FILM SERIES
Intimate Epics
Some stories are so sweeping and some visions so monumental, they can’t be contained to a mere 90-minute or two-hour running time. Each one an achievement of towering proportions, the films collected here may be sprawling in ambition, but they are rich and resonant in their observation and human insight. While the summer sun is high, join us in the AC and in front of the big screen for cinematic masterpieces from around the globe—all over the three-hour mark—that offer experiences to truly lose yourself in.
Taiwanese master Edward Yang’s magnum opus follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, unlocking the yearning, striving, and revelation woven into the fabric of everyday life.
This slow-burn drama from the Academy Award-winning director of Drive My Car renders the pain and promise of friendship, marriage, and midlife awakening in exquisite detail.
Cultures collide in this one-of-a-kind explosion of style and detail from Ulrike Ottinger about an eclectic group of Western women taken captive by a deeply hospitable tribe of Mongolian female warriors.
A father takes on an outrageous alter ego to trick his workaholic daughter into bonding with him in Maren Ade’s a laugh-out-loud comedy of father/daughter strife.
As an orphan seeks to uncover the truth of his family, Chilean director Raúl Ruiz’s expansive and dreamlike drama journeys through a labyrinth of histories, memories, and betrayals.
Unfolding across two films, writer-director Joanna Hogg’s lush, dreamlike story of young adulthood, first love, and artistic discovery is at once enrapturing and mysteriously unsettling.
Robert Altman gives cinematic form to the devastating emotional elegance of Raymond Carver’s stories in this interconnected drama that traverses Los Angeles through the lives of twenty-two characters.
Renowned Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky uses the life of a medieval icon painter to craft a transcendent parable about the role of the artist in society.
Using pioneering cinematic technique, Stanley Kubrick’s historical drama about a wiley Irish peasant’s ascent to the English aristocracy is a sardonic, decadent masterpiece.
A seminal work of “slow cinema,” Bela Tarr’s magnum opus unfolds in twelve distinct movements that travel forwards and backwards in time, tracing a group of villagers in post-Communist rural Hungary.
Jonathan Demme’s big-screen adaptation captures the harrowing power of Toni Morrison’s supernatural novel, with a stunning performance from Oprah Winfrey as an formerly enslaved woman haunted by visitations.
Akira Kurosawa makes a glorious return to the samurai epic, captured in blazing color, in this late career triumph rife with ghostly spirits, battling warlords, and the seductive lure of power.