Matinees and Late Shows
Based on Peter Hoeg's best-selling novel, this is an intelligent thriller set in Greenland is dominated by Julia Ormond's performance as an icily tenacious woman attempting to unravel the mysterious death of her neighbour, the six-year-old Isaiah.
FRI 1 - SUN 3 MAY
WAG THE DOG (15)
Director: Barry Levinson. Starring: Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Woody
Harrelson. USA 1997. 97 mins.
Eleven days before the election, the President of America is accused of accosting a girl scout in the Oval Office. Before the news leaks out to the press, spindoctor Conrad Brean is called in to save the President's image and the election.
Peckinpah's elegy for the old ways of the West. Ambivalent, and sombre in mood makes this one of the truly classic westerns of all time.
FRI 8 - SUN 10 MAY
THE BANDIT - ESKIYA (15)
Director: Yavuz Turgul Starring: Sener Sen, Ugur Yucel Turkey. 1996.
128mins Subtitles.
Leaving prison after 35 years, Baran the Bandit discovers his village is underwater flooded by a dam. He sets out to Istanbul, on the trail of Mahmud, his best friend, who betrayed him and stole the woman he loved.
GOODFELLAS will take its place among the great gangster pictures and is a development of MEAN STREETS. It takes place in the sergeant's mess of organised crime rather than the divisional headquarters of THE GODFATHER. Scorsese vividly explains why a life of violence and crime can be satisfying. Without sanctimony, he also presents the garishness, moral absurdity and downright viciousness of his remorseless protagonist's world.
SUN 10 MAY
ALEXANDER NEVSKY (15)
Director: Sergei Eisenstein Starring Nikolai Cherkasov. USSR 1938. 112mins
The patriotic symbol of Alexander Nevsky, under whose command the Russians routed a Teutonic invasion in the 13th century. Rich in imagery and dramatic power. In association with Cambridge Philharmonic Society who will be performing Prokofiev's score for Alexander Nevsky on 21 June at the Corn Exchange.
MON 11 MAY
LONDON (PG)
Director: Patrick Keiller. Narrator: Paul Scofield. UK 1993. 84 mins.
Filmed in sequence throughout 1992, LONDON counterpoints imaginative recapture of the past with sardonic allusions to contemporary blight - social, political, architectural. An anachronistic narrative and exploration of the capital's literary and artistic past, evoked by a static, interrogative camera .
Set in the spring of 1931 with Spain on the verge of civil war Fernando, a young army deserter is given refuge by an eccentric artist on his rambling country estate. The arrival of the artist's quartet of beautiful daughters for a summer holiday inevitably leads Fernando to indefinitely extend his stay and enjoy a succession of blissfully complicated romantic encounters.
TUE 12 - THU 14 MAY
REGENERATION (15)
Director: Gillies Mackinnon. Starring: Jonathan Pryce, James Wilby, Johnny
Lee Miller. UK/ Canada 1997. 105 mins.
Based on Pat Barker's award-winning novel, REGENERATION is a powerful drama set during the First World War which opens with a shocking aerial view of the trenches with their acres of devastated land littered with the result of the slaughter which has become routine along the length of the Western Front. Moving to the rain drenched Craiglockhart Military Hospital, the film focuses on its traumatised inmates, notably Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.
FRI 15 & SAT 16 MAY
RICHARD III (15)
Director: Richard Loncraine. Starring: Ian McKellen, Kristin Scott-Thomas,
Maggie Smith, Nigel Hawthorne, Adrian Dunbar. UK 1995. 103 mins.
Based on the Richard Eyre's outstanding stage adaptation, Shakespeare's play is transposed to England during the 1930's when a bloody Civil War is raging. Suitable for G.C.E. A level revision purposes.
FRI 15 MAY
PYAAR KIYA TO DARNA KYA (PG)
Director: Sohail Khan. Sameer: Lyrics. HIndi 1997. 180mins.
A Bollywood romantic comedy. Tickets ?4.50, ?3.50 (20% discount on family bookings)
A special advance preview of Tom DiCillo's satire of the fashion world and advertising in this tale of New Yorkers at work in search of love.
Lauded at Cannes, a drily satirical comedy of manners and attitudes among the Park Avenue Elite, a group of debutante students living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan who meet almost nightly at Sally Fowler's apartment, decked out in ball gowns and expensive evening dress deconstruct Jane Austen over cocktails.
MON 18 & TUE 19
KOLYA (12)
Director: Jan Sverak. Starring: Zdenek Sverak, Andrej Chalimon. Czech
Republic/UK 1996. 105 mins. Subtitles.
The deserved winner of this year's Best Foreign Language Oscar. Set in the romantic city of Prague in 1988, the year before the Velvet Revolution, this is a warmly tender tragi-comedy of parenthood.
Following close on the heels of STRICTLY BALLROOM and PRISCILLA: QUEEN OF THE DESERT, MURIEL'S WEDDING is an exuberant antipodean feelgood movie with it's fair share of camp and a heart of gold. Trapped in the dull seaside resort of Porpoise Spit Muriel Hislop (Toni Collette), despairs of ever finding her Prince Charming, instead she escapes into a fantasy world of ABBA songs and bridal catalogues.
Powell and Pressburger's passionate paean to English culture, landscape and identity, and a plea for their preservation in a world at war. A landgirl, an alienated sergeant and a GI unmask an eccentric magistrate (eventually revealed as hero) who's been intimidating girls going out with American soldiers, become attuned to a mystic sense of historical continuity along the Pilgrims' Way.
When ballroom champion Scott Hastings dances steps of his own devising, instead of those laid down by the Federation, retribution is swift. Dumped by his partner, his hopes of winning the Pacific Grand Prix are dashed - until out of the shadows steps Fran, an unprepossessing beginner with bad skin, frizzy hair and spectacles.
FRI 22 - SUN 24 MAY
DAS BOOT: THE DIRECTOR'S CUT (18)
Director: Wolfgang Peterson. Starring: Jurgen Prochnow, Herbert Gronemeyer.
Germany 1981. 209 mins. Subtitles.
A very welcome release for the Director's cut of Wolfgang Peterson's supremely tense and engrossing war drama, complete with restored footage and re-designed digital sound. Set entirely on board a submarine on one incredible voyage in 1941, DAS BOOT is an almost unbearably claustrophobic, immensely poignant anti-war masterpiece as rival captains battle it out in a tense war of nerves.
FRI 22 MAY
L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (18)
Director: Curtis Hanson. Starring: Kevin Spacey, Kim Basinger. 1997 140mins.
James Ellroy's crime novel is brilliantly bought to the screen. Set in 50's Los Angeles, with punchy gangland violence, sex scandals and cover ups.
Set in a cold and snowy Minnesota, Jerry, a car salesman in debt hires two thugs to kidnap his own wife and collect a ransom which he hopes her rich father will pay. When the thugs shoot a state trooper and two innocent bystanders the local Police Chief begins investigating and finds that her leads keep coming back to the suspicious looking Jerry.
TUE 26 - THU 28 MAY
THE BUTCHER BOY
Director: Neil Jordan. Starring: Eamonn Owens, Stephen Rea, Sinead
O'Connor, Sean Hughes. Ireland 1997. 106 mins.
At once darkly comic and horrific, the visually stunning THE BUTCHER BOY is a richly detailed, emotionally dense and frighteningly honest exploration of a young boy's disturbed mind gradually shrugging off reality.
Ricky seeks out and woos Marina, a prostitute with whom he once slept and now wishes to marry on his release from a psychiatric ward. In typical Almodovar burlesque.
Richard Linklater made his name with the off-beat cult favourite SLACKER, the film that defined 'Generation X'. Employing the same ultra-realist, deadpan humour that distinguished SLACKER, he evokes the last day of school for a loose-knit group of dope smoking middle-American teenagers in 1976.
SUN 31 MAY
NIL BY MOUTH (18)
Director: Gary Oldman. Starring: Ray Winstone, Kathy Burke. UK 1997. 128 mins.
Actor Gary Oldman makes an impressive writing-directing debut with an deeply personal tale drawing on memories of life in the projects of south-east London. Cloaked in a torrent of profanity and loutish, abusive behaviour the film is a strongly character driven portrait of a family on the edge.
MON 1 & TUE 2 JUNE
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (U)
Director: Martin Scorsese. Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker. Starring: Daniel
Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer. Richard E Grant USA 1993. 133 mins.
Visually sumptuous and emotionally devastating adaptation of Edith Wharton's tale of passion and loss in nineteenth century New York high society. A study in the stifled passions of Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), torn between duty to his fiancee and desire for her cousin, the Countess Olenska.
An absurdist day-glo tragi-comic thriller with trenchant comment on media obsessions with death, sex and voyeurism.
WEDS 3 JUNE, 7.30 - 9pm
ALMODOVAR'S WORLD
With his twelfth feature, LIVE FLESH, proclaimed by critics to be his best yet, Almodovar appears to be breaking new ground and displaying a previously unseen treatment of social and historical issues. Has the 'enfant terrible' of Spanish cinema finally come of age, with fleshed out male characters, a full engagement with female emotions and an ethical approach to disability?
This seminar, illustrated with clips from many of the director's earlier works such as PEPI, LUCI, BOM, MATADOR and WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN, will trace the development of the now-familiar Almodovarian themes, and indulge in his sumptuous visual style and extravagant emotionality.
Tickets: ?3 each (includes documentation). Places limited to 15 so early booking advised. Call the Box Office on 01223-504444
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