Here are the wonderful films we've shown so far at CFI

I’ve Loved You So Long 

(12A) (115 mins) Thursday 17^th Sept    Doors open 8pm, Film starts at 8.30pm

The presence of Kristin Scott Thomas in this literate French movie by Philippe Claudel is so powerfully distinctive that it's as if Claudel has not merely written the lead role for her, but extrapolated his film's entire narrative structure from Scott Thomas's personality. Her formidable bilingual presence, her beauty - elegant and drawn in early middle age - her air of hypersensitive awareness of all the tiny absurdities and indignities with which she is surrounded, coupled with a drolly lenient reticence: it all creates an intelligent, observant drama about dislocation, fragility and the inner pain of unshakeable memories. Scott Thomas is on screen for almost every minute of the film, often in close-up and her face is at once eloquent and deeply withdrawn.

She plays Juliette, a fortysomething woman who after a long and painful separation has been taken in by her younger sister Léa, played by Elsa Zylberstein. When we first see Juliette, being picked up at the airport, she wears no makeup and smokes perpetually; she has a dowdy grey cardigan of the sort worn in girls' boarding schools, and has clearly been institutionalised in some awful way.

Juliette and Léa's childhood home was near Rouen, but Léa has now moved with her husband Luc (Serge Hazanavicius) and two young children to Nancy, in eastern France. The film's regional identity is cleverly underlined with material about intense football rivalries, and soccer-mad Luc's resentment of biased sports coverage in the Parisian papers.

Juliette's English-accented French is explained by the fact that she spent some time in England and that the women's mother (played by Claire Johnston) is English, a patient with dementia in an old people's home. Juliette's sole meeting with the old woman is a brashly tremendous coup de cinéma, which Claudel saves up for the very end: a dramatic flourish like something from Tennessee Williams.

The reason for Juliette's absence is a grim, unnameable secret. It is the elephant in the living room whose shadow has fallen over all their lives, and it is only when Juliette goes for job interviews, or for mandatory meetings with her welfare case-worker, or the local police officer with whom she must sign in once a week, that she can speak the truth aloud. This Juliette does with a crisp, proud defiance, and a perverse pleasure in shocking and upsetting people, to pre-empt their judgment and their scorn.

In a series of cleverly constructed, indirect dialogue scenes, Claudel shows how Juliette's 15-year-old secret has sent her entire family into shock and a collective dysfunction. Ironically, it is Juliette who has been able to look the facts squarely in the face and, having had a decade and a half to come to terms with it, is relatively well adjusted. But Léa, carrying the twin burdens of her own family respectability and the need to appease her parents' angry demands for silence on the matter, has had to spend her adult life in denial. To her astonishment, Juliette realises that her secret has induced in Léa a kind of learned amnesia about their shared youth, and she is enraged that Léa has made life choices that look like an agonised repudiation of Juliette's past. Yet all this makes Léa's passionate need to reach out to her damaged sister all the more moving.

Scott Thomas and Zylberstein make good sisters. It is not simply that they look plausibly similar, but not too similar, it is that they act out sibling tension so well: the tricky magnetic field made up of shared memories, rivalries, intimacies. (I couldn't help wondering what a film about sisters starring Kristin Scott Thomas and her own sister Serena would look like.) For a novelist, Philippe Claudel shows remarkable skill with his first feature film: in fact, his script is almost a screenplay masterclass, absorbing a lot of facts and story into a small space, but without any uncomfortable cramming, and he adroitly suggests the slow process by which Juliette is gradually accepted into the family and the community. With miraculous efficiency, he creates for Juliette a flirtation with a melancholy cop, a sexual encounter with a bumptious guy in a bar, and a growing, tender intimacy with Léa's colleague and fellow lecturer Michel (Laurent Grevill). Enough material for a whole soap opera season is miraculously reduced to feature length.

Having set his story in Nancy, Claudel self-consciously alludes to one of the region's most famous sons: Eric Rohmer, who is hotly defended in a dinner party conversation in opposition to the flashy Americans. Ironically, though, the montage sequence that this follows, showing the delights of a very French family party in the country, is a little sugary and Hollywoodish. Very different from Rohmer.

Scott Thomas's performance, easily the best of her career, countermands any such qualms: the centre of a deeply involving, beautifully acted and expertly constructed human drama by and for grown-ups.

Peter Bradshaw (Guardian Sept 2008)

Thursday 20th August - The Wrestler (15)     Doors open 8pm, Film starts at 8.30pm. Film 110 mins.

The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) (15) (137 mins)    Thursday 16th July 2009     

Doors open 8pm Film starts 8.30pm

You know within minutes of watching The Lives of Others, the debut feature that brought writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck an Oscar for the best foreign language film of 2006, that you are in confident, authoritative hands. The film opens with an interrogation in East Berlin in 1984 at the temporary detention centre of the German Democratic Republic's Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (the Ministry for State Security), better known as the Stasi. Forty years earlier, the Stasi's job was being done by the Gestapo, which was active for a mere dozen years and employed around 45,000 agents with some 160,000 registered informants. The Stasi lasted 40 years in only half of the country, employed 100,000 full-time workers and had, so this movie tells us, 400,000 informants.

The interrogator in this initial scene is Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe), a lean, humourless man seeking a confession from a political prisoner. There is no direct physical torture (though we know there was no form of punishment or persuasion the Stasi balked at). But the accused is made to sit on his hands and is forced to stay awake. Wiesler informs his victim that merely to question the probity of the Stasi is itself a serious crime.

When the necessary confession has been obtained, Wiesler places the fabric from the seat the prisoner has been sitting on in a bottle to retain the offender's odour for the use of tracker dogs. Wiesler then uses the tape recording of this scene to lecture recruits in the art of interrogation. While indoctrinating them in his form of mad logic, he's asked a question about the possible innocence of a victim; Wiesler puts a little cross beside the questioner's name. At the end of his lecture, he's buttonholed by a suspiciously hearty old schoolfriend, Lieutenant-Colonel Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), now head of the Stasi's Cultural Department.

The colonel asks Wiesler to join him in the staff canteen, where he hears a lieutenant mention a joke about President Honecker. The embarrassed young man is forced to repeat it and we know (and two hours later actually discover) that the joker's career has been seriously blighted. Similar incidents lead to jail sentences in Milan Kundera's novel The Joke and Emir Kusturica's film When Father Was Away on Business

This sense of social unease and constant suspicion, which informs the whole of the film, leads on to the next scene: Grubitz takes Wiesler to the theatre and suggests he take an interest in a potentially dissident playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), whose beautiful girlfriend (Martina Gedeck) is appearing in his new play. It is first hinted at, and then made clear, that an influential minister (Thomas Thieme) has designs on the actress and intends to use the Stasi to tarnish the playwright. Wiesler is assigned to the case by his old friend and proceeds to bug the writer's flat and put him under 24-hour surveillance.

We then see the Stasi at work, doggedly recording everything for the organisation's files, with entries in their log such as (noting the end of a birthday party) 'unwrap presents and then presumably have intercourse'. Their targets, however, are largely innocent of any plans to undermine the state. The theatre people are dedicated socialists who merely seek artistic freedom and a certain licence to criticise and exercise democratic rights.

In John le Carre's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, the Stasi man targeted for destruction is a dedicated true believer, while the man being kept in place by MI6 is a corrupt, time-serving career man. Similarly here, the wily, unprincipled Grubitz is manipulating the honest communist Wiesler, who really does believe what everyone in the Stasi professes, that 'we are the party's sword and shield'.

But like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the lonely, essentially decent Wiesler comes to doubt what he is doing and to suspect the patriotism of those around him. Listening in on the playwright and his girlfriend, he develops human sympathies for people his superior believes to be suffering from a sickness known as 'anthropocentrism'. He reads Brecht. A little boy he meets on the lift insults the Stasi, but he doesn't inquire, as he should, about the child's father. He begins to make minor interventions, protecting the couple's privacy; then acts in a serious, protective manner that puts his own life and career in danger.

The film turns into a suspenseful thriller with a complex and powerful moral drive. Were there people like Wiesler in the Stasi? Some of its victims say not. However, von Donnersmarck and Ulrich Muhe persuade us of that possibility without suggesting such figures were common.

The Lives of Others subtly evokes a vindictive society that exists by turning citizens against each other in the interests of national unity and collective security. It serves as a major warning to ourselves and our elected leaders about where overzealousness and a lack of respect for individuals and their liberties can lead.

The film has a remarkable coda, set in 1992 after the Berlin Wall has fallen and the Stasi files were opened to the public. When Dreyman the playwright visits the former Stasi headquarters, a trolley is required to bring in his bulky files. Reading them provides him with something like the walk down a nightmarish memory lane that British historian and student of Eastern European affairs Timothy Garton Ash describes in his fascinating book The File: A Personal History, which resulted from examining the dossier that the Stasi had opened on him in 1981 when he was doing research in Berlin for a book on the Third Reich.

Dreyman finds some illuminating surprises in his files. He also meets the lecherous minister, who, like many of his kind, performed a Vicar of Bray act and recreated themselves in a new Germany as many Nazi sympathisers had done 50 years before.

(Philip French The Guardian)

Gomorrah (cert 15) (137 mins)

Thursday 18th June. Doors open 8:10pm. Film starts 8:30pm.

There's only one moment in the new Italian film Gomorrah that resembles the gangster movie as we know it. In a tanning parlour, assorted fleshy men stand gleaming in the blue light of their cubicles. Backs are slapped, grins grinned, jokes cracked. Then suddenly, bada bing! – or however that translates in Neapolitan dialect, the main language of Matteo Garrone's extraordinary drama.

Set around Naples, Gomorrah is an everyday epic of criminality, exposing the activities of the Camorra, the underworld network that holds sway in that region. But perhaps "underworld" isn't the right term: judging by Garrone's film, there's nothing remotely surreptitious about the Camorra's activities. In the world of Gomorrah, crime is simply the business of everyday life.

The film is based on a book by journalist Roberto Saviano (also one of the film's co-writers), whose revelations about what's known locally as "the System" proved so incisive that he's been under police protection for two years. Director Garrone may need his own protection because – while Hollywood gangster cinema has traditionally tickled and flattered the Mob – there's not an iota of glamour in Gomorrah's harsh, unforgiving tableau.

Gomorrah comprises five interleaved stories. One strand involves an angelic-looking boy, Totò (Salvatore Abruzzese), who wants to be a gang foot-soldier. He passes his audition: donning a bullet-proof vest, he stands to be shot at, then is told, "Now you're a man". At home, he proudly admires the bruise on his chest: a medal of war, but also a reminder that, like everyone in the Camorra's circle of hell, he's already been kissed by death.

We also meet Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato), a bagman who scuttles around in his respectable windcheater doling out cash to families of faithful Camorra members. Then there's Pasquale, an expert tailor on a couture-house shopfloor, who gets into deep water when he agrees to moonlight giving lessons to a rival Chinese concern. A dash of black comedy is provided by two young yahoos (Marco Macor, Ciro Petrone), who fancy themselves as go-it-alone outlaws: they're first seen swaggering around like children, making "pow! pow!" noises and fancying themselves as Tony Montana, Al Pacino's anti-hero in Scarface. They're almost lovable in a pitiful way: one has a raspy bulldog voice, the other a nebbish whine, and their adventures constitute a sort of ill-fated love story.

In the fifth story we see the System's respectable face, represented by dapper Franco, whose lucrative business is the disposal of toxic waste as landfill. In a quarry, he smilingly oversees a gang of children that he's enlisted to drive trucks – their spilled contents having already left one adult looking like the English Patient. The film's most chilling moment comes when an elderly peasant woman gives Franco and his lieutenant a tray of peaches. Once he's on the road, Franco throws them away: they're toxic. A shot of the junked fruit brings the point home: the peaches are the people, poisoned by the Camorra's contempt for its own land.

The cast includes a few outstanding professionals, notably Salvatore Cantalupo as the careworn tailor, and the superb Toni Servillo as Franco. Best known for his lead in The Consequences of Love (smoothly creepy, like John Malkovich all'italiana), here Servillo is all bonhomie and vicious cynicism. But Garrone's truly creative casting is among local non-professionals, some with real Camorra ties: the tubercular-looking youths, the fat old men in beach shorts, the terrifying Zio Bernardino (Bernardino Terracciano) who rasps veiled warnings from a tracheotomy-scarred throat.

Garrone films in the kind of locations that are the Camorra's real terrain, notably a housing project with many apartments blasted or burned out. Little wonder that he has compared Gomorrah to a war film: this could be Beirut or Sarajevo at the height of their conflicts. Marco Onorato's camera creeps nervously, as if in fear of ambush, along the estate's walkways, where drugs are dealt to clamouring crowds and the walls resound with dialect cries from lookouts: we get a terrific sense of the noise of crime.

An especially sobering note comes in the end titles, which reveal how vast the Camorra's business is, how noxious its effects, and how involved it is in legit mainstream concerns: the organisation has apparently invested in the Twin Towers reconstruction. But for Garrone's characters, the Camorra is about daily life: the business of living or dying, paying your staff's wages, killing a neighbour. There's no romantic Mafia-movie stuff here, no noble omerta – just poverty, squalor and contempt for life. Matteo Garrone's film has the authentic ring of reportage, and by comparison, Tony Montana might as well have walked out of Tolkien. (J Romney The Independent)

Juno (2007) (Cert 12A) (96 mins)

Thursday 21st May. Doors open 8:10pm. Film starts 8:30pm.

A naked Nicole Kidman was once famously described as "pure theatrical Viagra"; in this thoroughly delightful teen comedy, the fully clothed Ellen Page is pure cinematic Prozac. With its smart dialogue by newcomer Diablo Cody and a miraculously effective and evocative lo-fi soundtrack, the film has the ephemeral charm of a great pop song.

Page plays Juno MacGuff, a hyper-articulate 16-year-old who has cultivated sarky irony to insulate her against the pain and awfulness of being a teenager. In a spirit of experiment she has had sex for the first time with Paulie (Michael Cera), with whom she was once in a band. Paulie was also surrendering his virginity, or as Juno puts it, "going live". As ill fortune would have it, Juno gets pregnant the first time out, and is catapulted in a world of genuine grown-up experience to match and exceed her super-cool mannerisms. Unable to express his deeply hurt and confused feelings, Paulie shrugs and lets Juno do what she wants, and she decides to keep the baby and find a couple for adoption. This turns out to be the uptight yuppies Mark (Jason Bateman) and Vanessa (Jennifer Garner). Mark is a cool composer with a guitar collection, secretly unreconciled to fatherhood; inevitably he begins a dangerous flirtation with Juno, whose baby threatens to destroy the marriage it was intended to complete, and to undermine Juno's own future in ways she had not begun to imagine.

It may be that like Judd Apatow's comedy Knocked Up, Juno will be criticised for neglecting to endorse abortion, or to reflect that this is the option that is the most tenable in real life. In this paper, Hadley Freeman recently wrote an insightful article, noting that Juno is not the product of an anti-abortion culture, but one which has taken abortion for granted. Absolutely right. But this needn't mean abortion rights are being slighted; it would be a relief to see a culture in which, say, evolution was taken for granted.

Juno is a fiction with irresistible charm and wit and Page carries everything before her, creating a character with a powerful sense of right and wrong, an overwhelming belief in monogamy, and a nascent talent for leadership.

The film owes its power to Ellen Page's lovely performance and to Cody's funny script, which treats the subject of status with shrewdness and compassion. If women all too often find status only in the dangerous and expendable commodity of sexual attractiveness, then in getting pregnant, Juno would seem to have catastrophically abandoned this one tiny prerogative, and looked stupid into the bargain. Yet she finds that, as a pregnant woman, she is the centre of attention, and in offering her child for adoption, she has dizzying power over rich adults. It is a power that gives her insight and clarity, and humbles her elders. Like I said: this film is a happy pill. (Peter Bradshaw - The Guardian)

Hunger (Cert 15) 96 mins

Thursday 16th April. Doors open 8:10pm. Film starts 8:30pm.

Hunger, the feature debut of Steve McQueen, the British artist and 1999 Turner Prize winner, covers those same events of 1980-81 which culminated in Bobby Sands's death on 5 May at the age of 27. But McQueen and his co-writer, the Irish playwright Enda Walsh, approach the subject with a Bressonian austerity. We are shown little of the outside world and nothing of the activities of the IRA leadership. The film opens with a troubled warder (Stuart Graham) leaving for work, examining his car to see if there's a concealed bomb, his wife anxiously watching from the window. Later a warder is killed in cold blood by an assassin in an old folks' home, his blood spattering the elderly mother he's visiting. Yes, that is what assassins do, and this is what the results look like. Otherwise the whole picture is set in the H-block and comes to centre on Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender).

One can almost feel the intensity of the prisoners' determination and smell the stench of their unwashed bodies and the excrement-covered cells. The orchestrated flooding of the corridors by urine poured from beneath the cell doors, the flies and the maggots, the awful job of cleaning up that falls to the warders: all of this is presented without comment. So too are the beatings, the strip searches, the forced baths, the running of gauntlets formed by policemen with plastic shields and truncheons.

The film takes on a different, more sombre, tone when Sands decides on the hunger strike and calls in a priest, Father Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham), to discuss the political and theological implications of his proposed actions. Fassbender and Cunningham play brilliantly together in a sequence that begins with an unbroken 10-minute take from a stationary camera as the pair sit at a table in the visitors' room, fencing, joking, testing each other, moving warily like prize fighters as they progress towards their vital moral debate. Both talk of their childhoods: the priest of his rivalry with his brother, also a man of the cloth; Bobby of his growing awareness of a divided Ireland and his own need to act that grew from competitive athletics involving Protestants and boys from the Republic. The eloquent Sands sees himself as a lonely long-distance runner, and one wonders if he ever read Alan Sillitoe's novella.

After this great middle act there is little dialogue as Sands fades away, his body crumbling, his faculties fading, his resolve never changing. There are unforgettable images here. For instance, a male nurse, his political allegiances betrayed by the UDA tattooed on his fingers, carrying Sands' emaciated body from the bathroom to his cot in a manner that inevitably brings to mind a pietà. (Philip French, The Guardian Nov 2008)

Seen it already? - Post a preview of the film

Thursday 19th March -Doors Open 8:10pm. Film starts 8:30 pm

Persepolis (cert 15) (95 mins)

This stark and beautiful art-house cartoon is an animated coming-of-age story with a difference, set against the backdrop of war and revolution in Iran.

Deservedly nominated for an Oscar, the true tale of graphic artist Marjane Satrapi’s childhood unfolds as a monochrome flashback, charting her journey from a precocious girl who secretly rocks out to Iron Maiden to an empowered young woman, via a spell in Vienna.

Despite the harrowing landscape, it is really a story about people and family more than the politics of Tehran. Managing to be both laugh-out-loud funny and heart-wrenchingly tragic, Persepolis has a sense of real history that is all too rare in animated movies.

“This moving, perceptive and extremely funny film is based on the two volumes of Marjane Satrapi's comic-strip autobiography about growing up in Iran under the Shah and the ayatollahs and is comparable in ambition to, though graphically more modest than, Art Spiegelman's books on his family's experience of the Holocaust, Maus, and his reflections on 9/11, In the Shadow of No Towers. Its title refers to the ancient city that Darius founded in the 6th century BC, now a noble ruin, but for long the ceremonial capital of Persia and still for many the source of national pride and identity. Satrapi, who has lived and worked in Paris since 1984, was offered the chance of seeing her book turned into a live-action movie but wisely opted to collaborate on an animated film with French graphic novelist and animator Vincent Paronnaud..... I was often reminded of the sharp graphic style, ear for dialogue and wry humour of Posy Simmonds and indeed Satrapi's self-portraits could have been drawn by the English artist.”  Philip French The Observer April 2008

Before The Devil Knows You're Dead (cert15)

Thursday 19th February 2009 -

From the unexpectedly graphic opening shot, director Sidney Lumet proves he hasn’t lost any of his bite with age. This is a riveting suspense thriller that retains the director’s classic approach to storytelling while updating it at the same time.

The story concerns a New York Family with rolling undercurrent of dysfunction. The eldest son Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a frustrated, drug-abusing stockbroker who is unable to satisfy his gorgeous wife (Marisa Tomei). The youngest son, Hank (Ethan Hawke) is passive and struggles to make alimony payments. Their parents (Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris) live in Westchester and operate a small jewellery store. Their lives begin to unravel when Andy approaches Hank about pulling off a heist that will seemingly solve all their monetary problems. Everything about this idea is risky, yet Andy convinces his timid younger brother that this is his only way out of his current situation. Naturally, their plan falls apart, resulting in a series of tragedies that they never could have predicted.

Thursday 15th January 2009 Persepolis was cancelled due to technical failure

The Orphanage

Thursday 18th December 2008

It's only his first film, but Spain’s Juan Antonio Bayona has already figured out the secret to a successful supernatural thriller: emphasize character over special effects. Like Walter Salles's Dark Water and Alejandro Amenábar's The Others, The Orphanage pivots on a pretty woman and an unusual child. When her old orphanage goes on the market, Laura (Belén Rueda, Amenábar's The Sea Inside) and Carlos (Fernando Cayo) settle in with their son, Simón (Roger Príncep). Once acclimated to the remote seaside surroundings, they plan to re-open it as a home for special-needs children. Meanwhile, their seven-year-old doesn't know he's adopted or that he has a life-threatening illness. He does, however, have a lot of imaginary playmates. When Simón disappears without a trace, his parents contact the police, but to no avail. Because Laura has been hearing odd noises and having strange visions, they proceed to consult a medium. Aurora (Geraldine Chaplin, speaking perfect Spanish) is convinced they aren't alone. Carlos has his doubts, but Laura makes like a detective and revisits her childhood--through photographs, home movies, and exploration of the spooky stone manor--to determine who or what abducted her son. Produced and presented by Guillermo Del Toro, The Orphanage is less fanciful than his works, though it does bear a vague resemblance to the ghostly Devil's Backbone. There are a few gory make-up effects, but Bayona mostly preys on our fear of the unknown to craft a first-rate fright fest.

The Black Dahlia (2006) (cert.15)

Thursday 20th November 2008  (in conjunction with The Chorlton Book Festival)

The film follows two detectives in 1940s Los Angeles as they investigate the murder of Elizabeth Short (Mia Kirshner), nicknamed by the press as the Black Dahlia. In a subplot, the two detectives, Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart), are caught in a love triangle with Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson). Blanchard and Bleichert become obsessed with the murder and it gradually consumes their lives, plunged into the depths of an urban underworld rife with pornography, femmes fatales, corrupt police and depraved criminals, a graphic and bloody trail to the solution of the Black Dahlia's murder.

Brian DePalma directs a strong cast in a film that divided critics over it's intentions and style. It is an adaptation of a classic James Ellroy book mixing murder, sleaze and Hollywood. Ellroy said of the film "Brian De Palma's film is a wonderful reduction and compression of my story," he says, "And it stands as Mr De Palma's visual record of my story. It's a visual language that I couldn't imagine and so I'm grateful for it. For the first time an actor, Josh Hartnett, physically resembles the character he plays, which is me once removed."

The film looks gorgeous and justifiably won an Oscar for cinematography - judge for yourself.

Thursday 16th October 2008- No Country for Old Men

The Coen brothers make their finest thriller since Fargo with a restrained adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel. Not that there aren't moments of intense violence, but No Country for Old Men is their quietest, most existential film yet. In this modern-day Western, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is a Vietnam veteran who needs a break. One morning while hunting antelope, he spies several trucks surrounded by dead bodies (both human and canine). In examining the site, he finds a case filled with $2 million. Moss takes it with him, tells his wife (Kelly Macdonald) he's going away for awhile, and hits the road until he can determine his next move. On the way from El Paso to Mexico, he discovers he's being followed by ex-special ops agent Chigurh (an eerily calm Javier Bardem). Chigurh's weapon of choice is a cattle gun, and he uses it on everyone who gets in his way--or loses a coin toss (as far as he's concerned, bad luck is grounds for death). Just as Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a World War II veteran, is on Moss's trail, Chigurh's former colleague, Wells (Woody Harrelson), is on his. For most of the movie, Moss remains one step ahead of his nemesis. Both men are clever and resourceful--except Moss has a conscious, Chigurh does not (he is, as McCarthy puts it, "a prophet of destruction"). At times, the film plays like an old horror movie, with Chigurh as its lumbering Frankenstein monster. Like the taciturn terminator, No Country for Old Men doesn't move quickly, but the tension never dissipates. This minimalist masterwork represents Joel and Ethan Coen and their entire cast, particularly Brolin and Jones, at the peak of their powers. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Thursday 9th October 2008 - *EXTRA SCREENING Babette's Feast * in conjunction with Chorlton Food & Drink Festival

Some movies can only be described as delicious. In Babette's Feast, a woman flees the French civil war and lands in a small seacoast village in Denmark, where she comes to work for two spinsters, devout daughters of a puritan minister. After many years, Babette unexpectedly wins a lottery, and decides to create a real French dinner--which leads the sisters to fear for their souls. Joining them for the meal will be a Danish general who, as a young soldier, courted one of the sisters, but she turned him away because of her religion. The village elders all resolve not to enjoy the meal, but can their moral fiber resist the sensual pleasure of Babette's cooking? Babette's Feast deservedly won the 1987 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. This lovely movie is impeccably simple, yet its slender narrative contains a wealth of humor, melancholy, and hope. --Bret Fetzer

What better film choice for a Food Festival!

Thursday 18th September - The Counterfeiters

Writer/director Stefan Ruzowitzky explores the moral corrosion of Nazi complicity with this tightly wound adaptation of Adolf Burger's fact-based book The Devil's Workshop. Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) may be a talented artist at heart, but his desire for wealth has driven him to use his creativity for more nefarious means. Arrested by the police inspector Herzog (Devid Striesow) at the onset of World War II, Sorowitsch is sent to the notorious Mauthausen concentration camp. It's not long before Salomon's thinly veiled opportunism earns him a relatively comfortable position as the camp's resident sketch artist, and five years later he is mysteriously swept away to Sachsenhausen. Upon arriving at the camp, Sorowitsch discovers that Herzog, now a commandant, is attempting to destabilize the economies of the Allies while simultaneously funding the Nazi war machine by assembling a special team of counterfeit artists to create millions in fraudulent pounds and dollars. As the operation gets under way, Sorowitsch finds the efforts of the team continually undermined by unyieldingly idealistic collotype specialist Adolf Burger (August Diehl). In the months that follow, the team wrestles with their consciences as Axis forces are gradually overwhelmed by Allied might. The Counterfeiters won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

Once - Thursday 21st August at 8.30pm

Doors open at 8.10 - please come with plenty of time to spare if you want to indulge in tea/coffee/biscuits/wine.

A modern day musical set on the streets of Dublin. Featuring Glen Hansard from the Irish band "The Frames," (he was also Outspan in The Commitments)the film tells the story of a street musician and a Czech immigrant during an eventful week as they write, rehearse and record songs that reveal their unique love story.

This is a really heartwarming film full of great tunes.

90 Mins Cert 15

This is England (18) Thursday 19th June 8.30pm

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warning: this trailer contains scenes of Margaret Thatcher.

SAT 17th May 11am - Saturday Morning Children's Cinema (in association with the Chorlton Arts Festival) Five Children and IT

SAT 24th May 11am - Saturday Morning Children's Cinema (in association with the Chorlton Arts Festival) Magic Sword:Quest for Camelot

Factory Girl - Thursday 15th May, 8.30pm

FACTORY GIRL imaginatively unfolds the comet-like rise and fall of 60s “It Girl” Edie Sedgwick, the blazing superstar who came to define both the glamour and the tragedy of our celebrity-obsessed culture. Sedgwick appeared to be the quintessential American princess, with her blue blood, her trust fund and her Harvard education, not to mention her ethereal beauty and vivacious charisma. But she was also a lost and fragile little girl; and when she met up with counter-culture anti-hero Andy Warhol, everything changed. Suddenly, Edie found herself at the center of a Pop Art universe bursting with sex, drugs, style and rock ‘n’ roll -- and a mad rush for fame and fabulousness that was destined to spin out of control.

Arriving into the chaos of mid-60s New York, Edie (Sienna Miller) is taken under the wing of the famously deadpan artist Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce) who sees in her untamed vulnerability the makings of an irresistible muse. Warhol invites Edie into the wild world of The Factory, a former downtown hat factory he has transformed into a bohemian paradise. Here, a rag-tag mix of musicians, poets, artists, actors and misfits gather to create avant-garde movies during the day and throw glam parties all night long. Edie quickly ascends to become the star of Warhol’s movies, an idol at The Factory and a media darling. She is on top of the world when she falls in love with a larger-than-life rock star (Hayden Christensen). But when Edie becomes caught between Warhol’s world of sexy surfaces and her new love, she winds up rejected by both – and once again, set adrift in the modern world.

Hallam Foe

Thursday 17th April

Jamie Bell is Hallam Foe, a troubled young man whose knack for voyeurism paradoxically reveals his darkest fears, and his most peculiar desires. Driven to expose the true cause of his mother's death, he instead finds himself searching the rooftops of the city of Edinburgh for love.

Away From Her

Thursday 27th March

Although much of her fledgling career has been spent in front of the camera, Sarah Polley emerges as a serious writing-directing talent with Away From Her. It's a low-key yet powerful and uplifting story of love renewed amid the ravages of old age. Julie Christie, even in her sultry sex bomb days, has rarely been more radiant than as a 60-something woman whose memories of life with her husband (Gordon Pinsent) are gradually being eroded by Alzheimer's disease.

After putting the frying pan in the fridge once too often, Fiona (Christie) convinces husband Grant (Pinsent) to check her into a care home. She doesn't want to risk his resentment, but after a month at the facility Fiona does exactly that, forming an attachment to fellow patient Aubrey (Michael Murphy). Added to this mild-mannered tug of love is Grant's guilt over a past dalliance and the question of whether Fiona is secretly punishing him for that.

"SOULFUL & WONDERFULLY ACTED"

Polley brings hope, poetry and light to a place of apparent desolation. There are haunting flashes of the past while, in the present, a dramatic snowy landscape hints at the barren space growing between the couple. Then she frequently undercuts this mood of whimsical melancholy with outrageous humour. So one patient (Thomas Hauff) is an ex-sports pundit who commentates on everything from a walk down the hall to a wistful glance! It's a cannily composed story, soulful and wonderfully acted. Pinsent is a sturdy anchor and Olympia Dukakis adds a touch of big city wit as Aubrey's world-weary wife. It's the nuances in Christie's performance, however, that really linger in the mind. Outstanding. (Review from BBC Website)

Notes on a Scandal

Thursday 21st Feb

Dame Judi Dench and Kate Blanchett face off with searing performances in this riveting tale of obsession and desire. Based on the novel by Zoe Heller, NOTES ON A SCANDAL is the story of Barbara Covett (Dench), a hard-nosed spinster schoolteacher, and her poisonous friendship with fellow teacher Sheba Hart (Blanchett). When the young and beautiful Sheba shows up as the new art instructor, everyone is charmed by her, including the embittered Barbara. Barbara is thrilled when her lonely life is shaken up by Sheba's overtures of friendship, as Sheba invites her to share in family dinners, and opens up to her about her marital troubles and personal longing. Barbara narrates her own feelings of longing to us from her meticulous diaries, and it becomes increasingly clear that her take on the friendship is uncomfortably intense, if not borderline delusional. Things reach a fever pitch when Barbara happens upon Sheba dallying in the art room with a 15-year-old student. She tells Sheba that she must end the affair at once, but decides not to report her to the school, and instead, to use her knowledge of the indiscretion to draw Sheba closer to her, and put her in her debt. But when Barbara's demands on Sheba become too high, things soon unravel, setting off a chain of events that will leave viewers chewing their nails to the quick, but unable to tear their eyes away. Both Blanchett and Dench are dazzling to watch as they deftly handle the barbed wit of Patrick Marber's screenplay. Directed by Richard Eyre of the Northern Theatre of London, and with a score by Philip Glass, NOTES ON A SCANDAL takes what could serve as mere tabloid fodder and plays it out on the level of Shakespearean tragedy.

Last King of Scotland

Thursday 17th January 2008

Forest Whitaker delivers an Oscar-winning, ferociously commanding performance as bloodthirsty Ugandan president Idi Amin in Kevin MacDonald’s THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND. Adapted from the novel by Giles Foden, the film recounts Amin’s horrific reign through the eyes of a fictional character, Nick Garrigan (James McAvoy), a young doctor from Scotland who travels to Uganda hoping to do some good. Nick is more sanguine about new president Amin than his counterpart Sarah Merrit (Gillian Armstrong) is, whose experience causes her to be sceptical of Amin’s bombastic declarations. After an automobile accident, Nick is called in to treat the president’s wounds. His authoritative behaviour impresses Amin, who charms Nick into becoming his personal physician. Nick embraces his newfound life of luxury, but he is unable to grasp the reality of the situation. When he does finally realise the atrocities Amin is inflicting upon his people (and is also capable of inflicting on Nick), the terrified doctor tries to make a frantic escape before it's too late. MacDonald, director of the acclaimed documentaries ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER and TOUCHING THE VOID, makes a startlingly assured transition into fictional filmmaking with THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND. Working with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (THE CELEBRATION) and editor Justine Wright, MacDonald brings 1970s Uganda to pulsating life, perfectly recreating that tumultuous era. But ultimately the film belongs to Whitaker: as he shifts from charming to maniacal in the space of a short, unexpected breath, he infuses Amin with startling humanity.

Running with Scissors Thursday 13th December 2007

Red Road Thursday 15th November 2007

The History Boys Thursday 18th October 2007

Little Miss Sunshine Thursday 20th September 2007

Pan's Labyrinth Thursday 16th August 2007

Babel Thursday 26th July 2007

Me and You and Everyone We Know Thursday 21st June 2007

James & the Giant Peach (part of Chorlton Arts Festival Childrens Films) Sat 26th May 2007

Superman the Movie (part of Chorlton Arts Festival Childrens Films) Sat 19th May 2007

Volver Thursday May 17th 2007

Elephant Thursday April 12th 2007

Transamerica Thursday 15th March 2007

The Wind that Shakes the Barley Thursday 15th February 2007

Sideways Thursday 18th Jan 2007

Mighty Aphrodite Thursday 7th December 2006

Monster's Ball Thursday 9th November 2006

Rumble Fish Thursday 21st September 2006