The tale of an outlaw who escapes from prison and sets out across the Texas hills to reunite with his wife and the daughter he has never met.
Writer/director David Lowery weaves this 1970s poetic drama centered on the journey of a notorious outlaw who breaks out of prison to reunite with his beloved wife, and the daughter he’s never met. Bob Muldoon and Ruth Guthrie were two outlaws on the run when their crime spree came to a sudden end deep in the Texas hills. When the gun smoke cleared following a shootout with police, a local officer lay critically wounded by deadeye Ruth. Determined to save his love from getting thrown behind bars, however, Bob claims responsibility for the shot, and receives a stiff prison sentence. A few years later, when Bob learns that Ruth has given birth to their daughter, he makes a daring escape, and flees to be with them at any cost. (New York Times)
One weekend only – this Friday and Saturday at midnite! Two highway road workers spend the summer of 1988 away from their city lives and women they left behind.
An odd couple of sorts, meditative and stern Alvin and his girlfriend’s brother, Lance, dopey and insecure, leave the city behind to spend the summer in solitude repainting traffic lines down the center of a country highway ravaged by wildfire. As they sink into their job in the remarkable landscape, they learn more than they want to about each other and their own limitations. An unlikely friendship develops through humor and nasty exchanges, leading to surprising affection.
Adapted from Icelandic film Either Way, Prince Avalanche is driven by wonderful performances by Paul Rudd, Emile Hirsch, and Lance LeGault. Writer/director David Gordon Green gets back to his independent roots with this character study, which shows his knack for realistically capturing people and finding meaning in their lives and dreams. With a soundtrack by Explosions in the Sky and David Wingo and gorgeous cinematography by Tim Orr, Prince Avalanche bucks convention by exploring male bonding in a refreshingly genuine way.
Born next door to Jesus on Christmas Day, poor Brian is forever mistaken for the Messiah in Life of Brian co-penned by (and starring) Terry Gilliam.
Who better to tackle the silliness of biblical films, religious intolerance, bureaucracy and, well, life in general than the glorious Monty Python crew? Brian is a Jew growing up in Roman-occupied Judea who joins up with an anti-Roman political group (Judean People’s Front or the the People’s Front of Judea?), becomes mistaken for a prophet, becomes a reluctant Messiah and then hangs on a cross. And not for nothing, John Cleese looks great in a toga. Always look on the bright side of life…
Life of Brian is part of THE WORKS – TERRY GILLIAM program.
Starring: Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, Madeleine Stowe, Christopher Plummer
12 Monkeys is a time-traveling, mystery unravelling, science-fiction thriller set in a post-apocalyptic future 1996 after a deadly virus on Earth’s surface has forced all survivors to exist underground. In order to find the source of this viral outbreak, scientists send convict James Cole (Bruce Willis) in an unsteady time machine to gather all the information he can about the man-made virus. But time travel and villainess plots are never straightforward, especially when the story is told by Terry Gilliam, so welcome to the new world of mental institutions, The Army of the Twelve Monkeys, and a stellar performance by Brad Pitt.
Starring: John Cleese, Sean Connery, Shelley Duvall, Katherine Helmond
While Stephen Hawking searches for black holes in the universe, a young boy discovers a time hole in his very own wardrobe! Through this opening, a band of dwarves enter into his life while escaping their evil master, The Supreme Being, taking him through Napoleonic times to the Middle Ages to the early 20th century in search of treasure to steal. A philosophical endeavor while also an enduring children’s film favorite, and a truly lovely bizarre one at that, Time Bandits tackles forces of good versus evil in the realm of the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness.
Starring: Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Martin Sheen, Tom Skerritt
After waking up from a five-year coma following a terrible car accident, Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) discovers that he’s able to see into the future when holding people’s hands…and they can see it too. Most frightening is his unique ability to also change the future which takes an already uneasy gift into a truly horrible nightmare. Penned by Stephen King and directed by corporeal master David Cronenberg, The Dead Zone asks about the responsibility of knowing something bad is going to happen and takes audiences into this liminal space between life and death.
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Mary McDonnell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Patrick Swayze, Drew Barrymore
The complexities of Richard Kelly’s seminal film Donnie Darko are as rich as the concept of time travel itself. When young Donnie escapes death (by a fallen plane engine in his bedroom), a sequence of events unfold that weave together people, events, time and space on a finite loop, all leading up to the inevitable conclusion that rectifies the world.
Portals, teenage angst, God, and hallucinations that include a giant bunny rabbit named Frank play out spectacularly in this new midnight movie cult classic. Basically, Donnie Darko takes the typical teen struggle genre to a whole new existential level complete with an incredible period soundtrack and ultra-creepy Patrick Swayze.
Starring: Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Crispin Glover
Part nerdy and a little bit cool, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is a regular teenager living in the mid-1980s. His Dad is wimpy, mother disaffected, siblings lazy and he dreams of being a rock star. But as complicated as his young life is, when his mad scientist friend Dr. Emmett Brown (the zany Christopher Lloyd) accidentally sends Marty back to the 1950s, things get really weird. While lingering in the past he teaches his father to stick up for himself, fights off his mother’s advances, and learns there’s no place like home. The most important task, however, is to ensure his teenage parents fall in love so he can get… Back to the Future!
Starring: Pam Grier, Antonio Fargas, Peter Brown, Terry Carter
The lovely Pam Grier plays Foxy Brown (aka “a whole lotta woman”), a sexy bad ass who takes on a job as a high-class prostitute to get revenge on the mobsters who murdered her boyfriend. But it’s not even that straight-forward. He dead boyfriend was a governmental agent and those gangsters? Why, they’re a perverted and kinky couple. She also saves a drug addicted woman along the way. Violent and sexual (oh yes, there’s castration), Foxy Brown is a staple in the blaxploitation genre.
Starring: Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox
The western genre meets the horror genre in this intense portrayal of an outdoor buddy weekend gone severely wrong. When four Atlanta city slickers decide to spend the weekend on Northern Georgia’s Cahulawassee River, they know that the mode of thinking is different in the country but don’t realize the extent of that difference until it’s too late. Encountering generations of inbreeding with a group of hillbilly moonshiners, they face difficult life-and-death decisions that could mean the difference of going home or never getting out alive.
