Cinema 10

Spring, 2010

Roxy Theater, Potsdam, New York

Mondays at 7:15 PM

2/8 Amreeka (USA/Canada; 2009; d. Cherien Dabis)
Amreeka is an award-winning drama by first-time director, Cherien Dabis. The film follows a Palestinian woman and her teenage son who win a green card lottery and move to the US. After settling in a Chicago suburb, she struggles to find a job and eventually must go to work at a White Castle fast food restaurant. There she struggles to adjust to life in “Amreeka,” to cope with anti-Arab prejudice, and to take pride in the work that she performs. Stephen Holden of The New York Times argues that Amreeka is “one of the most accomplished recent films about a non-European immigrant coming to the United States,” and Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times applauds Dabis for creating “a heartwarming film, not a political dirge.”
(PG-13; 96 min.)

2/15 Soul Power (USA; 2008; d. Jeffrey Levy-Hinte)
Jeffrey Levy-Hinte directs this documentary about the music festival that preceded the legendary “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire in 1974. Levy-Hinte worked as a producer on When We Were Kings, the award-winning documentary film that chronicled that bout, and has distilled this film—part musical chronicle, part historical narrativefrom over 120 hours of contemporary footage of the festival, including performances by James Brown, Celia Cruz, the Spinners, Miriam Makeba, and B. B. King, among many others. Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post calls the film “an unusually resonant time capsule, one that weaves together theatrics, musicianship, cosmopolitanism and sharp political critique in a vibrant look back that's at once celebratory and wistful.” In The New York Times, A.O. Scott agrees: "Soul Power, as aptly and succinctly titled a movie as I have ever seen, takes you to a place where the discipline that produces great popular art is indistinguishable from the ecstasy that art creates.”
(PG-13; 93 min.)

2/22 Treeless Mountain (USA/South Korea; 2008; d. So Yong Kim)
Korea’s growing reputation for innovation in cinema is vindicated by this beautiful film of the way the world appears to two young sisters who are shunted off to family members as their mother searches for their father. Treeless Mountain abandons the neat structure of narrative in order to bring childhood emotions of love, fear, and yearning to the surface for viewers to feel and remember for themselves. Bruce Eder (TV Guide) calls this film “a lyrical and seductive look at childhood resiliency . . . thoroughly engrossing from the opening frame to the end credits.”
(NR; 89 min.)

3/1 Broken Embraces/Los abrazos rotos (Spain; 2009; d. Pedro Almodovar)
Renowned Spanish auteur Pedro Almódovar (All About My Mother, Talk to Her) and Penélope Cruz join forces for a fourth time in this clever film that intertwines elements of intrigue, difficult love, and the movie business in a manner reminiscent of Francois Truffaut’s 1973 masterpiece, Day for Night. The plot centers on the memories of Mateo Blanco (Lluís Homar), a filmmaker who has not directed a film since being blinded in a car accident sixteen years earlier. He recalls his relationship with Lena (Cruz), the star of his last film, but also his producer’s wife, and the wide-ranging repercussions this affair had on his life and his art. David Edelstein of New York Magazine calls the film “a lush, deeply romantic noir . . . utterly irrestible.”
(R; 127 min.)

3/15 Bright Star (UK//Australia/France; 2009; d. Jane Campion)
Jane Campion’s latest film is a retelling of the love affair between poet John Keats and his next door neighbor Fanny Brawne. The affair began with Brawne’s request that Keats teach her poetry. Soon the lessons to turn to love and love turns to that sort of obsessive tumult so central to Romanticism. Critics celebrate the film as Campion’s best work since The Piano. Roger Ebert, of The Chicago Sun-Times, observes that “what Campion does is seek visual beauty to match Keats’ verbal beauty. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone calls it “a literate, lyrical love story in the age of Hollywood crass. I must be dreaming.”
(PG; 119 min.)

3/22 The Cove (USA; 2009; d. Louie Psihoyos)
The Cove is a multi-award winning documentary about the annual killing of dolphins in a Japanese national park. The film was directed by former National Geographic photographer and founder of the Oceanic Preservation Society, Louie Psihoyos, who has noted that despite the film’s subject matter, it is not a graphic film and in fact features only a few scenes of violence. Kenneth Turan of The Los Angeles Times calls The Cove “a powerful and effective piece of advocacy filmmaking.” Variety’s Justin Chang describes it as “simultaneously a love letter to a beloved species, an eye-opening primer on worldwide dolphin captivity, a playful paranoid thriller and a work of deep-seated moral outrage.”
(PG; 92 min.)

3/29 Coco Before Chanel/Coco avant Chanel (France; 2009; d. Anne Fontaine)
Audrey Tautou of Amélie fame takes on a decidedly different role in this biographical film about the early life of famed designer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. Orphaned and working both as a seamstress and in a dingy cabaret as a singer, Gabrielle (Tautou) finds herself excluded from most paths for social advancement. To escape this life, she becomes the mistress of a wealthy patron who gives her material comfort, but little in the way of fulfillment, the possibilities of which she begins to explore through unconventional opportunities to express the creative impulses that eventually led her to the top of the fashion world. Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal writes that “it's a special pleasure to watch this vibrant Coco taking in the world around her and turning it to her use, in her fashion.”
(PG-13; 105 min.)

4/12 The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call--New Orleans (USA; 2009; d. Werner Herzog)
Two unconventional icons of contemporary film – director Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo) and actor Nicolas Cage (Raising Arizona)--pair up for the first time in this surrealistic and grimly funny remake of Abel Ferrara’s 1992 film about Terrence McDonagh, a homicide cop working homicide cases on one of the country’s roughest beats. McDonagh becomes addicted to painkillers after an injury and gradually descends into both physical and moral corruption as he becomes more desperate to feed his habit. Mike Scott of The New Orleans Times-Picayune calls it a “deliriously watchable and darkly comic portrait of a high-velocity death spiral” and Marjorie Baumgarten of The Austin Chronicle raves that she “had more fun watching it than I did at any other movie this year.”
(R; 122 min.)

4/19 The Maid/La Nana (Chile/Mexica; 2009; d. Sebastián Silva)
The Maid is a 2009 multi-award winning Spanish dramedy. Actress Catalina Saavedra is remarkable in her role as Raquel, a middle-aged maid who has worked for the same family for more than twenty years. When Raquel begins to suffer dizzy spells due to exhaustion, the family tries to help by hiring additional maids to assist her. Instead of appreciating the gesture, Raquel feels threatened and goes to bizarre lengths to drive away what she sees as her competition. Mick LaSalle of The San Francisco Chronicle writes: “The Maid would have been worthwhile just as a showcase both for good acting and for the director's virtuosity. But the movie's ultimate virtue is its humanity.”
(NR; 95 min.)

4/26 Sita Sings the Blues (USA; 2008; d. Nina Paley)
What is left to say about the pain and madness of love coming to an end? Plenty, if Sita Sings the Blues is any indication. But you need to have eye-catching animation, a soundtrack of classic jazz sung by the great Annette Hanshaw, and a sensitive exploration of Sita’s heartbreak in her relationship with the god Rama that sheds light on the plain old human tale of estrangement in the form of director Nina Paley’s separation from her husband. All the reviews for this film are raves. A.O. Scott of The New York Times calls it “affecting, surprising and a lot of fun,” while the Chicago Reader’s J.R. Jones calls it “mesmerizing, captivating, [and] spellingbinding…”
(NR; 82 min.)

 

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Cinema 10 is a non-profit, volunteer group which presents alternative film programming. We work to bring the best in American independent and foreign films to North Country audiences. If you have a suggestion or would like to get involved, please e-mail Holly Chambers. The Cinema 10 Board members are Fran Bailey, Ramachandran Bharath, Holly Chambers, Ed Clark, Milner Grimsled, Viki Levitt, J. Dolores Martin, Derek Maus, Hilary Oak, Celine Philibert, Chris Robinson, Erik Schulz, Donna Smith-Raymond, David Sommerstein, and Jean Thompson.

Cinema 10 is made possible with public funds from

the New York State Council on the Arts,
a state agency

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