When Alex Honnold and directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin came out on stage after the premiere of FREE SOLO at the Telluride Film Festival this past Labor Day weekend, the audience (including myself) went crazy. Honnold's achievement - the free solo ascent of El Capitan in Yosemite - was both breathtaking and death-defying. This vertiginous film uses an entire arsenal of mountain-film tricks to capture each perilous step. But as with their award-winning climbing film MERU, this is a film about much more than sport - the filmmaking team explores the calculus of risk in our lives, revealing Honnold's inner life and the powerful arrival of love into his precarious world.
Can you imagine sitting down to tea with Dame Judi Dench? A delicious thought. Now imagine sitting down to tea with Dench, and Dame Maggie Smith, Dame Joan Plowright and Dame Eileen Atkins. They are among the most celebrated actresses of our time, with scores of iconic performances, decades of wisdom and innumerable Oscars, Emmys and BAFTAs between them. They are also longtime friends who hereby invite you to join them for a weekend in the country as they reminisce and share their candid and delightfully irreverent thoughts on everything from art to aging to love to life lived in the spotlight. TEA WITH THE DAMES opens in the Starlight this Friday.
FIRST MAN ends today (10/25), while A STAR IS BORN and COLETTE each hold over for one more week.
SPECIAL EVENTS: PAN'S LABYRINTH, from the great director Guillermo del Toro plays at 7:30 in the Starlight on Halloween night. And just confirmed yesterday, a four-film tribute to Katherine Hepburn: LITTLE WOMEN (11/7), BRINGING UP BABY (11/21), HOLIDAY (12/5), and THE PHILADELPHIA STORY(12/19.
KING LEAR starring Ian McKellen was incredibly well-attended last weekend, and there's one more opportunity to see it - this Sunday in the Rose at 11:00 a.m. The Metropolitan Opera's Wild West production of LA FANCIULLA DEL WESTbegins at 9:55 a.m. this Saturday. And tickets our selling fast for our encore presentation of FRANKENSTEIN starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller. It shows at 4:30 on Halloween.
--Rocky