COMPLETE CINEMATHEQUE SCREENINGS JAN-MAY 2O23

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13

  • Thu., Jan. 26 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

This immersive fantasia depicting the life of a donkey topped “Best Film of 2022” lists in The New York Times and Artforum, and was a close runner-up most everywhere else. The eponymous mule’s odd odyssey begins when he is separated from his lifelong role in a traveling circus. EO goes on to a series of misadventures throughout Europe, witnessing the entire spectrum of human experience through his dark, soulful eyes. “No movie that I've seen this year has moved me as deeply, made me feel as optimistic about cinema or engaged me with such intellectual vigor” (Manohla Dargis, The New York Times). (MK)

  • Fri., Jan. 27 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

In what is unquestionably one of his signature leading roles, Javier Bardem plays Blanco, the charismatic and sometimes menacing owner of a factory that manufactures industrial scales. While awaiting the presentation of an award for corporate excellence, Blanco must sort out the problems of his workers - problems that are undoubtedly compounded by Blanco’s not-so-upstanding personal behavior! A compelling and darkly funny workplace satire. The Good Boss “provides prime material for Bardem, who has to maintain a polished veneer even as his character’s mendacity and troubles mount” (Ben Kenigsberg, The New York Times).

  • Sat., Jan. 28 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

Bresson demonstrates his austere sense of beauty through exquisitely composed shots and a carefully crafted story paralleling the lives of a mistreated donkey and the equally suffering girl who gave him his name. Jean-Luc Godard called this uncompromising view of humanity through the eyes of a donkey, “the world in an hour and a half.” It is possibly Bresson’s most personal, intense work with one of the most powerfully devastating endings in cinema history. 

  • Sun., Jan. 29 | 2:00 PM
    Chazen

Set in and around Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects, Cooley High presents the seriocomic adventures of two best friends, Preach (Turman) and Cochise (Hilton-Jacobs), as they navigate their way through the humdrum of high school and the hazards of North Side 1964’s mean streets. Labeled the “Black” American Graffiti for years, Cooley is looser, grittier, and less nostalgic than the comparison suggests, with an energy and vibe that has proved influential in the ensuing decades. Director Schultz’s movie inspired the long running tv sitcom What’s Happening, and left its fingerprints all over subsequent big screen portrayals of Black teens, including, notably, 1991’s Boyz n the Hood. (BR)

  • Thu., Feb. 2 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

Named Best Film of 2022 at Indiewire, Charlotte Wells’s incredibly moving film captures the tender relationship between a tween girl and her dad on vacation from Ireland at a Turkish resort. “An astonishing and devastating debut feature. It’s hard to find a critical language to account for the delicacy and intimacy of this movie. This is partly because Wells, with the unaffected precision of a lyric poet, is very nearly reinventing the language of film, unlocking the medium’s often dormant potential to disclose inner worlds of consciousness and feeling" (The New York Times). (MK)

  • Fri., Feb. 3 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

When her teenage daughter is kidnapped, Cielo will stop at nothing to get her back. After turning to the cops and her family, she takes matters into her own hands, and goes up against the cartel herself. Co-produced by Palme d’Or winners Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days) and the Dardenne brothers, La Civil invests its gripping, ripped-from-the-headlines thriller premise with a documentary-like eye for detail. Inspired by true events, La Civil won a Courage Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. (MK)

  • Sat., Feb. 4 | 6:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

Grant plays detective Daniel “Handsome Dick” Barr, and Bennett is his girlfriend, Eve Fallon, a manicurist turned ace crime-reporter. Together, they’re hot on the trail after a gang of baby-killing jewel thieves in this fast-paced and suspenseful crime-comedy. Unsentimental and brimming over with hard-boiled cynicism, Big Brown Eyes finds director Walsh making the most of Pidgeon and Lloyd Nolan as some truly ice-blooded ne’er-do-wells, as well as helping to shape Grant’s remarkably charming big-screen persona. (BR)

  • Sat., Feb. 4 | 7:30 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

In a closed-minded hamlet, bank clerk Ruth (Carroll) finds herself the subject of a scandal when she innocently spends an evening with city-slicker playboy Romer (Grant). The false accusations threaten Ruth’s livelihood and her budding romance with childhood friend Bill (Scott). A racy, beautifully directed pre-code gem, Paramount’s Hot Saturday “ is set in a curdled version of the small-town America that was being enthusiastically celebrated down the road at Fox…[a town] where the local youths spend their leisure time chugging bootleg liquor and groping each other on the dance floor at a lakeside roadhouse” (Dave Kehr, The New York Times).

  • Thu., Feb. 9 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

One of the current era’s most daring artists returns with another layered, involving, and essential cinematic puzzle. In his fourth feature since receiving a ban on filmmaking from the Iranian government, Panahi again plays a version of himself, this time as a director remotely overseeing a film production in Turkey. Throughout, No Bears blurs borders—between reality and cinema, between tradition and modernity, and between countries themselves. Since completing production, Panahi has been imprisoned for “propaganda against the system.” Named one of the 5 best films of 2022 in The New York Times and The New Yorker, among others. (MK)

  • Fri., Feb. 10 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

In October 2019, over a million people took to the streets of Santiago demanding social change, igniting years of protests with the aim of reshaping the very foundation of Chile’s government. Master documentarian Guzmán (Nostalgia for the Light), who chronicled Chile’s 1973 coup d’état in his classic The Battle of Chile, is once again on the ground to capture his home country’s latest political earthquake. My Imaginary Country is amply supplied with Guzmán’s characteristically clear-eyed observations and arresting protest footage, but is most of all devoted to probing interviews with a broad cross-section of the women behind the revolution. (MK)

  • Sat., Feb. 11 | 6:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

Film noir regulars O’Brien and Totter star in the story of a gangster who gets amnesia after having experimental brain surgery to cure his criminal tendencies — then his old gang wants to know where he stashed the loot. Man in the Dark was just the second 3-D feature to be released in the U.S. (between Bwana Devil and House of Wax) and the process is dazzlingly, dizzyingly demonstrated in the climax set aboard an amusement park roller coaster.

  • Sat., Feb. 11 | 7:30 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

The San Francisco Police ask Eleanor Johnson (Sheridan) for help in tracking down her husband, who is the eyewitness to a murder. Eleanor must find her spouse before the killer does, so she embarks on her own investigation all over the city, learning things about her marriage that she never realized before. Her search leads her ultimately to the roller coaster on the Santa Monica pier (the same coaster used three years later for the climax of Man in the Dark). After twelve years under contract at Warner Bros., Sheridan gives one of her finest performances in this riveting noir thriller, a movie she also produced! 35mm print restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Film Noir Foundation.

  • Thu., Feb. 16 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

A fixture of 2022’s “Best Film of the Year” lists, Diop’s narrative debut is a powerful contemporary reimagination of the Medea myth. A pregnant writer attends the trial of a young Senegalese immigrant who abandoned her infant daughter on a French beach. Based on a real case, Diop’s subtle yet riveting film interrogates the traditions of European social order and the courtroom drama in cinema. “Extraordinarily multifaceted. Saint Omer challenges accepted ideas of perspective, of subjectivity and objectivity—and even of what cinema can be when it’s framed by an intelligence that doesn’t accept those accepted ideas” (Variety). (MK)

  • Fri., Feb. 17 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

Pinky is on the run. After living under the spell of a cult, he’s finally escaped and is hiding out with his gun in an abandoned building in Medellín, Colombia. Edging back into society, he takes a job in an illegal screen-printing factory and watches his back, waiting for fate to catch up with him. Shot on rich 16mm, crafted with total precision, and paced like a bullet, Camilo Restrepo’s stylish debut won the Best First Feature prize at the Berlin Film Festival. “Succinctly potent like a concentrated shot of a mood-altering substance” (The Film Stage). (MK)

  • Sat., Feb. 18 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

Bearded space bros travel the galaxy blowing up unstable planets, clearing the way for future Earth colonies. Along the way, they do battle with a beachball-shaped “pet” alien and argue with “smart” bombs as well as each other. John Carpenter’s seminal stoner sci-fi spoof takes aim at tropes established by Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, while also providing proof of concept for co-screenwriter/star O’Bannon’s next project; 1979’s Alien. (BR)

  • Sun., Feb. 19 | 2:00 PM
    Chazen

An avant-garde artist whose work was completed between the late 1960s and his death in 2022, Paolo Gioli occupies a unique spot in the history of Italian cinema. Gioli's films explore the mechanical, chemical, and perceptual elements of the cinema that, while often overlooked, are nevertheless essential to the cinematic experience as we have known it. This selection of Gioli’s short films, curated and presented by UW Madison Professor of Italian Patrick Rumble, offers examples of the filmmaker’s playfully archeological attitude towards the medium and its technology, resulting in Rumble's description of Gioli as "among the last of the first filmmakers."  The program of 8 Gioli short films spans between Traces of Traces (1969) and Natura Obscura (2013). (PR)

  • Thu., Feb. 23 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

Cahiers du Cinema’s pick for best film of 2022 stars Magimel as De Roller, a French bureaucrat in over his head on the island of Tahiti. Adrift in this luxuriant setting, De Roller attempts to navigate the remnants of France’s colonial empire, while the spectral presence of a nuclear submarine looms offshore. As ravishing and hypnotic as the coastal tides, Pacifiction deconstructs the paranoid political thrillers of the 1970s to mesmerizing effect. “The art film of the year. Last year and this one” (Indiewire).

  • Fri., Feb. 24 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

Larry Gottheim has been a key figure in American experimental cinema for nearly five decades. Combining conceptual and formal sophistication, Gottheim’s two most recent works included in this program survey the boundary between natural process and human agency, offering varied perceptions of deceptively simple subjects that concatenate into feasts of light, color, texture, movement, and sound. Larry Gottheim will appear in person to introduce his films and discuss after the screenings.

  • Sat., Feb. 25 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

One of the very best independent movies of the 1970s takes place in a soon-to-be-defunct inner city police station. When a massive, marauding mob of criminals lay siege to the practically empty building, it’s up to one lone cop, a secretary, and a mysterious prisoner to defend Precinct 13. Though neither a traditional Western or zombie movie, writer/director/music composer Carpenter’s second feature plays like a pulse-pounding hybrid of Rio Bravo and Night of the Living Dead. A new 4K restoration from the American Genre Film Archive will be screened!

  • Sun., Feb. 26 | 2:00 PM
    Chazen

Schultz’s box office hit offers a day-in-the-life of the workers, customers, and strange visitors at a busy Los Angeles car wash. The Grammy-winning pop soundtrack features Rose Royce’s chart-topping title song, of course, and the talented cast also includes Antonio Fargas, Melanie Mayron, Jaws’s Lorraine Gary, Garrett Morris, Clarence Muse, The Pointer Sisters, Ivan Dixon, Bill Duke, Brooke Adams, and Danny DeVito. A multi-character laugh riot with moments of poignancy in the tradition of American Graffiti, Car Wash is a “sunny, lively comedy…[with a] tremendous sense of life” (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times).

  • Fri., Mar. 3 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

A happy, newlywed laborer is disfigured after an explosion in the quarry where he is working and is forced to wear a mask. At the peak of his fame as an actor in silent cinema, Vanel (The Wages of Fear) stepped behind the camera and completed his only feature film as director. “Dans la nuit is a disturbing, surprising film in which [Vanel] demonstrates an incredible sense of framing and editing and a wild demented modernity” (Il Cinema Ritrovato Program Guide). Released and quickly withdrawn at the dawn of talkies, Dans la nuit is perhaps France’s last silent film. Unseen for nearly a century, Vanel’s gem has been restored by Institut Lumière and Éclair Classics. Live piano by David Drazin.

  • Sat., Mar. 4 | 6:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

In the last film produced by the celebrated Val Lewton (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie), a gambler and gunman reluctantly returns to the desert mining town he’s just been expelled from to warn the citizens of an impending attack by Mescalero warriors. Excitingly directed by Fregonese, the final siege sequence inside a dance hall turned fortress sets the stage for films-to-come like Rio Bravo, Night of the Living Dead, and Assault on Precinct 13, and is “one of the most remarkable passages in American cinema” (Dave Kehr, Il Cinema Ritrovato Program Guide). Restored in 4K in 2021 by Universal Pictures in collaboration with The Film Foundation at NBC Universal StudioPost laboratory, from a 35mm nitrate 3-strip original negative preserved by UCLA Film and Television Archive.

  • Sat., Mar. 4 | 7:30 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

Mason plays Dr Frank Matson, a shady physician who takes off with a bag full of stolen money and the girlfriend (Toren) of a gang leader (Duryea), hiding out with her in Mexico. But fate knocks loudly on the door echoing one of Fregonese’s major preoccupations: the encounter with death. Matson takes advantage of his medical knowledge to deceive and to negotiate his way out of trouble. But he later comes to use it to integrate and eventually to heal. He regains his sense of self-worth by opening a hospital, curing the poor in a Mexican village. The game of fate involves things happening twice: a car accident, an encounter with a sick Mexican patient, a journey by aeroplane, and the face-off with Duryea. A sense of doom hangs in the air and pushes all the players into the “red circle” where they meet their designated fate. This is the ballad of a fatalist” (Ehsan Khoshbakht, Il Cinema Ritrovato Program Guide).

  • Fri., Mar. 10 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

Released the year after the end of World War II and the death of Mussolini, De Sica’s Shoeshine was an important early work of Italian neorealism—the influential film movement that explored social issues in postwar Italy. De Sica, who would go on to make the neorealist classics Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D. (1952), brings his trademark humanist pathos to this story of two young friends who, in their attempt to save money to buy a horse, find themselves falling into petty criminality that lands them in the uncompromising jaws of the juvenile prison system. Shoeshine stands alongside Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955) and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) as one of the classic films about childhood in a challenging world. (JB). Restored in 4K in 2022 by The Film Foundation and Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with Orium S.A. with funding provided by Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory. Prior to the screening,  a special introduction from Guy Borlée of Il Cinema Ritrovato and Cineteca di Bologna.

  • Sat., Mar. 11 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

For this adaptation of a psychologist’s memoir, in which the author recalls his time using modern psychological techniques to help San Quentin inmates, director Fregonese shifts the focus of the story onto the prisoners. Produced by Stanley Kramer and shot on location at San Quentin, My Six Convicts is genuine auteurist cinema, where, according to film critic and Il Cinema Ritrovato curator Ehshan Khoshbakht, “the controlled space of the prison becomes a metaphor for the filmmaking itself, in which every element is determined by Fregonese, especially in his mosaic-like arrangement of the violence inherent in spaces of confinement…eroding any sense of comfort and belonging.” 

  • Fri., Mar. 17 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

“Gee, whiz!,” exclaims young David (Hunt), as he witnesses a flying saucer landing near his home. Soon, his parents and all the adults in his smalltown begin acting strangely and it’s up to David to confront the green, bug-eyed aliens and their giant-brained leader who controls the grown-ups! Filmed in glorious color and directed by former set designer Menzies, Invaders from Mars remains one of the most eye-poppingly delightful films of the 1950s, especially in this new 4K restoration from Ignite Films.

  • Sat., Mar. 18 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

Spanish auteur Buñuel is best remembered for his surreal satires lampooning sex, religion, and the upper classes. With 1953’s Él, the enigmatic auteur made one of the most scathing, scabrous dark comedies of his career. Made at the height of Buñuel’s period working for the Mexican film industry, Él tells the story of the marriage of Francisco and Gloria. Gloria marries Francisco because of his charm and social position; she soon finds, however, that she has married a man who is pathologically jealous, interpreting infidelity in Gloria’s every move. Adorned with striking touches of surrealism, Él deftly balances its comedic and unsettling tones. (JB). Restored by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project, Les Films du Camélia and Cineteca di Bologna at L'Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory, with the support of OCS and in association with Películas y Videos Internacionales. Special thanks to Guillermo del Toro and Daniela Michel. Funding provided by the Material World Foundation. 

  • Fri., Mar. 24 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

The bucolic existence of a riverside town is disrupted by a traveling circus troupe. Filmed in cinéma-vérité style, director Aravindan rounded up a troupe of actual circus artistes and traveled with them to the village of Thirunavaya on the banks of India’s Bharathapuzha river. The resulting film is a gently poetic allegory that maintains the improvisational and immediate qualities of a documentary. Restored by Film Heritage Foundation, The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna at Prasad Corporation Pvt. Ltd’s Post – Studios, Chennai and L’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory in Bologna, and in association with Producer K. Ravindranathan Nair of General Pictures, and the family of Aravindan Govindan. Presented with the support of the Center for South Asia.

  • Sat., Mar. 25 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

Coppola’s breakthrough film as a director is the epic narrative of the near demise and reemergence to power of the Corleone Mafia clan.  The film features stellar performances by a cast that also includes Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall, Sterling Hayden and John Cazale. A compelling story on its own terms, The Godfather also offers the big screen’s most powerful metaphor for the ruthless nature of American big business. A new 4K digital restoration will be screened.

  • Sun., Mar. 26 | 2:00 PM
    Chazen

Thirty-something delivery man Dexter Jackson’s (Carson) greatest dream is to be a television news anchor, a gig he spends every free moment practicing for. His big break comes during an active hostage situation where his heroic efforts earn him the respect of his community and a cushy reporting gig as the only Black newsman at a highly rated local network. Soon enough, though, he’s pushed by a craven, ratings-hungry producer to deliver sleazy exposés on his friends and neighbors, and he begins to see a grotesque, Dorian Gray-like transformation in his on-air appearance. In hindsight, Livin’ Large! looks like a stepping stone between Sidney Lumet’s Network and Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, a media satire as broad and crass as the industry it’s skewering, and another Schultz-directed winner that pins its wacky hijinks to an uncommon sensitivity regarding matters of race and work. Print courtesy Chicago Film Society. (CW)

  • Fri., Mar. 31 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

Palestine’s leading cinematic auteur Elia Suleiman (Divine Intervention) has returned with his first feature in ten years: a comic chronicle of an artist looking for funding for his next project. Without uttering more than a handful of words, Suleiman plays himself, a writer-director who leaves his oft-absurd daily life in Nazareth to court producers and actors (including Bernal) in Paris and New York City. Concerned with a lot more than just show business, Suleiman fixes his camera on a number of droll characters and situations: a ballet of cops on Segways, an all gun-carrying citizenry of Manhattan, and a stubborn, implacable sparrow, among many others. Told in a series of sequences that are as deadpan as the expression on Suleiman’s face, It Must Be Heaven recalls the comic genius of Jacques Tati, Jerry Lewis, and Sweden’s Roy Andersson. “Affably self-effacing meta-commentary blankets the film, skewering the very notion of a standard-bearing national artist by revealing how tenuous geographic borderlines can be” (Charles Bramesco, Little White Lies).

  • Sat., Apr. 1 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

In his finest lead performance, Caan plays Frank, a home-invading safecracker and ex-convict living and working by a strict code. He has a reliable partner in Barry (Jim Belushi) and a mentor in the still-behind-bars Okla (Willie Nelson). When a Chicago mob outfit recruits Frank for some high-end heists, the thief finds his entire way of life in jeopardy, especially his new marriage with Jessie (Weld). Writer/director Mann’s first theatrical feature, with its neon-lit nightworld pulsating to the music of Tangerine Dream, is one of the most exciting and stylish debuts of the 1980s.

  • Fri., Apr. 7 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

Kurosawa transplants Shakespeare’s Macbeth to feudal Japan with Toshiro Mifune as the samurai analogue to the famed Scottish lord. Measured expressionistic flourishes (blankets of fog, sheets of rain, and a stunning use of arrows in the unforgettable conclusion) endow the world of this underrated masterpiece with an eerie sense of inevitable evil and peril. Presented in conjunction with University Theatre’s production of Macbeth, April 20-30.

  • Sat., Apr. 8 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

A group of L.A. police detectives, led by Vincent Hanna (Pacino) are closing in on a clever, well-armed group of thieves, led by Neil McCauley (De Niro). Cross-cutting between the cops and criminals, writer-director Mann explores their codes of personal behavior, their working methods, and their relationships with women, finding more similarities than differences. Ditching plans to film in Chicago just before production began, Mann nonetheless delivered one of the definitive Los Angeles movies, and one of the greatest crime epics of our time.

  • Fri., Apr. 21 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

Returning as Wong Fei-hung 16 years after Drunken Master established his big screen persona as an ingenious comic acrobat and fighter, Jackie Chan outdoes the original with this sequel’s series of stupefying stunt set pieces. While taking on crooks selling Imperial Chinese treasures, our hero finds himself in jaw-dropping fights that take place under a train, in a busy marketplace, and, ultimately, in an iron foundry where Jackie must contend with a plethora of hot coals! A new 4K DCP of the original international version will be screened.

  • Sat., Apr. 22 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

Berlin, 1947: a congressional delegation is headed to a war-torn Berlin to evaluate military morale. U.S. Representative Phoebe Frost of Iowa (Arthur) is particularly concerned with the whereabouts of Erika von Schlütow (Dietrich, giving a career-best performance), a cabaret singer rumored to have been the mistress of high-ranking Nazi officials. Phoebe enlists Captain Pringle (Lund), one of her constituents stationed in Berlin, to aid in her investigation, blithely unaware that Pringle and Erika are lovers. A romantic farce colored by striking tones of lingering wartime danger, A Foreign Affair remains one of legendary writer/director Wilder’s most underrated comedies. (JB)

  • Fri., Apr. 28 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

The third chapter in the internationally popular action saga finds Jackie Chan’s HK Inspector teamed up with Yeoh’s cop from mainland China in order to bust up a drug smuggling ring. Quentin Tarantino said Supercop has “the greatest stunts ever filmed in any movie ever" and we are pretty sure he was thinking about Yeoh’s driving a motorcycle onto a moving train and Chan’s jumping from the sixth story of a building onto the rope ladder of a helicopter! A new DCP of the original international version, running eight minutes longer than the 1996 U.S. release version, will be shown.

  • Sat., Apr. 29 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

Be careful what you say when someone asks you ‘Permesso,?’” reads the poster tagline of Wilder’s Italian-set comedy. Wilder perennial Lemmon plays Wendell Armbruster, an uptight married American executive who turns up on the Mediterranean coast to claim the body of his dead father. Slowly, Armbruster falls in love with the daughter (the radiant Mills) of his father’s unknown-to-him mistress, discovering he has more in common with his old man than he thought.

  • Sun., Apr. 30 | 2:00 PM
    Chazen

Aspiring to the kung fu mastery of Bruce Lee, martial artist Leroy (Taimak) rescues TV personality Laura (Vanity) from an evil businessman (Murney). To keep Laura safe, Leroy faces a showdown with Sho’nuff (Julius Carry III), The Shogun of Harlem. Produced by Berry Gordy, this light and funny action-romance has a Motown soundtrack featuring Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, and Debarge, performing Rhythm of the Night. “The Last Dragon is first and foremost a romantic comedy, and a very sweet one at that, and that's why its martial-arts combat scenes work so well. We've been given enough time to care about who's kicking the stuffing out of whom” (Gene Siskel, Chicago Tribune).

  • Thu., May. 4 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

They say a dog is a man’s best friend, but what if the man is a total dirtbag? In that case, it might be time for some sweet revenge, doggy style.  When Reggie (voiced by Will Ferrell), a naïve, relentlessly optimistic Border Terrier, is abandoned on the mean city streets by his lowlife owner, Doug (Will Forte), Reggie is certain that his beloved owner would never leave him on purpose. But once Reggie falls in with a fast-talking, foul-mouthed Boston Terrier named Bug (voiced by Jamie Foxx), a stray who loves his freedom and believes that owners are for suckers, Reggie finally realizes he was in a toxic relationship and begins to see Doug for the heartless sleazeball that he is. Determined to seek revenge, Reggie, Bug and Bug’s pals—Maggie (Isla Fisher), a smart Australian Shepherd who has been sidelined by her owner’s new puppy, and Hunter (Randall Park), an anxious Great Dane who’s stressed out by his work as an emotional support animal—together hatch a plan and embark on an epic adventure to help Reggie find his way home … and make Doug pay by biting off the appendage he loves the most. (Hint: It’s not his foot).  A subversion of the dog movies we know and love, Strays, directed by Josh Greenbaum (Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar) and produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, is a hilarious, R-rated, live-action comedy about the complications of love, the importance of great friendships, and the unexpected virtues of couch humping. See Strays at this free screening before it is released on June 9. Special Thanks to Universal Pictures.

  • Fri., May. 5 | 7:00 PM
    4070 Vilas Hall

Scorsese’s homage to musical melodramas like A Star is Born and The Man I Love tells of the stormy romance of hotheaded jazz saxophonist and bandleader Jimmy Doyle (DeNiro) and pop singer Francine Evans (Minnelli). As Francine’s star ascends, the lovers’ relationship begins a downward spiral. Combining big-budget production numbers and elaborate set-design with DeNiro and Scorsese’s trademarked improvisatory style, New York, New York is a singularly striking artistic achievement. A recently struck 35mm print of the uncut version, complete with the “Happy Endings” musical number, will be shown.

  • Sat., May. 6 | 7:00 PM
    Marquee

Highlighting works produced in Communication Arts Media Production courses at UW Madison, this program is curated by the instructors of documentary and narrative production courses and gives new filmmakers the opportunity to present their films on screen for the first time.