Part of Nitehawk’s SUMMER OF SURREALISM program, LIVE SOUND CINEMA presents Alejandro Jodorowsky’s HOLY MOUNTAIN with a live score by REEL ORCHESTRETTE.

Embodying the sex, drugs, spiritual awakenings and societal unrest of the late 1960s/early 1970S, Jodorowsky’s Mexican-American film Holy Mountain (La Montaña Sagrada) is a suitably bizarre and exquisitely designed trip. The quasi narrative tells of a Christ-like vagrant and six of the world’s most powerful individuals (each representing a planet in the Solar system) for a spiritual pilgrimage through a perverse and unfriendly land. The mission is to find the Holy Mountain and immortality. The film’s symbolic figures and gestures – ranging from birds flying out of bullet holes to reptiles re-enacting the Mexican conquest – make this surreal film one that existed completely outside of traditional filmmaking of the time.

Reel Orchestrette (Bradford Reed & Geoff Gersh) is dedicated to the art of live musical accompaniment to silent films. Reed & Gersh have been collaborating together for almost 20 years, they formed Reel Orchestrette in 2012. 

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

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.