Programme for the first half of 2025:

Sunday 23 February 2025

THE CONVERSATION
USA · 1974 · 113 min.
Director Francis Ford Coppola
Cast Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Harrison Ford, Frederic Forrest

Harry Caul (Hackman) is a professional wiretapper wracked by guilt for his complicity in a previous job that ended in three deaths. Hired by a mysterious client to monitor a couple as they walk through Union Square in San Francisco, Caul records a statement rich in menace: "He'd kill us if he got the chance." Tormented by the prospect of again incurring responsibility for the death of others, Caul descends into a spiral of paranoia and intrigue. It is a masterpiece that unites the sensibilities of the European New Wave cinema with classic American crime.

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Sunday 9 March 2025

MEET ME IN ST LOUIS
USA · 1944 · 113 min.
Director Vincente Minnelli
Cast Judy Garland, Margaret O'Brien, Lucille Bremer, Tom Drake, Mary Astor, Leon Ames

This enchanting musical focuses on an American family in St Louis in the year of the World Fair, 1903. The family is more than comfortable (father is a banker) but still faces all the problems that would soon become staples of American sit-coms, including the raising of four precocious daughters. One is Judy Garland who has a ball singing wonderful songs such as The Boy Next Door, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, and The Trolley Song. The youngest is scene-stealer Margaret O’Brien who won a special Oscar® for Best Child Actress. It’s beautifully directed by Vincente Minnelli who typically explores the emotions from melancholy to ecstatic.

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Sunday 23 March 2025

DIVA
France · 1982 · 117 min.
Director Jean-Jacques Beineix
Cast Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, Frederic Andrei, Richard Bohringer, Thuy An Luu, Jacques Fabbri

This is Jean-Jacques Beineix’s directorial debut, after his being an assistant director for years. It was worth the wait, becoming a huge hit in France, screening in Paris continually for 12 months. It was also a cult favourite in the USA and Australia. Its mixture of suspense, wry humour, cool fashion, beautiful music, and exquisite cinematography was irresistible. Film critic Pauline Kael wrote: "Beineix has a fabulous camera technique and understands the pleasure to be had from a picture that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Every shot seems designed to delight the audience." The plot: a young postman makes a bootleg recording of a famous diva and finds himself in hot water.

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Sunday 13 April 2025

SMOOTH TALK
USA · 1985 · 96 min.
Director Joyce Chopra
Cast Laura Dern, Treat Williams, Levon Helm, Mary Kay Place

Adapted from a short story by Joyce Carol Oates, Smooth Talk explores the fast developing maturity of 15-year-old Connie Wyatt (Dern). Connie's life of days at the beach with friends, flirting with schoolboys. and shirking chores takes an unexpected turn with the appearance of a mysterious stranger, Arnold Friend (Williams). Certainty and assurance yield to anxiety. A masterpiece of realism, Smooth Talk conveys the confusion and emotion of Connie's experience with extraordinary skill. Alternately straightforward, ambiguous, and suspenseful, this is a forgotten gem with uniformly strong performances and a very strong script.

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Sunday 27 April 2025

WILD TALES
Argentina / Spain · 2014 · 121 min.
Director Damian Szifron
Cast Ricardo Darin, Oscar Martinez, Erica Rivas

One promotional slogan for this film confessed that we can all lose control. The pressures of modern life drive some to depression, but this portmanteau film with its six blackly comic tales shows those who explode. The stories are connected by the threads of revenge and catharsis with the added spice of coincidence and absurd misunderstandings. The film's wicked humour endeared it to the critics. It received many awards and nominations and its popularity was further enhanced with the participation of the Almodóvar brothers as producers. It also holds the record as the most-seen Argentine film of all time.

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Sunday 11 May 2025

GUN CRAZY
USA · 1950 · 87 min.
Director Joseph H. Lewis
Cast Peggy Cummins, John Dall, Berry Krueger

Gun Crazy follows the gun-obsessed Bart (Dall) who falls in love with Annie (Cummins), a sharpshooting carnival performer. When times become hard, the couple start committing crimes together and Bart is dragged deeper into crime and destruction, torn between his love for the bad-but-beautiful Annie and his moral compass. A forerunner to films like Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands, Gun Crazy is a landmark in film noir, blending romance, suspense, and action. It is directed by Joseph H. Lewis, a highly regarded B-movie director, and written in part by blacklisted Dalton Trumbo.

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Sunday 25 May 2025

THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE
USA · 1924 · 85 min.
Director Ernst Lubitsch
Cast Monte Blue, Florence Vidor, Marie Prevost, Adolphe Menjou

Dr Franz Braun (Blue) and his wife Charlotte (Vidor) have an ideal marriage until he is aggressively pursued by her best friend, the unhappily married Mizzi Stock (Prevost). Mizzi’s husband Josef (Menjou) is delighted with Mizzi’s increasingly brazen efforts to seduce Franz because he wants evidence for a divorce. This silent film by Ernst Lubitsch was the model of sophisticated comedy that influenced every romantic comedy made since. It has been praised by Jean Renoir, Yasujiro Ozu, and Alfred Hitchcock who described it as pure cinema – his highest praise.

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Sunday 8 June 2025

LOLITA
USA · 1962 · 147 min.
Director Stanley Kubrick
Cast James Mason, Sue Lyon, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers

On its initial release, the film came with the tagline: How did they ever make a movie of Lolita? It was a fair question. The book concerns a literary academic who becomes obsessed with his landlady’s teenage daughter, and invites us to see the resulting tragedy from his point of view. In 1953, no reputable publisher would touch the book, but it became a bestseller anyway; and by 1962, MGM was more than eager to distribute the movie. After close collaboration between the book's author, Vladimir Nabokov, and a soon-to-be-legendary director, the material translates brilliantly to the screen, far better than could have been hoped for.

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Sunday 29 June 2025

WASTE LAND
Brazil / UK · 2010 · 99 min.
Director Lucy Walker
Cast Vik Muniz

This uplifting documentary follows Brazilian artist Vik Muniz in his attempts to artistically engage a handful of recycling trash pickers. The impoverished catadores (literally collectors) are a part of the many thousands working in Rio de Janeiro's Gramacho, the world's largest landfill mountain. They're initially bemused by the eccentric, enthusiastic Muniz, but the beauty he helps generate from their garbage opens doors into their world, with all its intended, and some unintended, consequences. The director, Lucy Walker, documents the lives of these socially shunned workers with sensitivity and compassion, with the mood ably supported by a soundtrack from Walker's occasional collaborator, Moby.