Fake psychics, a family inheritance, forced adoption, faked deaths, jewelry, automobiles, twists, turns, blondes, suspense, and of course…murder.
While somewhat light-hearted, Family Plot is still a suspenseful film by Alfred Hitchcock so revealing too much of the plot defeats the whole purpose of experiencing it in the cinema. Still, we will say that Karen Black stars as Fran, part of a kidnapping and jewelry heist duo, who winds up involved in a plot to receive a family inheritance initiated by a faux-psychic/con-artist. As Hitchcock does so well, characters and plots intertwine, providing revealing clues to the audience while the people on-screen still solve the mystery and get the money. Plus, Karen Black personifies the ultimate Hitchcock woman by wearing a blond wig.
Part of The Works: Karen Black retrospective series.
Friday night introduction by Sean Young! Both Easy Rider screenings include a very special pre-taped introduction and Q&A with Karen Black about the film and her role!
Easy Rider is a landmark American film about the encroaching disillusionment of the country’s counter culture movement in the late 1960s.
They’re not scared of you. They’re scared of what you represent…Freedom.
Directed by Dennis Hopper, Easy Rider shows the real and metaphorical journey of two bikers Captain America and Billy (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) as they travel from New Orleans to Los Angeles. Along the way they realize the fabric of American culture is so fundamentally flawed that the promise of change invoked by the counter culture in the early 1960s seems to fade away. And although the tagline says that it’s about “a man who went looking for American…but couldn’t find it”, it seems more dangerous to suggest that perhaps he did.
In one of her first film roles, Karen Black (along with dance legend Toni Basil) plays one of the New Orleans prostitutes who takes up with Billy and Captain America during Mardi Gras and ends up in the Big Easy graveyard doing LSD, amongst other naughty deeds.
Part of The Works: Karen Black retrospective series.
Starring: Karen Black, Oliver Reed, Bette Davis, Burgess Meredith, Eileen Heckart
Desperate to escape the city, Ben and Marion Rolf along with their son David, take over a dilapidated house for the summer to get some much needed family time. The house super affordable but there’s a catch – they have to take care of the old recluse “Mrs. Allardyce” during their stay.
Burnt Offerings tackles domesticity in a very frightful way. The house has a mysterious life force of its own, one that slowly absorbs Marion into the honorable role of its “mother” while killing the others in order to complete its ritualistic rejuvenation. Hazy shots and slow narrative build only compound the eery realization that something is changing the Rolfs. The breakdown of the family is scary enough but it’s the dream-induced chauffeur character who has been the stuff of nightmares ever since the film’s release.
In the role of Marion Rolf, Karen Black plays a woman who becomes obsessed, and possessed, by a house; leaving her family behind for a new role as “mother.” Burnt Offerings is also packed with incredible performances by Oliver Reed, Burgess Meredith, Eileen Heckart, and Bette Davis, no less.
Spend 420 with us by taking a psychedelic journey into the heart of Las Vegas with a goofy journalist and his questionable lawyer.
“The possibility of physical and mental collapse is now very real. No sympathy for the Devil, keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
Things start of weird and only get weirder when Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp doing a spot-on impression of Hunter S. Thompson) and Dr. Gonzo (Benicio de Toro at his heavyweight best) take a mescaline-fulled road trip to Las Vegas. Copious amounts of illegal drugs are consumed, hallucinations projected, and a sequence of oddballs met, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas brings Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo journalism onto the big screen (it is based, after all, off his culture defining novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream). While Raoul and Dr. Gonzo languish in their drug-induced haze they do have philosophical musings about chasing the American dream and questioning the failure of the counter-culture revolution.
OPENS APRIL 12TH. A standing couples brunch goes from dealing with each other’s personal dramas to dealing with the sudden possibility that the world is ending.
If there’s one thing that The Twilight Zone taught us it’s that people’s true nature tends to come out during the pending apocalypse, and it isn’t always pretty. It’s a Disaster embraces this idea with a more comedic tone as eight couples meet for their monthly brunch that goes from personal therapy session to coping with the word’s end in a matter of hours. What emerges through this often hilarious process between friends is revealing. I mean, what would you do if the end came knocking at your door?
Starring: Elizabeth Berkley, Gina Gershon, Kyle MacLachlan
To make an additional $10 donation to Black Trans Liberation Kitchen, select the “Event + Donation” ticket on the checkout screen.
What lengths will a drifter-turned-stripper-turned-showgirl go to achieve her dreams of Vegas stardom?
To know this film is to love this film. What is it that can be said about Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls except that it is probably one of the most memorable films to come out of the 1990s. Elizabeth Berkley (from Saved by the Bell fame) plays Nomi, a young dancer who moved to Las Vegas to make it big. She gets her chance and trips, claws, and sleeps her way to the top only to discover that there’s a heart underneath that stripper facade. Gina Gershon is magical as the “aging” and manipulative Cristol Conner while Kyle MacLachlan moves from Lynch-weird to Verhoeven-weird status. You know what I mean.
Versace.
Nitehawk launches its NASTIES series with recent French horror film, Inside (À l’intérieur). A young pregnant widow plays host to a persistent and deadly uninvited guest who wants her baby.
There is nothing subtle about Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s 2007 French horror film Inside. Pregnant and suffering the loss of her husband after a car accident, Sarah is despondent and uninterested in the baby she’s about to have. So, she spends her last night before giving birth, alone, at Christmas time…or so she thinks. An unidentified woman knocks at the door and proceeds to tear Sarah’s world apart. Guests come back into the house but none leave. Inside is brutal and unrelenting but also very powerful in its showing of how motherly instincts can take a woman. Seeing Inside on the big screen is a must.
Inner Space is a LIVE SOUND CINEMA event featuring a live score by Morricone Youth.
Explore Australia’s vast underwater life depicted in Inner Space to the sounds of Morricone Youth. Featuring narration by Dominic Engel.
With National Geographic features, numerous documentaries, and scenes featured in major Hollywood motion pictures like Jaws, Orca, and The Blue Lagoon in their fifty-year career, husband and wife team Ron and Val Taylor are hugely respected and prolific underwater filmmakers. But it’s the Taylors’ undersea footage of sharks, coral, and other marine exploration from the 1970s as the focus of this legendary Australian television series that will really blow your mind; especially as this amazing imagery is screened to the live original score by New York’s Morricone Youth.
Morricone Youth is a New York City septet formed in 1999 dedicated to performing and recording old film and television soundtrack and library production music.
God, the Devil, and a man’s mortal soul. F.W. Murnau’s silent film Faust will be feature an original live score by Gersh/Reed.
Faust is a hauntingly beautiful piece of early silent cinema as only F.W. Murnau could create. Mephisto is a demon who bets an Archangel that if he can corrupt the soul of a righteous man then the Devil will have dominion over Earth. Target: the old alchemist Faust. So, Mephisto sends a deadly plague into Faust’s town who, when he is unable to stop the spread of death, burns many books, including a bible. Needless to say, trickery is involved, souls are sold, and hearts are stolen at an Easter church service but the question is…who actually wins the wager?
Notably, this is F.W. Murnau’s last German film before his relocated to Hollywood.
Nitehawk’s new signature series ART SEEN launches with Orson Welles’ filmic documentary on fraud and fakery, F for Fake.
There is no other film quite like Orson Welles’ F for Fake. Based in the story of world-renowned art forger Elmyr de Hory and his infamous biographer Clifford Irving (author of the controversial and fake Howard Hughes biography), this pseudo-documentary is a magic trick all its own. Juxtaposing the real life narratives of these “fakes” with fictional montages featuring Welles, F for Fake is a devious exploration begging the audience to question: what’s real here?
Before the film: our “Artist Film Club” will be screening the video work Untitled #142 (Bob Coe from Wasco) by artist Josh Azzarella. We will also show Emily’s Video by Eva and Franco Mattes that was selected by Nitehawk as part of our partnership with Moving Image Art Fair.
About Art Seen: Nitehawk’s Art Seen is a unique monthly art-focused program showing artist documentaries, the art world in film, and artist-directed features. Screening before each Art Seen film is our “Artist Film Club” where Nitehawk programmers and guest curators present an artist moving image program. Art Seen aims to introduce and revisit some of these fantastic lives lived in the world of art as seen on film.
