Cinematically, Yours
This Week’s Movie Reviews
The Story of Film

     I booked Mark Cousins’ wonderful THE STORY OF FILM: A NEW GENERATION as soon as it became available because I knew it would be catnip for our film-obsessed audience. Cousins’ remarkable 15-hour epic THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY is the most comprehensive history of our 116 year-old art form, and A NEW GENERATION picks up where it left off, investigating and celebrating the current state of cinema, with an eye to the future.

     For 22 years I’ve made a fall pilgrimage to the Telluride Film Festival to hunt down the best new movies to bring to Taylor Street, and when I arrived last week I was delighted to discover that Cousins was receiving a festival tribute for his lifetime contributions to the art of film.

     Telluride’s program says it best: “Mark Cousins is a scientist-poet-detective of the cinema, unearthing revelations within movies that are hiding in plain sight. We experience his reveals as if he is in our brain, that rare intimacy very few filmmakers achieve. In his marvelous, seminal epic works, he tells us filmmaking creates ‘a lie to tell the truth, the art of making us feel we’re there.’ He asks us to believe that our everyday lives depend on the cinema and vice versa.”

     In an effort to make this wonderful film accessible to our community, all tickets to THE STORY OF FILM will be $6.

     Thank you to all the movie lovers who attended our sold out screening of BLUE, the first in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s legendary THREE COLORS TRILOGY. This remarkable collection of films was a defining event of the art-house boom of the 1990s. Each is named for a color of the French flag and stands for a tenet of the French Revolution—liberty, equality, and fraternity—but that hardly begins to explain the films’ enigmatic beauty and rich humanity. “Staggering. Finds a mystical hope in desolate times…this season’s most relevant cinematic universe.” – IndieWire

     Up next are the comedy WHITE (this weekend) and the quirky RED (next weekend).

     There are still a handful of tickets left for Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame in the ultimate film noir—Nicholas Ray’s IN A LONELY PLACE on Sunday evening in the Starlight Room.

     And for those of you staying home this weekend, I recommend another pillar of the cinematic pantheon, François Truffaut’s THE 400 BLOWS, streaming at rose theatre.com“One of the first glistening droplets of the French New Wave.” – Time Out

     Coming to the Rose and Starlight in September: SEE HOW THEY RUNCASABLANCA BEATSMOONAGE DAYDREAM, and for Classics Night in the Starlight (10/2) MY DINNER WITH ANDRE.

Cinematically Yours,
Rocky