MEAN STREETS (Martin Scorsese, 1973)
- Monday, April 2
A great early work from recent Best Director Oscar-Winner Scorsese, Mean Streets is an electrifying, hyperkinetic slice of Italian-American street life, starring Harvey Keitel and a very young, swaggeringly confident Robert De Niro. Violent, passionate and grittily realistic.
BLOW OUT (Brian De Palma, 1981)
- Monday, April 9
A fusion of Antonioni’s Blow Up and Coppola’s The Conversation, with a nod to Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick scandal. De Palma’s film features a pre-Tarantino-ressurrection John Travolta as a film sound recordist who accidentally captures what may be a political assassination on tape. Expertly tuned thrills and chills, with an unexpectedly downbeat twist.
THE BORDER (Tony Richardson, 1981)
- Monday, April 16
A relatively obscure Jack Nicholson vehicle, in which he plays an immigration officer working on the Mexican border, caught between the temptations of corruption and the possibility of redemption. With a great soundtrack by Ry Cooder and fine supporting turns from Harvey Keitel, Valerie Perrine and Warren Oates.
PRETTY POISON (Noel Black, 1968)
- Monday, April 24
Anthony Perkins’ Walter Mitty-esque misfit crosses paths with innocent-on-the-outside teenage drum majorette Tuesday Weld, and impresses her with his “secret agent” fantasies. But when their plans take a violent turn, she proves more than a match for him in the crazy stakes. Hysterical, impassioned and bizarrely sexy.
PUNISHMENT PARK (Peter Watkins, 1971)
- Monday, April 30
An astonishing docu-drama from the director of the infamously controversial anti-nuclear film The War Game. Made at the height of the anti-Vietnam protests in the US, this fictional look at an extreme solution to internal political dissent seems, in light of modern American activities at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, to be far more prophetic than histrionic.
|
