Spotlight tells the riveting true story of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe investigation that would rock the city and cause a crisis in one of the world’s oldest and most trusted institutions. When the newspaper’s tenacious “Spotlight” team of reporters delve into allegations of abuse in the Catholic Church, their year-long investigation uncovers a decades-long cover-up at the highest levels of Boston's religious, legal, and government establishment, touching off a wave of revelations around the world. Directed by Academy Award-nominee Tom McCarthy (Win Win, The Visitor, The Station Agent), Spotlight is a tense investigative thriller, tracing the steps to one of the biggest crime stories in modern times.

A portmanteau to keep you up past midnight, these five chilling tales are tied together by an equally eerie framing narrative. An architect arrives at a country estate and tells the crowd of assembled guests he’s seen them all in a dream although he knows none of them. The guests try to humor him while entertaining each other with various tales of the supernatural. Each segment boasts a different director and writer but it all hangs together hauntingly well. One highlight is Redgrave as a tormented ventriloquist predicting Anthony Hopkins's Magic performance by decades. (BR)

The drama of anti-Nazi activism in 1940s Europe is conveyed through a gripping documentary account of the interconnected lives of two Harvard alumni: Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, who served the Third Reich before offering himself to the Allies; and Varian Frye, who risked all to smuggle hundreds of Hitler’s opponents out of Europe. Their 1935 meeting, and a seemingly off-hand remark, may have affected the course of Twentieth Century history. The distinguished, Academy Award winning documentarian Richard Kaplan, whose collection of papers and works resides at the Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research, will discuss his work after the screening. Event sponsored by the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and the University Lectures Committee. (AS)

Newly restored to its original form, celebrated filmmaker Paradjanov’s visually audacious masterpiece is, on the surface, a biography of the 18th century Armenian poet Sayat Nova. “But before all else it’s a cinematic experience, and you come away remembering images, repeated expressive movements, costumes, objects, compositions, colors. There’s nothing else quite like this picture.” (Martin Scorsese). Restored by Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata and The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, in association with the National Cinema Centre of Armenia and Gosfilmofond of Russia. Restoration funding provided by the Material World Charitable Foundation and The Film Foundation. After the screening, a special lecture by film scholar James Steffen, entitled "The Color of Pomegranates: A Poetic Film Masterpiece." Funding for James Steffen’s talk courtesy of the University of Wisconsin Lectures Committee General Fund. Additional support provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

This remarkable collaboration between 6 cinema greats was created in protest of American military involvement in Vietnam, and, according to project instigator Marker, "to affirm, by the exercise of their craft, their solidarity with the Vietnamese people in struggle against aggression." Far from Vietnam brings together an array of stylistically disparate contributions, none individually credited, under a unified editorial vision. The elements span documentary footage shot in North and South Vietnam and at anti-war demonstrations in the United States; a fictional vignette and a monologue that dramatize the self-interrogation of European intellectuals; interviews with Fidel Castro and Anne Morrison, widow of Norman Morrison, the Quaker pacifist who burned himself alive in front of the Pentagon in 1965; an historical overview of the conflict; reflections from French journalist Michèle Ray; and a range of repurposed media material. The screening will be preceded by Agnès Varda’s short film, Black Panthers (1968, 30 min.).  Presented with the support of the Friends of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries.