A failed New York playwright awkwardly navigates the transition from Next Big Thing to Last Year’s News.
After both Imogene’s (Kristen Wiig) career and relationship hit the skids, she’s forced to make the humiliating move back home to New Jersey with her eccentric mother and younger brother (Annette Bening and Christopher Fitzgerald). Adding further insult to injury, there’s a strange man (Darren Criss) sleeping in her old bedroom and an even stranger man sleeping in her mother’s bed (Matt Dillon). Through it all, Imogene eventually realizes that as part of her rebuilding process she must finally come to love and accept both her family and her Jersey roots if she’s ever going to be stable enough to get the hell away from them.
Japanese anime film Metropolis (aka Metoroporisu) is a Live Sound Cinema event featuring a live score by Party Supplies.
Kenichi and his uncle Shunsaku Ban must find the mystery behind robot girl Tima.
If the title sounds familiar, it is…but different. Metropolis (Metoroporisu) is an anime film loosely based on the 1949 manage, also called Metropolis, that was inspired by Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic silent film Metropolis. Got it? The film draws some of its plot from the silent film (it does, after all, deal with a mysterious robot girl) but it is uniquely its own version of the robotic future. The anime was created by stars in the field: renowned anime director Rintario, Akira creater Katsuhiro Otomo (scriptwriter), and Madhouse studios and Tezuka Productions (animation).
Party Supplies is the American Dream. It is the sound of Justin Nealis, producer behind critically-acclaimed rap collabs with Action Bronson (Blue Chips) and Danny Brown (“Grown Up”) setting up a mic stand behind his MPC and strapping on a Stratocaster. Joined by multi-instrumentalist Sean Mann, the two write classic rock from the future. Half Chromeo, half Easy Rider, the Brooklyn duo drop blue collar funk, school gym foot-stompers, and yearning city boy ballads over drum machine beats on their forthcoming Fool’s Gold debut LP, Real Men Don’t Need Instructions. Inhale and salute.
Academy Award nominee Sarah Polley’s extraordinary Stories We Tell is a deeply moving portrait of a family dealing with a legacy of secrets and lies, and the elusive nature of truth itself.
Stories We Tell unpeels the complex life of Diane, an aspiring actress and mother, and the shockwaves that a series of impulsive actions unleash on her children, husband and community.
With this groundbreaking new feature that seamlessly blends past and present, the real and the imagined, Polley’s characteristically unflinching yet compassionate gaze delivers a level of depth and emotion only hinted at by her earlier acclaimed directorial works, Away from Her and Take This Waltz. Making Stories We Tell all the more memorable is the revelation that the mother depicted – and family in question – is Polley’s own.
Spy on us, and we’ll spy on you!
OPENS JUNE 7TH! THE EAST, a suspenseful and provocative espionage thriller from acclaimed writer-director Zal Batmanglij and writer-actress Brit Marling, stars Marling as former FBI agent Sarah Moss.
Moss is starting a new career at Hiller Brood, an elite private intelligence firm that ruthlessly protects the interests of its A-list corporate clientele. Handpicked for a plum assignment by the company’s head honcho, Sharon (Patricia Clarkson), Sarah goes deep undercover to infiltrate The East, an elusive anarchist collective seeking revenge against major corporations guilty of covering up criminal activity. Determined, highly-trained and resourceful, Sarah soon ingratiates herself with the group, overcoming their initial suspicions and joining them on their next action or “jam.” But living closely with the intensely committed members of The East, Sarah finds herself torn between her two worlds as she starts to connect with anarchist Benji (Alexander Skarsgård) and the rest of the collective, and awakens to the moral contradictions of her personal life.
In a galaxy very, very, very, very far away there lived a ruthless race of beings known as… SPACEBALLS.
I don’t exercise. If God had wanted me to bend over, he would have put diamonds on the floor. – Joan Rivers
In Mel Brooks’s masterful spoof of Star Wars, the planet Spaceball has run short on breathable air, forcing the evil empire to kidnap prissy Princess Vespa in order to coax her father, King Roland of the planet Druidia, to surrender his planet’s air supply over to them. Roland responds by hiring two down-and-out mercenaries – Lone Starr and Barf, a man-dog hybrid – to rescue the princess, but in order to save the galaxy for good, the team must learn the ancient secrets of The Force. Er…Schwartz. Joan Rivers appears in voice-only as Dot Matrix, the princess’s guardian android and mobile chastity alarm. It’s the perfect role for Rivers, because if she were given the option to be dipped in solid gold and live to crack jokes, she certainly would have taken the plunge. May the Swartz be with you!
Part of Nitehawk’s summer program COMEDIANS IN FILM (Women in Comedy).
Starring: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester
Structured around four movements, 2001: A Space Odyssey shows discoveries of black monoliths throughout different time periods and the quest to either destroy or discover what they mean. It also deals with the struggle of a growing reliance on technology in a very frightful imagining that computers should never be wrong but that they can also become human. Most importantly, despite its convoluted narrative, 2001 is a symphony of sound and stunning visuals that include the most realistic vision of space for the time of its production.
A coming of age film as two young Arkansas boys find themselves mixed up in the mysterious life of a man named MUD.
“Mud” is an adventure about two boys, Ellis and his friend Neckbone, who find a man named Mud hiding out on an island in the Mississippi. Mud describes fantastic scenarios—he killed a man in Texas and vengeful bounty hunters are coming to get him. He says he is planning to meet and escape with the love of his life, Juniper, who is waiting for him in town. Skeptical but intrigued, Ellis and Neckbone agree to help him. It isn’t long until Mud’s visions come true and their small town is besieged by a beautiful girl with a line of bounty hunters in tow.
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.
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.
Like Dr. Frankenstein, Gary and Wyatt manipulate science to make their own human but, unlike the modern prometheus, their version is way hotter!
With bras on their heads and weird science on their side, young nerds Gary and Wyatt use their trusty computer create the “perfect” women who turns out to be a just a little more than a handful. When Lisa (Kelly LeBrock) emerges from the bathroom in a half-shirt and underwear, she begins to turn the boys’ world upside down by placing them in awkward and bizarre situations that they must deal with. Their road to acceptance is paved with obstacles…and hilarity. Aside from the sexy lady, you have to see Weird Science for Bill Paxton’s epic character “Chet”.
