), Alan Sepinwall (author of The Revolution was Televised), and Emily Nussbaum (TV Critic at The New Yorker) will follow the film. We’ll also have copies of Mad Men Carousel for sale and an inspired Mad Men cocktail!
Before Sex in the City or Mad Men, there was Rona Jaffe’s book, The Best of Everything. Unsurprisingly, Jaffe’s story of three ambitious career girls who share a small apartment and a secretarial jobs at a publishing house on Madison Avenue quickly made its way onto the big screen. Gregg (the actress), April (single and pregnant), and Caroline (a budding editor) all contend with the conflict of professional goals versus marriage/children expectations. In what can be seen as a comparison to Mad Men’s Peggy, Caroline works her way up to be an editor even though she has to deal with boss Amanda Farrow (played to perfection by Joan Crawford). And just like Mad Men, there’s a lot of booze, sex, and ambition. Scandalous!
The Best of Everything was featured in the Mad Men episode What Do Women Want (Season 1/Episode 6).
Nitehawk’s MUSIC DRIVEN presents a screening of ADAM GREEN’S ALADDIN feating a Q&A with director and composer, Adam Green!
In this retelling of the classic tale, Aladdin is an out of work indie-rock singer living in a video-game-world ruled by a perverted technology-obsessed Sultan. With the help of a magical genie named Mustafa and his 3D printer lamp, Aladdin gets lost and found again in a story about spiritual redemption in the internet age.
A story about virtually everything: CREATIVE CONTROL.
The setting is New York, 5 minutes in the future. The glorious technological advances and communication devices of the near future meant to increase connectivity and alleviate boredom are only increasing the anxiety level of the insecure New Yorkers who’ve inherited them. David (writer/director Benjamin Dickinson) is an overworked, tech-addled advertising executive developing a high-profile marketing campaign, featuring musician/comedian Reggie Watts, for a new generation of Augmented Reality glasses. Feeling stuck in his relationship with yoga teacher Juliette, he envies the charmed life of his best friend, fashion photographer Wim and his entrancing girlfriend Sophie – so he uses the glasses to develop a life-like avatar of her. Unwittingly, fantasy and reality begin to blur. As passions escalate and things get increasingly out of hand, the friends are forced to deal with the impending collision between their public, private and imaginary lives.
When reporter, Kim Baker’s life needs something more, she decides to “shake it all up” by taking an assignment in a war zone.
In 2002, cable news producer Kim Barker(Tina Fey) takes a daring new assignment in Kabul, Afghanistan. Dislodged from her comfortable American lifestyle, Barker finds herself in the middle of an out-of-control war zone. Luckily, she meets Tanya Vanderpoel (Margot Robbie), a fellow journalist who takes the shellshocked reporter under her wing. Amid the militants, warlords and nighttime partying, Barker discovers the key to becoming a successful correspondent.
Join us for special sneak preview of KRISHA before it opens at Nitehawk on March 25. Includes a Q&A with director Trey Edward Shults!
When Krisha shows up at her sister’s Texas home on Thanksgiving morning, her close and extended family greet her with a mixture of warmth and wariness. Almost immediately, a palpable unease permeates the air, one which only grows in force as Krisha gets to work cooking the turkey and trying to make up for lost time by catching up with her various relatives, chief among them her nephew, Trey. As Krisha’s attempts at reconciliation become increasingly rebuffed, tension and suspicion reach their peak, with long-buried secrets and deep-seated resentments coming to the fore as everyone becomes immersed in an emotionally charged familial reckoning.
