IAM Screening Series

May 21: MAS*H (1970)

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

M*A*S*H (1970)

Friday, May 21st - 7:00pm

Trailer

Rotten Tomatoes: 89%

Metacritic: 79

"One of America's funniest films." - Time

"The best American war comedy since sound came in." - Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

"Perfectly expressed the anarchic, rebellious spirit of the 1970s." - Neil Smith, BBC

"Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland are two genuinely funny actors." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

"A cockeyed masterpiece -- see it twice." - Joe Morgenstern, Newsweek

A war movie without any battle scenes; a comedy we laugh at precisely because it shouldn't be funny. Director Robert Altman's thinly veiled Vietnam War satire M*A*S*H follows a group of Mobile Army Surgical Hospital officers stationed near the front lines of the Korean conflict. Led by sardonic captains "Hawkeye" Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and "Trapper" John McIntyre (Elliott Gould), they hatch screwball adventures as an antidote to the tragedies surrounding them. Surgical hijinks unfold as they fly off to Japan to play golf, rig a game of football against a rival army team, and subject their priggish superiors, Major Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) and Major "Hot Lips" Houlihan (Sally Kellerman), to all manner of hilarious indignities. Altman's decision to present his film as a series of loosely connected vignettes rather than a traditionally unfolding narrative perfectly captures the freewheeling spirit so unique to early-'70s cinema; the film has the feel of an absurd three-ring circus.

M*A*S*H features a huge ensemble cast all talking over each other (both Altman traits) and with its release a new form of comedy was born. Premier Magazine rated MASH one of the 50 Greatest Comedies of All Time and AFI (the American Film Institute) named it #54 on their list of Greatest Movies of All Time. It won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy) and the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, as well as the Palme d'Or for Director Robert Altman at the Cannes Film Festival. An essential part of film history and a real side-splitter to this day.

Runtime: 116 minutes

April 16: Citizen Kane (1941)

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Citizen Kane (1941)

Friday, April 16th - 7:00pm

Trailer

Rotten Tomatoes: 100%

"Sparkles with originality and invention…a triumph" - John C. Flinn Sr., Variety

"A marvelous movie…that gets better with each renewed acquaintance." - Time Out

"To re-visit Citizen Kane is to experience the infinite possibilities of movies being realized right before your very eyes." - Empire Magazine

"The movie that taught [me] what movies were." - Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

"A picture of tremendous and overpowering scope, not in physical extent so much as in its rapid and graphic rotation of thoughts…comes close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood" - Bosley Crowther, The New York Times

"It would be nice to be able to buck the critical orthodoxy and say how tired and overrated Citizen Kane is; but the dull truth is, it's still, indisputably, one of the great masterpieces of cinema." - Robert Hanks, The Independent

Arguably the greatest of American films, Orson Welles's 1941 masterpiece, made when he was only 26, still unfurls like a dream and carries the viewer along the mysterious currents of time and memory to reach a mature (if ambiguous) conclusion: people are the sum of their contradictions, and cannot be easily known.

Welles plays the enormously wealthy media magnate Charles Foster Kane. Told from the often contradictory perspectives of his friends, coworkers, and romantic interests, the film charts Kanes's rise to power running a media empire, his pursuit of political office, and his eventual personal collapse. The film, based on a composite of eccentric aviator/recluse Howard Hughes and famed newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, bore a strong enough resemblance that Hearst tried to have the movie suppressed.

The film is the sum of Welles's awesome ambitions as an artist in Hollywood. He pushes the limits of then-available technology to create a true magic show, a visual and aural feast. Every aspect of the production marked an advance in film language: the deep focus and deeply shadowed cinematography (from Gregg Toland); the discontinuous narrative, relying heavily on flashbacks and newsreel footage (propelled by a script largely written by Herman Mankiewicz); the innovative use of sound and score (music composed by Bernard Herrmann); and the ensemble acting forged in the fires of Welles's Mercury Theatre (featuring the film debuts of, among others, Joseph Cotten, Everett Sloane, and Agnes Moorehead).

Nominated for nine Academy Awards, Citizen Kane is quite possibly the greatest film ever made and certainly the most influential. Every moment of the film, every shot, has been choreographed to perfection. This is truly a one-of-a-kind work, and in many ways is still the most modern of modern films from the 20th century.

Runtime: 119 minutes

March 19: A Serious Man (2009)

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

A Serious Man (2009)

Friday, March 19th - 7:00pm

Trailer

Rotten Tomatoes: 87%

Metacritic: 79

"Rich and funny" - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

"The Coens have made their most personal, most intensely Jewish film, a pitch-perfect comedy of despair that, against some odds, turns out to be one of their most universal as well." - Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

"A wonderfully odd, bleakly comic and thoroughly engrossing film." - Claudia Puig, USA Today

"Earnestly engaged in the question of what constitutes a life well lived." - J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader

"It's about God, man's place in the world and the meaning of life, so naturally it's one of [the Coens] funnier movies…a metaphysical pie in the face." - Kirk Honeycutt, The Hollywood Reporter

"See this film immediately." - Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

In celebration of and disagreement with the Oscars last weekend, the IAM Screening Series staff would like to present their winner for Best Picture of 2009, Academy Award-winning writer/directors Joel and Ethan Coen's black comedy, "A Serious Man."

It is 1970, and Larry Gopnik (Tony Award nominee Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) that she is leaving him. She has fallen in love with one of his more pompous acquaintances, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), who seems to her a more substantial person than the feckless Larry. An anonymous hostile letter-writer is trying to sabotage Larry's chances for tenure at the university, while a graduate student seems to be trying to bribe him for a passing grade while at the same time threatening to sue him for defamation. On top of all this, the beautiful woman next door torments him by sunbathing nude. Struggling for equilibrium, Larry seeks advice from three different rabbis. Can anyone help him cope with his afflictions and become a righteous person -- a mensch -- a serious man?

Nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards as well as Best Actor for Michael Stuhlbarg at the Golden Globes, and winner of Best Cinematography for Roger Deakins at the Independent Spirit Awards, A Serious Man is darkly funny and filled with thought provoking questions about faith, familial responsibility, delinquent behavior, dental phenomena, academia, mortality, and Judaism. Few films are so deadly serious and yet so funny at the same time; this sustained tone is pitch-perfect and makes A Serious Man required viewing.

Runtime: 106 minutes

Yi Yi (2001)

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0500

February 12, 7:00pm
Trailer
Rotten Tomatoes: 96%
Metacritic: 92
"A marvel of delicacy and humor" - Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
"Only rarely is a film this observant and tender about the ups and downs of daily existence." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
"A lucid, elegant, nuanced, humorous movie…A wonderfully engrossing experience." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
“An intimate epic...In exchange for three hours of your time, 'Yi Yi' will give you more life.” - A.O. Scott, The New York Times
The multigenerational story of a Taiwanese family – two parents, two children, and an elderly grandmother – living in a small apartment in Taipei, Yi Yi (translated as 'A One and a Two') is about the patterns of daily life, from a wedding to a funeral, from the first date to the last, from birth to death. A father whose business needs a new-media fix from a Japanese swami (the marvelous Issey Ogata), a mother who seeks solace in a Buddhist retreat; other hearts break from romantic despair or break down from old age. These are the delicately observed emotional struggles of a middle class Taiwanese family seen through the eyes of three generations.
Widely hailed as one of the most important directors in contemporary cinema, Edward Yang won the Best Director prize at Cannes for this careful, direct, meticulously photographed film. Yi Yi was also named Best Foreign Language Film by the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and was selected as one of the top ten greatest films of the past twenty-five years by British film magazine Sight and Sound (right alongside Raging Bull and Apocalypse Now). Yi Yi is not only essential viewing, it's essential for your soul.
173 minutes

Frozen River (2008)

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0500

January 15, 7:00pm
Trailer
Rotten Tomatoes: 88%
Meta Critic: 82

"Incredibly compelling and intense…I can't think of another film that's this small and powerful." - Don Lewis, Film Threat
“This is a debut feature, though you'd never know it from the filmmaker's commandingly confident style, or from the heartbreaking beauty -- heartbreaking, then heartmending -- of Melissa Leo's performance.”
- Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal
"As the summer heats up, let Frozen River wash over you; let its bracing drama and the intensity of its acting restore your spirits as well as your faith in American independent film." - Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
"A first-rate thriller, maintaining a high level of suspense." - J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader
"Does what too many independent American movies only pretend to do: Takes you to an unnoticed corner of our country and shows what it's like to actually live there." - Ty Burr, Boston Globe

Courtney Hunt's feature directorial debut Frozen River – nominated for two Oscars (Best Actress and Best Original Screenplay) and the winner of 2 Independent Spirit Awards and the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for Best Dramatic Film - is a powerful, unflinching tale of two women, who, driven by economic hardship, form an unlikely partnership smuggling illegal immigrants across the Canadian border. Melissa Leo (The Three Burials, 21 Grams) turns in a gritty performance as Ray, a struggling dollar-store cashier and mother living in a trailer home in upstate New York, who forms a fraught and unlikely partnership with Lila (Misty Upham), a Mohawk Indian from the Mohawk territory near the frozen St. Lawrence River that forms part of the border between the U.S. and Canada.

Within a stark, mostly minimalist screenplay, Hunt seamlessly works in contemporary anxieties - economic recession, immigration, and trafficking - but never puts too fine a point on social relevance to the detriment of a compelling storyline. Frozen River is more than a somber meditation on lives in peril: it's a complex portrait of women from different walks of life struggling to find their ethical bearings in a harsh, unforgiving, and corrupt world.

97 minutes

A Christmas Tale (2008)

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0500

December 18, 7:00pm
Trailer
Rotten Tomatoes: 86%
Metacritic: 84

"Great, chaotic, unsettling fun." - Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
“A film experience to be seen and savored for its exquisite delineation of human feelings and foibles." - Andrew Sarris, New York Observer
"A movie that is almost indecently satisfying and at the same time elusive, at once intellectually lofty — marked by allusions to Emerson, Shakespeare and Seamus Heaney as well as Nietzsche — and as earthy as the passionate provincial family that is its heart and cosmos and reason for being." - A.O. Scott, The New York Times
"A compellingly literate exploration of the misguided motives and lingering regrets that bind families together." - David Parkinson, Empire Magazine
"What Desplechin has given us…is a benediction." - Stephanie Zacharek, Salon
For some, Christmas means the joy of spending time with loved ones, but not for the Vuillard family. In Arnaud Desplechin's blackly comic A Christmas Tale, instead of eggnog, vinegar and bile flow at the family get-together when estranged son Henri (Mathieu Amalric, the latest Bond villain in Quantum of Solace) returns for the holidays. His mother, Junon (French legend Catherine Deneuve), has cancer, and Henri may be the bone marrow donor match that could save her life. Oldest daughter Elizabeth (Anne Consigny, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) is equally unhappy to see her brother; he has been an emotional and financial drain on the family, and she had him legally banished from the family six years ago. But with his return, old wounds are freshly opened as the entire family gathers for what could be their last Christmas together.
An official selection at the Cannes Film Festival, a New York Times Critics' Pick, and nominated for 9 César Awards, A Christmas Tale is well served by its knockout ensemble cast and creative team. Director Desplechin (Kings and Queen) strikes a perfect balance between uncomfortable family moments and unruly comedy, and his postmodern filmmaking style is perfectly suited to the material. The film is not destined to be a feel-good holiday classic à la It’s a Wonderful Life, but A Christmas Tale is a lively, capricious, mischievous ensemble delight.

152 minutes

November 20: Ace in the Hole

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Ace in the Hole (1951)
November 20, 2009 at 7:00pm
Space 38|39 (38 W. 39th St, 3rd Floor)
Clip

"Dark, funny, ferocious, and vintage Wilder all the way...Few films of bygone decades have retained their relevance as stingingly as this 1951 satire"
- David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor

“Wilder's lost classic...[a] brilliant indictment of media circus brutality...a virtuoso feat.”
- Eric Kohn, The Reeler

"Wilder and Douglas call down fire from the very heavens and put it on film in a hellish carnival of poisoned humanity and angry, dashed dreams"
- Guy Maddin, director of My Winnipeg & The Saddest Music in the World

"Walks a fine and crooked line between sharp satire and pitch black film noir."
- A.O. Scott, The New York Times

"Questions the very nature of human interest stories and the twisted relationship between the American media and its public...More than 50 years after the film's release, Ace in the Hole feels more relevant than ever."
- Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine

After being fired from a number of big city newspapers, hotshot reporter Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) is reduced to working for a paper in dead-end Albuquerque. On his way to cover a rattlesnake hunt, Tatum accidentally stumbles on a story that he believes can get him back in the big time, if he plays the yarn long enough and can keep it to himself.

Billy Wilder’s follow-up to Sunset Boulevard is one of the most scathing indictments of American culture ever produced by a Hollywood filmmaker, legendary for both its cutting social critique and its status as a hard-to-find cult classic. An uncompromising portrait of human nature at its worst, the film was so far ahead of its time in its depiction of a media circus and the public's appetite for tragedy that it was a commercial disaster when first released, but now stands as one of the great American films of the 1950s.

Ranked among Empire Magazines best movies of all time, the film was nominated for Best Screenplay at the Academy Awards and winner of the International Award at the Venice Film Festival. Wilder’s underrated masterpiece is a must see.

111 Minutes

October 16: Requiem

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Requiem (2006)
October 16, 2009 at 7:00pm
Space 38|39 (38 W. 39th Street, 3rd Floor)
Trailer

"Quietly devastating and unbearably moving, this is a soul-searching classic."
- Nigel Floyd, Time Out New York

"Brisk, taut and confident...a rigorously urgent and compelling film."
- Kevin Thomas, LA Times

"A naturalistic and thrillingly powerful film...a character-driven, understated movie, concerned with the violence that dysfunctional families inflict on their children, and the battle between reason and faith...Not a devil in sight; but this might just be the most intelligent possession movie you'll ever see."
- David Mattin, BBC

"This quietly unnerving psychological study from German director Hans-Christian Schmid wields its ambiguity about religion and science like a double-edged blade."
- Jim Ridley, Village Voice

"A jittery, cleansing naturalism, all the better to root the uncanny in the surfaces of this world."
- Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

It is the 1970s, and Michaela (Sandra Hüller) is about to break free from the small town in Southern Germany where she has grown up her whole life. Leaving behind the strictures of her Catholic home, she heads off for university. But Michaela is subject to strange attacks and labeled an epileptic by puzzled doctors. Now, among new college friends, she increasingly finds herself paralyzed by terrifying visions of devils.

Based on the true story of Anneliese Michel, a 23-year-old German college student who was believed to have been possessed by multiple demons (the story was also the basis for the American film The Exorcism of Emily Rose), the film has been promoted as a more truthful depiction of the real-life events. Steering clear of special effects or dramatic music, it instead takes a documentary approach that focuses on Michaela’s struggle to lead a normal life on her own.

Stage actress Sandra Hüller gives a stunning emotional tour de force in her feature film debut, for which she received the Silver Bear award at the Berlin International Film Festival for best actress. The film garnered the FIPRESCI Prize for director Hans-Christian Schmid.

89 Minutes

September 18: Helvetica

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Helvetica (2007)
September 18, 2009 at 7:00pm
Space 38|39 (38 W. 39th Street, 3rd Floor)
Trailer

"Gary Hustwit’s film builds an impressive sense of drama around the rise of the Swiss-designed typeface."
- Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out

"It sharpens your eye in general and makes connections between form and content, and between art and life. By rounding up a great group of eloquent obsessives eager to explain their feelings about a font, Hustwit has come up with 80 unexpectedly blissful minutes."
- Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

"Even viewers who've never given a serif a second thought, though, are in for an exclamation point of joy from such a well-designed doc."
- Lisa Schwartzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

"You’re guaranteed to spend the next few days scanning the world for Helvetica like a child on a cross-country car trip playing I Spy."
- Matt Zoller Seitz, The New York Times

Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type. Encompassing the worlds of design, advertising, psychology, and communication, Helvetica invites us to take a second look at the thousands of words we see every day.

The film premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival and was nominated for a 2008 Independent Spirit Award in the "Truer Than Fiction" category, and was shortlisted for the Design Museum London's "Designs of the Year" Award. An excerpt of the film was included in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

80 Minutes

About the Typeface

Helvetica was developed by Max Miedinger with Edüard Hoffmann in 1957 for the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland. In the late 1950s, the European design world saw a revival of older sans-serif typefaces such as the German face Akzidenz Grotesk. Haas's director Hoffmann commissioned Miedinger, a former employee and freelance designer, to draw an updated sans-serif typeface to add to their line. The result was called Neue Haas Grotesk, but its name was later changed to Helvetica, derived from Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland, when Haas's German parent companies Stempel and Linotype began marketing the font internationally in 1961.

Introduced amidst a wave of popularity of Swiss design, and fueled by advertising agencies selling this new design style to their clients, Helvetica quickly appeared in corporate logos, signage for transportation systems, fine art prints, and myriad other uses worldwide. Inclusion of the font in home computer systems such as the Apple Macintosh in 1984 only further cemented its ubiquity.

IAM Screening Series

May 21: M*A*S*H (1970)

April 16: Citizen Kane (1941)

March 19: A Serious Man (2009)

Yi Yi (2001)

Frozen River (2008)

A Christmas Tale (2008)

November 20: Ace in the Hole

October 16: Requiem

September 18: Helvetica

May 21: MAS*H (1970)