A Nightmare on King Street, Island of Lost Souls, How the Sky Will Melt, and Spotlight Cinema presents Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin
Thursday
“New Animated Realities” (7:00p — Union South Marquee)
WUD Film’s FREE “Starlight Cinema” program has given Madison cinephiles loads of variety this fall, pumping out experimental programs featuring women filmmakers and Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux on celluloid already. This week’s collection features Peter Burr’s monochrome, white-noisey Alone with the Moon and Sarina Nihei’s The Play of Independent Heads, an undulating showcase of the Tokyo-based illustrator’s signature oblong style with paint on paper. (FREE.)
Chasing Shadows (8:00p — Barrymore Theatre)
It’s hard to believe sports video company Warren Miller Entertainment’s been showing winter sports films for 66 years. Or maybe it’s not. (Tickets information is at barrymorelive.com.)
All freakin’ weekend
The Amazing Nina Simone (Sundance)
Named after the singer’s 1959 Colpix Records debut album, the documentary pieces together the forgotten and underappreciated pieces of Simone’s life with over 80 interviews.
Rock the Kasbah (AMC Star, Point)
Bill Murray is a burn-out rock manager who, after being robbed and left behind in Kabul by his receptionist and latest act (Zooey Deschanel), runs into Leem Lubany’s promising young singer in a Pashtun village and finds his creative drive (and soul) return to him. Murray hardly ever takes a lead role, and when he does, the results can be iffy, so who knows how this one will go with box office poison Bruce Willis onscreen. On a semi-related note, Murray did another “Ask Me Anything” for Reddit this week; in case you were wondering, if he had to star on a reality show it would be Flavor of Love.
Jem and the Holograms (AMC Star)
Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (AMC Star)
Blumhouse’s found footage series lops off its mythology with this sixth and allegedly final installment in which a family is beset by supernatural forces in their new home after uncovering secrets of the franchise’s past with a camera that can see dead people. Wasn’t that in the iOS 9 update? (WUD Film hosts a FREE sneak peek Thurs at 9:00p in the Union South Marquee.)
The Last Witch Hunter (Sundance, AMC Star, Point)
Fast and the Furious has maintained Vin Diesel’s household name status, but he hasn’t found much success outside of the cars and heists and booty shorts. In one of those modern day-meets-hard fantasy things, Diesel’s witch hunter learns the evil he thought he’d defeated is coming back. The plot twist is that this is playing at Sundance.
Steve Jobs (Sundance, AMC Star, Point)
(Opening wide.)
Rocky Horror Picture Show (Thurs – Sun — AMC Star, Point)
So Rocky Horror is celebrating its 40th birthday this year, which is why the longtime cult favorite has been popping up around these here parts so frequently.
Tangled (Fri – Sun — Point)
(10:00a, 12:30p, 3:00p)
Friday
Shaun the Sheep (6:00p — Union South Marquee)
Aardman Animations, Bristol England’s stop-motion studio behind Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run, ports its sheep Shaun (from the Wallace and Gromit episode “A Close Shave”) to the big screen in a wordless “sheep out of water” story that has its titular character leading his flock back to the safety of Mossy Bottom Farm. (FREE.)
“A Nightmare on King Street” (7:00p — Context Clothing)
Despite protestations about its overlap with “Corn Maze Night,” “A Nightmare on King Street” will proceed as planned outside of Context Clothing (113 King Street). Expect street tacos from El Grito Taqueria and back-to-back screenings of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Kuei Chih-Hung’s batshit black magic revenger The Boxer’s Omen, courtesy of Four Star Video Coop. 5 Rabbit Brewery and Ballast Point Brewing are set to provide beer samples to those brave enough/of age. (Admission appears to be FREE.)
Jet Storm + Sea Fury (7:00p + 8:45p — 4070 Vilas Hall)
(FREE.)
The Look of Silence (8:30p — Union South Marquee)
The Act of Killing‘s Joshua Oppenheimer doubles down on his interests in difficult subject matter with The Look of Silence, which centers its focus on a surviving family of the Indonesian genocide and the emotional aftermath of confronting those responsible for murdering one of their brothers. (FREE.)
Dark City (11:00p — Union South Marquee)
Whether or not Alex Proyas has lived up to the very promising start of his career is debatable, but his 1998 science-fiction noir earned praise from critics and a cool four stars from Roger Ebert, who famously recorded a commentary track for the film: “Dark City has been created and imagined as a new visual place for us to inhabit. It adds treasure to our notions of what can be imagined.” Now imagine two FREE late night screenings.
Saturday
Madtown Horror Festival (Sat – Sun — Market Square)
A horror-centric film festival in Madison hasn’t reared its gloriously ugly head in years, but Jason Davis is here to (hopefully) bring that tradition back. We’ll have a preview of some of the festival’s local fare later, but you can check the full two-day lineup at madtownhorror.com. (Passes are $8 each per day with $15 netting you weekend-long admission.)
Seven Chances (2:00p, 7:00p — Overture Center for the Arts)
The Overture Center for the Arts’ new season of “Duck Soup” silent cinema appreciation kicks off with this 1925 Buster Keaton comedy. Greatest chase sequence ever? Greatest chase sequence ever. (Admission is $7 for adults and $3 for children.)
The Look of Silence (6:00p — Union South Marquee)
(FREE.)
Tangerine (7:00p — 4070 Vilas Hall)
Characters on the periphery of society have dominated the filmography of director Sean Baker. Smugglers, adult film stars, and undocumented immigrants were the subjects of his previous efforts and while his latest has attracted lots of hype for being shot on an iPhone 5s, there’s so much more to it than a thrifty budget. Baker, who is scheduled to stop by Cinematheque in person, will likely elaborate on he and cinematographer Radium Cheung’s choices in addition to the more nuanced elements of what is ostensibly a buddy film between two transgender prostitutes (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, Mya Taylor) on Christmas Eve. (FREE.)
The Gift (8:30p — Union South Marquee)
(FREE.)
Dark City (11:00p — Union South Marquee)
(FREE.)
Sunday
Island of Lost Souls (2:00p — Chazen Art Museum)
The easiest way to tell when a film was made before the Motion Picture Production Code? When your film features a delusional doctor with a God complex creates half-human, half-animal experiments in his island laboratory in the South Sea. In addition to influencing scores of monster movies that followed it, Erle C. Kenton’s H.G. Wells oddity also won over John Landis and make-up effects legend Rick Baker. Not bad. Experience Charles Laughton outdoing Burt Lancaster and Marlon Brando for FREE on 35mm.
Dracula (2:00p, 7:00p — Point)
Shaun the Sheep (3:00p — Union South Marquee)
(FREE.)
The Look of Silence (6:30p — Union South Marquee)
(FREE.)
How the Sky Will Melt (7:00p — 4070 Vilas Hall)
After the dissolve of her band, Gwen (Sara Lynch) leaves Los Angeles and returns home to Idaho where she ambles about with unmotivated friends and plays cassettes with a pair of “Magic Winks” goggles. Her color-filled, 8mm-shot “media coma” gets weirder when a man inexplicably falls from the sky. Whether you like comparisons to the vibrant but amoral fantasties of David Lynch or you can simply appreciate a great score in an indie film, Micro-Wave Cinema’s latest sounds like a trip. (FREE.)
Monday
Dracula (2:00p, 7:00p — Point)
The Mummy + The Wolf Man (6:00p — Pinney Library)
(FREE.)
Vertigo (7:00p — Point)
Rocky Horror Picture Show (7:00p — Point)
Angst (7:00p — Union South Marquee)
(FREE.)
Wednesday
Dracula (2:00p, 7:00p — Point)
Vertigo (7:00p — Point)
Bellissima (7:00p — Helen C. White Building, Rm 4281)
(FREE.)
Rocky Horror Picture Show (7:00p — Point)
$5.
The Assassin (7:00p — Madison Museum of Contemporary Art)
I caught Eden at MMoCA, and I’m glad I did because it’s probably not coming back. The bad news is that the auditorium for such a limited engagement was maybe 25% full. The Spotlight Cinema series brings Madison audiences films they wouldn’t otherwise see, so let’s make something of it, eh? At least, that’s the sentiment behind Madison Film Forum‘s “Pack the Assassin.” Hou Hsiao-Hsien took home Best Director the Cannes Film Festival this year for a 9th century wuxia film, where a young girl is taken from her home, raised to be a killing machine by a nun and then sent back to kill the man she was once betrothed to. (Admission is FREE for museum members and $7 for everyone else.)
Spotlight (7:00p — Union South Marquee)
Of course, it wouldn’t be proper limited engagement in Madison without a schedule conflict. You’ll have to decide between The Assassin and what’s sure to be one of the movies nobody will shut up about come awards season. (FREE.)