Jun 1—29

BAMcinématek’s annual Village Voice series gives you one last chance to catch the best films of 2004 on the big screen. Featuring selections from the Take 6 Film Critics’ Poll, this series showcases the most talked-about movies of the year, including many you couldn't see in US theaters. In addition, BAM presents a retrospective of upcoming filmmaker Eugène Green, whose two latest works have been voted Best Undistributed Films. All film descriptions courtesy of the Village Voice, unless otherwise noted.

I ♥ Huckabees (2004) 106min
Wed, Jun 1 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by David O. Russell
With Jason Schwartzman, Mark Wahlberg, Jude Law, Lily Tomlin, Dustin Hoffman, Naomi Watts
Russell’s blithely profound mishmash of screwball Sartre and zany Zen takes a euphoric bungee jump into the abyss of the Big Everything...A furiously depressed howl of liberal-left impotence that somehow lands on a grace note of provisional optimism, it could offer some pointers for the next four years—starting with the way it positions the very act of constant questioning as a life-saving rebellion. —Dennis Lim

Vento di terra (2004) 85min
Thu, Jun 2 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Vincenzo Marra
A lean, muted, and highly sympathetic slice of Italian neo-neorealism, Marra’s assured feature elliptically tracks the life changes of a working-class Naples family, mainly the son, Vincenzo, who’s impelled through a series of setbacks to enlist in the army. Reminiscent of Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers, Marra’s subtly makes a devastating political statement about class division in Italy and allows viewers to universalize its conclusions. —Mark Peranson.
In Italian with English subtitles.

Pin Boy (Parapalos) (2004) 90min
Fri, Jun 3 at 2, 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Ana Poliak
Bowling for Argentine, the spare, subtle Pin Boy glimpses the conspicuously uneventful life of a young man (Adrián Suárez) as he settles into the lonely, backbreaking job in a manually operated bowling alley. Not much happens to him, except life and its lessons. An unexpected surprise, Ana Poliak’s film is a delicate minimalist gem. —Jorge Morales. In Spanish with English subtitles.

Café Lumière (Kôhî jikô) (2004) 98min
Sat, Jun 4 at 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien
With Hitoto Yo, Asano Tadanobu
Like Millennium Mambo, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s new masterpiece monitors the inner transformation of a young woman—the shift barely registers moment to moment but by film’s end is blissfully palpable. Conceived as an Ozu tribute, Café Lumière is scaled and paced accordingly. There’s not exactly a happy ending, but the cumulative effect is one of muted rapture. —Dennis Lim. In Japanese with English subtitles.

Le pont des arts (2004) 126min
Sun, Jun 5 at 3, 6*, 9:15pm
*Q&A with Eugène Green, moderated by Village Voice film critic
Directed by Eugène Green
With Natacha Regnier, Adrien Michaux, Denis Podalydes
In Le pont des arts, Green sets two storylines in motion (a philosopher contemplates ending his life, while an opera singer suffers under her conductor), which eventually meet on the bridge of the title. A baroque exploration of art and philosophy, the film delicately balances its intellect with absurdist humor and terrific directorial flourishes (influenced from such far-flung sources as Woody Allen and Yasujiro Ozu). —BAM.
Click for complete information on Eugène Green: A Baroque World

The Manchurian Candidate (2004) 129min
Mon, Jun 6 at 7pm
Directed by Jonathan Demme
With Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber, Meryl Streep
Despite a few jokes, the tale of a programmed “sleeper” assassin, a high-level political conspiracy, and an election-year coup is not primarily played for gleeful dark comedy—there’s a grim, even brutal, quality to the craziness. Candidate represents Demme's best dramatic filmmaking since The Silence of the Lambs. —J. Hoberman
Please note: the previously announced Q&A with Liev Schrieber following this screening has been cancelled.

Primer (2004) 78min
Tue, Jun 7 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Shane Carruth
With Shane Carruth, David Sullivan
First-time polymath Shane Carruth’s feedback loop of a movie is both a deadpan satire and a heartening embodiment of no-budget DIY enterprise. The boldest attempt to reinvent sci-fi since 2001, it’s also the most seductively prosaic time-warp fantasy movies have ever dreamed up. —Dennis Lim

Night After Night (Toutes les nuits) (2001) 112min US Premiere!
Wed, Jun 8 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Eugène Green
With Christelle Prot, Alexis Loret, Adrien Michaux
As part of the Village Voice Best of 2004 series, BAM presents Green’s first feature—made after years as an instructor in France—was a true independent; privately made and advertised only via postcards, its anarchic humor and incredible visual precision made it a hit in France and winner of the prestigious Delluc prize for best first feature. Based loosely on a Gustave Flaubert novella, the film charts the fates of two young men through the tumultuous late 1960s and mid-70s. —BAM.
Click for complete information on Eugène Green: A Baroque World

Dogville (2003) 177min
Thu, Jun 9 at 7pm
Directed by Lars von Trier
With Nicole Kidman, Paul Bettany
Despite countless filmic, literary, and historical echoes, Lars von Trier’s fierce jeremiad is immediately recognizable as something new. For sustained cinematic chutzpah, Dogville has no peers among the year’s commercial releases; it lights up the sky the way its purposefully barren set is illuminated by Nicole Kidman’s career performance. —J. Hoberman

The Living World (Le monde vivant) (2003) 75min
with The Word for Fire (Le nom du feu) (2002) 20min
Fri, Jun 10 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm

The Living World:
Directed by Eugène Green
With Christelle Prot, Alexis Loret, Adrien Michaux
Perfection. Eugène Green’s Christian allegory, a knight's tale performed in modern dress, features a goldilocks damsel, an ogre, an enchanted forest, and a lion played by a golden retriever. Part C.S. Lewis, part Robert Bresson, this stylistically ascetic production addresses such weighty religious issues as fidelity, honor, and resurrection with the gentle touch of a children’s storybook. —David Ng

The Word for Fire:
Directed by Eugène Green
A werewolf goes to see a doctor and invites her to come to the woods at midnight to witness his “transformation.”—BAM

Click for complete information on Eugène Green: A Baroque World

Childstar (2004) 98min NY Premiere!
Sat, Jun 11 at 2, 4:30, 6:50*, 9:30pm
*Q&A with Don McKellar, moderated by Village Voice film critic
Directed by Don McKellar
With Don McKellar, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dave Foley
One of the most intriguing fixtures in Canadian film, Don McKellar is an actor (showing up regularly in Egoyan and Cronenberg films), writer (32 Short Films About Glenn Gould) and director. Here he satirizes Hollywood productions in this biting comedy about a child actor, his showbiz mother (Leigh), and McKellar’s limo driver/film professor. —BAM

Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) 64min
with Heart of the World (2000) 5min
Sun, Jun 12 at 2, 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm

Cowards Bend the Knee:
Directed by Guy Maddin
An hour-long silent melodrama intended to be seen only through uncomfortable peepholes, and yet it may be our Winnipeg maestro’s purest ejaculation of kino love.

Heart of the World:
Directed by Guy Maddin
Frame for frame the densest and most spectacular film playing anywhere! —Michael Atkinson

Son frère (2003) 95min
Mon, Jun 13 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Patrice Chéreau
Two brothers confront mortal illness and reacquaint themselves with unconditional love. Chéreau’s film is an unsentimental, almost uninflected, account of a preparation for death, told with a painful clarity that eventually bleeds into compassion. —Dennis Lim. In French with English subtitles.

The Big Durian (2003) 75min NY Premiere!
with short films
Tue, Jun 14 at 7:30pm
Directed by Amir Muhammed
Amir Muhammed is a wholly distinctive voice in Southeast Asian movies. Essayist, activist, and sociologist all in one, he deploys whimsical humor and sharp analysis to hack away at the contradictions and willed amnesia endemic to Malaysian culture and politics. —Dennis Lim.
With short films:
Lost (2002), 9min. 279,654 Malaysian identity cards were reported missing in the year 2001. This is the story of just one. Friday (2002) 8min. Sacred and profane thoughts during an afternoon at the National Mosque. Kamunting (2002), 15min. A visit to a prisoner of Malaysia’s notorious Internal Security Act. But is photography permitted?
Pangyau (2002) 12min. “When I took a few Cantonese lessons, I remembered a friend who is no longer here. Which is not to say he's dead.”
In Malay & Cantonese with English subtitles.

The Forest for the Trees (Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen) (2003) 81min NY Premiere!
Thu, Jun 16 at 6:50, 9:30pm
Directed by Maren Ade
A young, idealistic woman moves to a small German town to take up a post as a teacher, but finds her teaching methods and offers of friendship shunned. A poignant film about the heartbreak of loneliness, it gets an unexpected lift from the Grandaddy song “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot.” —BAM. In German with English subtitles.

Winner of Best Film Grand Prize at Lisboa Film Festival, Portugal. Winner of Best Film and Best Actress awards at Newport Film Festival. Nominated for Best Film at LOLA (the German Oscars).

The World (Shijie) (2004) 140min Special Screening!
Fri, Jun 17 at 7pm
Directed by Jia Zhang-Ke
The latest dispatch from the world’s greatest filmmaker under 40 revisits the themes of Unknown Pleasures and Platform: a hesitant romance, the growing pains of modernization, the urge for flight in a culture of inertia. From the sensational opening tracking shot to the flurry of animated punctuation, Jia’s first government-sanctioned film is his most flamboyant yet—and also his most conventional. —Dennis Lim. In Mandarin with English subtitles. Film courtesy of Zeitgeist Films.

Double Feature!
Before Sunrise (1995) 101min
Before Sunset (2004) 80min
Sat, Jun 18 at 3, 7pm
Directed by Richard Linklater
With Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy

Before Sunrise: A backpacker’s wet dream, a slacker mating ritual in miniature, and a swooning love story so believably tentative and open-ended it allowed secretly romantic cynics to have it both ways, this literal date movie sent two strangers on a train out into the Viennese summer for an all-night rap session. —Dennis Lim

Before Sunset: Even more than its only rival, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Richard Linklater’s sweet, smart, wonderfully formalist and impossibly modest tour de force dramatizes love’s tenacity and evanescence. While Gondry stages his regret scene on Montauk’s shifting sands, Linklater stages his on one of the tourist boats that work the Seine—there’s no reversing the river’s flow. —J. Hoberman

Star Spangled to Death (2004) 402min with intermission
Sun, Jun 19 at 3pm*
*Introduced by director Ken Jacobs
Directed by Ken Jacobs
Jacobs began annotating a lyrical junkyard allegory with chunks of found footage in the late ’50s; screened in various versions over the decades, Star Spangled to Death became his life’s work. Incorporating audiovisual material ranging from political campaign films to animated cartoons to children’s phonograph records, this vast, ironic pageant of 20th-century American history is a unique and mind-boggling contraption, the ultimate underground movie. —J. Hoberman

Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Bu San) (2003) 82min
with Music Palace (2004) 5min
Mon, Jun 20 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm

Goodbye, Dragon Inn:
Directed by Tsai Ming-Liang
Tsai Ming-Liang doesn’t remake King Hu’s Dragon Inn; he incorporates or rather, exhibits it in the context of his tribute to a moldering, soon-to-close Taipei movie house. Deft even by Tsai’s high standards, Goodbye, Dragon Inn effectively brackets the history of Taiwanese cinema—with considerable formal intelligence, elegant understatement, and deadpan humor. —J. Hoberman. In Mandarin & Taiwanese with English subtitles.

Music Palace:
Directed by Eric Lin
A touching, documentary look at the last days and closing of Chinatown's fabled Music Palace movie theater.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (Kôkaku kidôtai 2: Inosensu) (2004) 99min
Tue, Jun 21 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Mamoru Oshii
Japanese animator Mamoru Oshii tops himself with this remarkable sequel. A work of graphic splendor, fluid action, surrealist attitudes, and self-aware cyber-philosophizing, Innocence is the best animé I’ve ever seen. —J. Hoberman

Facing Windows (2003) 102min
Wed, Jun 22 at 4:30, 6:50*, 9:30pm
*Cinemachat with film critic/historian Elliott Stein
Directed by Ferzan Ozpetek
One of the most captivating Italian films in years was made by out gay Turkish director Ozpetek. This romantic drama, fortified with mystery and leavened by humor, was the last film of late great Massimo Girotti, whose long career included work with Visconti, Antonioni, Rossellini and De Sica. —Elliott Stein. In Italian with English subtitles.

Woman is the Future of Man (Yeojaneun namjaui miraeda) (2004) 88min Advance Screening!
Thu, Jun 23 at 7pm
Directed by Hong Sang-Soo
Like his 2002 Turning Gate, avant-pop Korean director Hong Sang-Soo’s latest film is a deadpan erotic comedy both blunt and elliptical. A pair of thirtysomething urban intellectuals go off in search of the woman that each loved and lost. Hong is good on postcoital tristesse and caustic in representing male stupidity. –J. Hoberman. In Korean with English subtitles. Film courtesy of New Yorker Films.

Crimson Gold (Talaye Sorgh) (2003) 95min
Fri, Jun 24 at 2, 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Jafar Panahi
Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold is an anti-blockbuster—a deceptively modest undertaking that brilliantly combines unpretentious humanism and impeccable formal values. The screenplay by Panahi’s mentor, Abbas Kiarostami is based on an actual incident. The subject is not gender oppression but class relations—with the camera often assigned the perspective of a lower-class outsider. —J. Hoberman. In Iranian with English subtitles.

Darwin’s Nightmare (2004) 107min
Sat, Jun 25 at 2, 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Hubert Sauper
Sauper’s staggering documentary is essential viewing on the survival of two ruthlessly fittest species: the Nile perch, which quickly annihilated almost all other fish life in Tanzania’s Lake Victoria after its artificial introduction in the ’60s, and the omnivorous beast known as winner-take-all global capitalism. Sauper’s stoically despondent film leaves little doubt that globalization’s losers are slaves by any other name. —Jessica Winter. Sterling Award, SilverDocs 2005.

Infernal Affairs (Mogan Do) (2002) 100min
Sun, Jun 26 at 2, 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Andrew Lau, Alan Mak
With Tony Leung, Andy Lau
The best Hong Kong crime flick in years, and by design the opposite of an action film. With Tony Leung and Andy Lau as repellent magnetic poles, this symmetrical diagram of cross-purposes plays out as a series of queasily static set pieces. For sweaty-palmed suspense, no Hollywood movie came close. —Dennis Lim. In Cantonese with English subtitles.

Birth (2004) 100min
Mon, Jun 27 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Jonathan Glazer
With Nicole Kidman, Cameron Bright, Lauren Bacall
A solemn, thrillingly ridiculous exercise in circular logic, Jonathan Glazer’s Birth begins with a death—and a birth. In the end, it’s less a meditation on reincarnation than a monument to the ferocious power of suggestion—which is to say, a love story. —Dennis Lim

The Corporation (2003) 145min
Tue, Jun 28 at 6, 9pm
Directed by Joel Bakan, Jennifer Abbott, Mark Achbar
Leisurely, never boring, and grimly amusing, this Canadian documentary ranges from third-world sweatshops and Monsanto petrochemical atrocities to the targeting of kiddie consumers and US corporate collusion with Nazi Germany. The filmmakers zero in on the fact that corporations have the same legal status as individual persons. In a particularly brilliant argument, they demonstrate that, judged by human standards, the corporation is by nature psychopathic. —J. Hoberman

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004) 88min
Wed, Jun 29 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Danny Leiner
With John Cho, Kal Penn
The pot odyssey gone melting-pot, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle takes a torch to the model-minority myth—or more precisely, it rolls it in a doobie and lights up. This stoner road movie is as broad and stoopid as the genre dictates, but as an idiot comedy whose buddies are somewhat bacchanalian Asian Americans and somewhat overachieving bongheads, Harold & Kumar can hardly be accused of forsaking nuance. —Dennis Lim