Outside of ACMI’s awesomely thorough Cassavetes retrospective it’s a kind of quiet week in Melbourne’s cinemas. Nonetheless, here be the details! Details? They be here!
IN CINEMAS
New Releases
VCA grad and all-around Cinderella Story Robert Luketic has his new blackjack+kids film 21 opening wide this week.
Shutter, directed by Japanese horror hack Masayushi Ochiai, is Hollywood remake of this 2004 Thai film. Weird.
Then She Found Me was directed by Helen Hunt. And written by Helen Hunt. IT WAS WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY HELEN HUNT. Not enough to keep you away? Maybe you kinda liked fucking Mad About You? This is the poster.
Yet another French Film Fest release: Un Secret, a très traditional WWII guilt/history middling from old man Claude Miller. However, being French and Holocaust-y it opens pretty wide: Nova, Kino, Brighton Bay, The Classic, Rivoli and The Jam Factory’s ever-dwindling Cinema “Europa”.
Rats And Cats is a new Melbourne-made satire of celebrity and its parameters. Apparently it’s ok. It opens at Cinema Nova, where director Tony Rogers and writers/stars Adam Zwar, Jason Gann and Anya Beyersdorf are doing a Q&A on tuesday at 6:45pm.
Not Really New Releases
Cinematheque is in the second week of its Andrzej Wajda retrospective. This week: his moving and intimate heartbreak opus The Maids Of Wilko, followed by his bawdy political allegory-of-sorts The Wedding. As always: ACMI, 7pm.
The aforementioned Cassavetes retrospective begins thursday at ACMI, opening with the jaw-dropping intensity of Opening Night at 7pm (which it also hilariously closes with on May 25th at 6pm). In between they will be screening almost every feature he directed, and every work he ever ‘autered’, as Jacque Rivette would say.
Time Capsules is screening Richard Linklater’s debut feature, the proto-Waking Life walk-and-wax Slacker. Friday night, 8:45pm-ish.
The Astor continues its ‘Fistful Of Westerns’ series of classic, uh, westerns, on sunday. This week: Leone’s A Fistful Of Dollars with the underrated An Invitation To A Gunfighter. 7:30pm! Blam!
Staying with The Astor, on monday night they’re screening Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy (in case you missed it at ACMI’s Van Sant retrospective) with Soderbergh’s epochal Sex, Lies And Videotape. 7:30pm.
On friday night ACMI is screening Neil Jordan’s career-best The Company Of Wolves, a wonderful contemporary werewolf genre piece and possibly that decade’s most ornate and cryptic horror film. 10pm.
Jacques Demy’s fantastical ‘family’ effort Donkey Skin is screening at – hey! – ACMI on sunday morning. 10:30am, and again at 1pm.
And Rolf De Heer’s awful Dingo is screening on saturday at 4pm.
ON DVD
Apparently nothing this week. Get out of the house and go see Cassavetes!!!
