Money, egos, and the heroic attempt to create something out of nothing. Living in Oblivion follows the difficulties no-budget independent film director Nick Reve (played by Steve Buscemi) experiences in one day trying to get his dream film made. This is real life director Tom DiCillo’s second film that apparently gleans from the process of making his first film, Johnny Suede, starring Brad Pitt in 1991. Director of photography, lead actors and actresses, and even the catering company present annoying problems in this three-part filmmaking comedy.

Starring: Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette, Bill Murray

From cross-dressing to epically cheap productions employing bad actors and inexpensive props, Tim Burton’s Ed Wood traces the life of Hollywood’s famously awful director. It’s a beautiful black-and-white homage to the legend of Ed Wood told in late-night horror television style. At its heart, Ed Wood is a love-story between two misfits, Ed Wood (Johnny Depp) and Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau in an Oscar winning role) who, at the time this story was told was an out-of-work actor hooked on drugs and recently released from a mental hospital. It’s their devotion to filmmaking that fuels the passion to create and is what makes Ed Wood one of Burton’s absolute best. Ironically, Ed Wood and his films such as Planet 9 from Outer Space are so well known and studied now that we need to re-think their “badness.”

A Goya painting, mind games, and money violently collide in Danny Boyle’s new psychological thriller, Trance.

“No piece of art is worth a human life.”

Simon (James McAvoy) is a fine art auctioneer who teams up with a criminal gang to steal a Goya painting worth millions of dollars. But after suffering a blow to the head during the heist, he awakens to discover he has no memory of where he hid the painting. After physical threats and torture fail to produce answers, the gang’s leader Frank (Vincent Cassel) hires hypnotherapist Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson) to delve into the darkest recesses of Simon’s psyche. As Elizabeth begins to unravel Simon’s broken subconscious, the lines between truth, suggestion, and deceit begin to blur. 

Starring: Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone, George Dzundza, Jeanne Tripplehorn

Who could ever forget the sexual explosion Paul Verhoeven ignited with the early 1990s classic Basic Instinct? Michael Douglas is the alcoholic/trouble cop, Detective Nick Curran, hot on the trail of wild woman mystery writer Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) after authorities suspect she murdered a man after a climatic roll in the hay. Brilliant in her role of seduction, Stone toys and taunts with every man and woman she meets (including the police in the now-legendary, and often spoofed, leg-uncrossing interrogation scene) but we never quite know if she’s the one. So, if you like your murders with a side of sex, this film is one naughty with a sharp edge.

Nitehawk Nasties invites you to find out if cannibalism still exists with CANNIBAL FEROX (a 35mm presentation).

A bona-fide Video Nasty (as decreed by the British Board of Film Classification in the 1980s), Cannibal Ferox is the trashier sister to Cannibal Holocaust but still full of adventurous youth, needless animal torture, and gruesome special effects. Three young anthropologists head down to Columbia to prove the cannibalism no longer exists and was, in fact, a story concocted by greedy European colonizers. After meeting two New York-based drug dealers who have wreaked havoc on the Columbian village, most of them wind up proving this theory with their lives. Turns out, violent killing and cannibalistic urges do come about when prompted. Hungry for more?

Part of the 2016 Nitehawk Nasties I EAT CANNIBALS program.

Introduction by director Douglas Buck on Saturday night!

Family Portraits: a Trilogy of America consists of three short horror films – Cutting Moments, Home, and Prologue – that unearth and expose the disturbing secrets of three “ordinary” families.

Unflinchingly and violently taking apart the facade of the American familial utopia, Douglas Buck’s trilogy of shorts comprising Family Portraits: a Trilogy of America is both a physical and psychology undoing. The first, Cutting Moments (1997), shows a small family of three who house a disturbing secret of sexual abuse and abandonment through the eyes of the mother; it’s when this truth surfaces that the brutal self-inflicted punishment begins. Home (1998) is a pseudo-sequel/remake of Cutting Moments where the focus shifts to the father’s perspective; more psychological but no less damaging. And lastly, Prologue, shows us the violent return of a young maimed woman to seek revenge on her attacker one year previously.

“…this is the sort of filmmaking the world desperately needs more of – uncompromisingly honest works designed not to entertain an audience but to destroy them.” – Mitch Davis, Flesh and Blood Magazine

Nitehawk’s June ART SEEN shows love for the Los Angeles art world with the documentary The Cool School and The Black and White Tapes (1970-1975) by Paul McCarthy. Introduction on Saturday by Rebecca Taylor from MoMA PS1.

Amidst the city’s sprawling landscape, vast highways, warm weather, and cheap rents, the artists that make Los Angeles their home are like no other artists in the world. 2008’s The Cool School documents the birth of modern art in LA with the beginning of the eponymous Ferus Gallery in the late 1950s, showing the renegade artists and curators who built that scene from almost nothing. Ed Kienholz, Larry Bell, Ed Moses, John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, Dennis Hopper, Irving Blum, Walter Hopps are but some of the notable names you find in The Cool School’s look at the most unique art scene in the world (then and now).

Showing before The Cool School will be a screening of seminal Los Angeles artist Paul McCarthy’s The Black and White Tapes (1970-1975). A mixture of subtlety and confrontation, the artist’s body and formal play with objects, light, and shadow, this compilation of thirteen early black and white performance tapes from the 1970s reveals the nascent development of the themes, the raw physicality, and the performance personae that mark McCarthy’s well-known later works.

We will also show artist works by Kelly Kleinschrodt, Alexa Garrity, and Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman’s A Brief History of John Baldessari.

Nitehawk’s May Country Brunchin’ presents John Wayne in The Searchers with a live pre-show serenade by Tatters and Rags.

The Searchers is an essential part of the western genre’s cinematic dialogue on the complicated foundation of North America. Three years after the Civil War, an ex-Confederate soldier (John Wayne) lands on his brother’s Texas farm just in time to find most of his family slaughtered and two of his nieces missing. After finding the eldest dead, he searches for five years for his other kidnapped niece, Debbie. And when he does ultimately finds her, his motives are seriously questionable. The Searchers really isn’t one of your feel-good westerns. Instead, it portrays racial issues between the “cowboys and Indians” as well as a rather ugly view towards women. Still, beautiful in scope and in Technicolor dreams, this epic film is one to not miss on the big screen.

Surprisingly, this is our first Country Brunchin’ film to feature the western genre’s man main, The Duke.

Tatters and Rags are at times a drone post-punk folk band, other times being a sweaty, whiskey-fueled electric honky-tonk band. Fans of the band state that their eclecticism is part of their charm, and it’s always accompanied by a frenetic energy that makes them one of the most exciting live bands in New York City.

Screening includes Q&A with Ben Shapiro, the Director of Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters.

The cinematic and contemporary art collide in this unparalleled view into the creation of acclaimed photographer Gregory Crewdson’s haunting imagery.

Acclaimed photographer Gregory Crewdson doesn’t just “take” his images, he creates them, through elaborate days and weeks of invention, design, and set-up. The epic production of these movie-like images is both intensely personal and highly public: they begin in Crewdson’s deepest desires and memories, but come to life on streets and soundstages in the hills towns of Western Massachusetts. In his decade-long project “Beneath the Roses” he uses light, color and character to conjure arresting images, managing a crew of 60 amidst seemingly countless logistical and creative obstacles. The documentary (filmed for over a decade, beginning in 2000) also reveals the life-story behind the work—through frank reflections on his life and career, including the formative influences of his psychologist father and his childhood fascination with the work of Diane Arbus.

Screening before Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters is our The Artist Film Club featuring Rä di Martino (guest curated by Hannah Gruy of White Cube) and Tommy Turner’s Simonland (1984) as selected from our partnership with the Moving Image Contemporary Art Video Fair (thanks to P.P.O.W. Gallery).

Nitehawk and Noisey present May’s Music Driven Hit So Hard, a documentary in which the highs and lows 1990s Seattle’s alternative music scene are told through the life of Hole drummer, Patty Schemel.

Much more than a documentary focusing on the life of one person, Hit So Hard expands upon Patty Schemel’s personal narrative as the drummer for Hole into the tumultuous landscape of the 1990s Seattle music scene. The film includes personal revelations from Patty about drug use, sexuality, extreme loss, fame, and the passionate desire to create music. Consisting of many moments captured on home-video by Schemel, what’s truly touching are the intimate home videos of a young Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love at home with their baby Francis Bean; not to mention the captured crazy moments on tour. Dealing with how women in rock-n-roll navigate the waters so often dominated by straight men, the heart of Hit So Hard is within the struggles and successes of its subject, Patty Schemel.

Presented with our media partner, Noisey.