The New World, dir. Malick, USA, 2006

presented by Prof. Wendy St. Jean (History)

“The New World” strips away all the fancy and lore from the story of Pocahontas and her tribe and the English settlers at Jamestown, and imagines how new and strange these people must have seemed to one another…Malick strives throughout his film to imagine how the two civilizations met and began to speak when they were utterly unknown to one another. We know with four centuries of hindsight all the sad aftermath, but it is crucial to “The New World” that it does not know what history holds. – Roger Ebert

Thursday, April 18, 6:30pm, CLO 110  

Black Robe, dir. Beresford, Canada, 1991

Presented by Tanya Stabler (History)

 A fiercely realistic drama of frontier Quebec, “Black Robe” mucks about where the new age western “Dances With Wolves” dared not put its pretty paw. In this portrait of 17th-century Canada, there is nothing much to indicate the presence of 20th-century filmmakers — no revisionist apologies, no polite courtships, no clean clothes, no cute animals… Beresford directs from Brian Moore’s adaptation of his own novel, the saga of a Jesuit missionary’s attempt to bring Christianity to the natives of New France. -Rita Kempley, The Washington Post Friday

Friday April 26, 5pm – SPECIAL DIRECTORAL PRESENTATION BY SALVADOR CARRASCO.

The Other Conquest, dir. Carrasco, Mexico, 1999.

AT THE TOWLE THEATER, DOWNTOWN HAMMOND- 5205 HOHMAN AVE.

Salvador Carrasco’s “The Other Conquest” takes place within the folds of history, telling a fictional story with a backdrop of all-too-real events. It’s an epic tale of ideas and cultures clashing, told on an intimate level… Strong performances… bring a reality to the film that almost makes one feel like a witness as these events unfold — a moment when the Aztec gods seemed to fail their people, but actually became part of a new Christianity. -Luis Carrasco, El Paso Times

This event is being held in conjunction with the closing ceremony of the photography exhibit, “In The Shadow of Cortes”, sponsored by the Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures.

March  7 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

2004 – USA – Directed by Michael Gondry

Eternal Sunshine is a very funny and unsentimental film, a romantic comedy with absurdist undertones. The serious philosophical and psychological ambitions are kept up its sleeve rather than worn on it. In this, it resembles the now classic Groundhog Day. Carrey and Winslet play well together; both are naturally aggressive performers with actively expressive eyes

-Phillip French, The Observer

Wednesday, March 20  – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

Alien – The Resurrection

1997- USA – Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet

[...] Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the Frenchman famous in art film circles for two highly stylized movies, “Delicatessen” and the “City of Lost Children.”This one looks a lot like those two and that pretty much sums up “Alien Resurrection.” It’s an art film with bugs that explode out of people’s chests. And it’s funny.
-Stephen Hunter Washington Post.

Thursday, March 28 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

Quest for Fire

1981 – Canada/France – directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud

This French-Canadian production was an impressive attempt at making a caveman movie the way it really was. [...] This scrupulous effort at authenticity does leave Jean-Jacques Annaud with the difficult job of trying to tell an entire story without words or using any of the usual cheats and shortcuts that these prehistoric films do – like subtitling the grunts, adding narration or having the actors speak in English [...] However, Annaud succeeds to a surprising degree – Quest for Fire becomes a film where one is caught up in the opulence of the mime and the natural visual tapestry. There are some often delightful touches like where Jean-Jacques Annaud manages to deliver entire little stories, even jokes on the naiveté of his questors, visually without the use of words. -Richard Scheib, 0-5 stars Moria

Wednesday, April 3 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc

1999 – France – Directed by Luc Besson

It doesn’t take long to see what Luc Besson was up to when he made “The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc.” Besson, the French director of “The Fifth Element,” wanted to make Joan of Arc a hip chick, a riot grrrl, a blaze of fabulousness across the millennial divide.[...] Jovovich (“The Fifth Element”) gives her all to Joan, the illiterate French peasant who heard voices and led France in battle against the English.[...] She growls, she rides a horse, she dives into battle. She rocks. – Edward Guthmann, The San Francisco Chronicle

Thursday, February 7 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

Cinema Paradiso

1988 – Italy – Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore

If you love movies, it’s impossible not to appreciate “Cinema Paradiso”, Giuseppe Tornatore’s heartwarming, nostalgic look at one man’s love affair with film, and the story of a very special friendship. Affecting (but not cloying) and sentimental (but not sappy), “Cinema Paradiso” is the kind of motion picture that can brighten up a gloomy day and bring a smile to the lips of the most taciturn individual. Light and romantic, this fantasy is tinged with just enough realism to make us believe in its magic, even as we are enraptured by its spell.

-James Berardinelli, Reelviews Movie Reviews

Wednesday, February 13 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

Purple Rose of Cairo

1985 – USA – Directed by Woody Allen

with special opening short “The Playhouse” (USA, 1921, Directed by Buster Keaton)

The “Purple Rose of Cairo” is audacious and witty and has a lot of good laughs in it, but the best thing about the movie is the way Woody Allen uses it to toy with the very essence of reality and fantasy… If it is true, and I think it is, that most of the time we go to the movies in order to experience brief lives that are not our own, then Allen is demonstrating what a tricky self-deception we practice. Those movie lives consist of only what is on the screen, and if we start thinking that real life can be the same way, we are in for a cruel awakening. – Roger Ebert

“The Playhouse” is pure proto-surrealism […]In the film’s first reel, Keaton attends an old-school vaudeville performance, and the running gag is that he portrays the entire orchestra and on-stage minstrel routine, as well as every member of the audience. – Budd Wilkins, Slant Magazine

Thursday, February 21 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

Goodbye, Dragon Inn

2003 – Taiwan – Directed by Ming-liang Tsai

with Special Opening Short “Sherlock Jr.” (USA, 1924, Directed by Buster Keaton)

In “Goodbye, Dragon Inn,” [Ming-liang Tsai] has created another idiosyncratic, oddball movie that is both funny and moody. On a lonely, rainy night, an old, run-down theater in Taipei is about to close for good. […] Tsai’s film mourns the passing of an era of not only movies and movie stars but also movie-going      – Ruthe Stein / G. Allen Johnson, SFGate.com

Considered one of Buster Keaton’s greatest works, and his most (gasp) avant-garde feature, “Sherlock Jr.” centers on movie illusion itself, hilariously filtered through the dreams of Keaton’s sad-sack projectionist. Showcasing both Keaton’s interest in filmmaking technique and his repertoire of vaudeville physical gags, the film comically riffs on such visual tricks as superimpositions and editing, as a ghostly “Keaton” exits his sleeping body and walks into the screen, only to face repeated peril as one background cuts to another. -Lucia Bozzola, AllMovie.com

Wednesday, February 27 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

Slpendor

1989 – Italy – Directed by Ettore Scola

To the priest in a small Italian town, the Splendor cinema (now sold for redevelopment) is a ‘dark grotto of sin’; to owner Jordan (Mastroianni), it’s a shrine. But writer/director Scola is more concerned with the grey areas between such views: the patrons who desert cinema in droves when TV offers cheap, undemanding entertainment. Using flashback and clips, he conveys something of the medium’s superiority over the box, at the same time beautifully unravelling a tale of life-long devotion and hard graft.

-Time Out, C.M

The Closet

2001 – France – Directed by Francis Veber

“The Closet is a bonbon spiked with mirth and malice. Daniel Auteuil, as good an actor as France has ever produced, stars as Francois, an accountant so dull that his wife has left him, his teenage son shuns him and his boss (the wonderful Jean Rochefort) is about to can him after twenty years. Francois contemplates suicide until a new neighbor (Michel Aumont) hatches a plan. Francois will pretend to be gay, forcing his boss to save his job for fear of a sex-discrimination suit. The comedy pivots on how everyone, including the firm’s homophobic personnel director (Gerard Depardieu), suddenly finds the gay Francois a figure of intense allure. Auteuil and Depardieu spar hilariously, and writer-director Francis Veber, following The Dinner Game, offers another delicious treat.” – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

Wednesday, November 7 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

La Grand Vadrouille

1966 – France – Directed by Gérard Oury

“Prior to the arrival of Titanic in 1997, La Grande Vadrouille was France’s all-time box-office champion for three decades. In terms of French-language movies, it maintained the number one spot for even longer. It’s a tale of a trio of British paratroopers landing in occupied France in 1941 and having the locals aid their escape courtesy of various farcical misadventures…[It has] excellent production values and a gloss that is easily the equal of a classic Hollywood production from the studio era. More importantly, however, such capable hands prevent Oury from getting too caught up in such concerns. Rather he is able to focus more fully on the acting talent; after all, it is they who really make the film what it is. ” – Anthony Nield, DigitalFix.com

Thursday, November 15 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

The Names Of Love

2010 – France – Directed by Michel Leclerc

“The American romantic comedy has grown distressingly moribund lately, but anyone looking to freshen up the genre a bit need look no further than Michel Leclerc’s The Names Of Love. The French filmmaker fills the film with rom-com conventions—from a film-opening meet-cute to an unflappably quirky heroine—but puts them to work in the service of a story with more on its mind than whether two characters clearly meant to be together will hook up before the credits roll… The French title, Le Nom Des Gens, literally translates as “the names of people,” which doesn’t have the same poetic ring, but gives a better sense of the film’s concern with cultural identity. Leclerc is especially interested in what it means for a pair of, in one of the characters’ words, “half-breeds” to live in a France obsessed with origins and identity. the whimsy is balanced by the leads’ chemistry, and the deft sense of the way two people falling in love bring not just their own histories with them, but the histories of their families and the cultures and nations that molded them.” – Michel Leclerc

Wednesday, November 28 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

Welcome To The Sticks

2008 – France – Directed by Dany Boon

“Welcome to the Sticks is a breezy, likeable little comedy that’s somehow become the all-time champ of the French box-office: a total of 20 million admissions… [Philippe], a post-office manager from the sun-kissed south… is unwillingly relocated to the (real-life) small town of Bergues, near Dunkirk. This comes as bad news to his Riviera-besotted wife, Julie…, causing further frictions in what’s evidently a somewhat ‘tricky’ marriage. Philippe ventures north alone expecting the worst – but finds Bergues a picturesque little spot full of friendly locals such as postman Antoine. Adapting to the local lingo, food and customs takes time, but Philippe eventually fits right in…. All goes swimmingly enough – until Julie decides to experience the “horrors” of Bergues for herself…’” – Neil Young, JigsawLounge

Suspiria

1977 – Italy – Directed by Dario Argento

“[Argento's] films are dreamlike acts of impressionistic fear, encountered as one might a childhood nightmare or a flesh and blood incarnation of a Grimm fairy tale. The subject here is witchcraft, and you’d be a fool to expect stable logic to be guiding the proceedings; rather, it’s a fractured experience at the hands of evil. Be grateful the pieces come together as readily as they do. The Goblins’ carnivalesque, tribal score amplifies the horror like the roar of fire leading to a hellmouth, and saturated, bold color schemes permit an otherworldly tone, like fantasy come to life. The spare parts of haunted house archetypes are tongue in cheek, but the film also exercises an immediately perpetual choke hold on the senses. Blood spills like crimson strokes, the tearing of flesh hurts as much as it looks unreal, and things go bump in the night. It’s nestled amongst the highest water marks of the horror genre” – The Projection Booth

Wednesday, October 10 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

Peeping Tom

1960 – UK – Directed by Michael Powell

“Reviled and fetishized, Michael Powell’s undeniable—if unsavory—classic was the original first-person horror film. Released in Britain barely a month before Psycho had its American premiere, Powell’s serial-killer saga is no less perverse and perhaps even more disturbing. If Powell lacks Hitchcock’s ruthless direction of the audience, he’s more luridly fanciful and blatantly self-reflexive in constructing his infernal machine. Peeping Tom exerts an awful fascination, as well it might. This is the movie that puts the sin in cinephilia. Although subsequently championed by Martin Scorsese and recycled by Brian De Palma, the story of a crazed amateur filmmaker who (literally) uses his camera to torture and murder the women he photographs, effectively ended Powell’s directorial career.” — The Village Voice

Thursday, October 18 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

The Exorcist

1974 – USA – Directed by William Friedkin

“Some movies aren’t just movies. They’re closer to voodoo — they channel currents larger and more powerful than themselves. The audiences that lined up to see The Exorcist in the late winter and early spring of 1974 were drawn by a primal desire to get shocked and prodded in a way that they’d never been shocked and prodded before. The picture was marketed as a deeply solemn ”religious” hex horror movie, complete with catechismal mutterings and a showdown between good and evil, but the word of mouth told the true story. The pea-soup vomit! The pee on the floor! Scary? As hell. But this, make no mistake, was also a blasphemous, eruptive freak show, less Rosemary’s Baby than a supernatural Lolita’s Revenge as imagined by the Marquis de Sade.” — Owen Gleiberman

Wednesday, October 24 – CLO 110 @ 6:30pm

The Iron Rose

1973 – France – Directed by Jean Rollin

“The Iron Rose is a weird haunted graveyard piece that follows two young would-be lover who become trapped in a cemetery after dark, when the locking of the gates transforms the pathways into an inescapable maze. There are no monsters here, no vampires or predators, and the only ghosts are by suggestion. The Girl first resists the idea of a tryst in a graveyard and only grudgingly follows The Boy into the marble orchard. But as night falls and Rollin’s atmospheric night shooting transforms the familiar imagery of crypts and gravestones (he shot the film on location in Amiens Cemetery in Arras, France) into a weirdly beautiful world of stone totems and old ruins being recalled into the earth, the girl’s fright turns to a serenity that terrifies the boy. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says soothingly, ‘The dead are our friends.’” — Parallax View