This Week At The New Bev: Claude Chabrol & Claire Denis plus Moulin Rouge!, Tiny Furniture, Ghost World, Let The Right One In, Pulp Fiction & MORE!

Posted by phil blankenship, February 10, 2011 10:26pm | Post a Comment

This Week At The New Beverly

Our full upcoming schedule is available online:

www.newbevcinema.com/calendar.cfm

Friday & Saturday, February 11 & 12

These pre-Oscar days that start off every new year are often considered dog days when it comes to the Hollywood release schedule. Studios tend to dump their least promising product in January and into February, allowing filmgoers to catch up with the big releases left over from Christmas that are likely to garner awards attention. The New Beverly is playing catch-up too with three 2010 releases that barely made a splash theatrically in Los Angeles but are well worth seeing on the big screen before they make their way to the various home theater formats. Friday and Saturday you can see the swansong of the late, great, some might even say underappreciated nouvelle vague master Claude Chabrol along with the latest from one of modern international cinemas most vital and celebrated filmmakers, which just happens to star an actress who herself sports more than a passing familiarity with Chabrol's pensively perverse universe. First, Gerard Depardieu is Inspector Bellamy, a French detective on vacation with his wife who ends up knee-deep in a crime case involving infidelity and issues of familial loyalty. Chabrol worms his way into the suspense through character, not plot machinations, and the movie has a lovely, rambling ease that sets it apart from more typical policiers of the French and American varieties. Second on the bill is Chabrol favorite Isabelle Huppert (Violette, Story of Women) in the latest from acclaimed director Claire Denis (Beau Travail, Trouble Every Day and last year's smashing 35 Shots of Rum). White Material

reunites the director with the biographical roots of her life in Africa to tell the story of a white French family embroiled in racial and civil conflict while trying to save their coffee plantation. Denis' startling visual sensibility and Huppert's fearlessness save the film from accusations of ignorant colonialism, forcing the viewer to confront, without judgment, the conscience of a woman who attempts to live out her connection to the continent in the way that reflects her deep emotional connection to it. While everyone else is scrambling to tick the last titles off their Oscar to-do list, take this opportunity to soak in two of the year's finest, least heralded achievements.

This Week At The New Beverly: THE WRIGHT STUFF II

Posted by phil blankenship, January 27, 2011 11:19am | Post a Comment

This Week At The New Beverly

Our full upcoming schedule is available online:
www.newbevcinema.com/calendar.cfm

January 14 - 31:

Edgar Wright presents THE WRIGHT STUFF II

Prepare yourself Los Angeles for the return of filmmaker Edgar Wright as he descends on The New Beverly with his epic screening series The Wright Stuff II. Mark your calendars because Mr. Wright will be delivering a double dose of features, special guests, and more surprises starting January 14th and continuing through January 31st, 2011.

Thursday, January 27

THE WRIGHT STUFF II

The Thursday show is now SOLD OUT. Any tickets that become available will be sold on a first come first served basis to those waiting in a stand by line the night of the event.

Wild At Heart

This Week At The New Beverly: Marlene Dietrich & Joseph von Sternberg, Charles Bronson, Pulp Fiction, Paul Schrader & the Grindhouse Film Fest!

Posted by phil blankenship, January 6, 2011 11:01am | Post a Comment

This Week At The New Beverly

Our full upcoming schedule is available online:
www.newbevcinema.com/calendar.cfm

Jan. 14 - 31 Edgar Wright presents The Wright Stuff 2

Advance tickets for all films in THE WRIGHT STUFF II series will go on sale this Friday, January 7 at 12:00pm (noon) PST. Links to ticketing for each event is now accessible on the New Bev calendar page or through the Brown Paper Tickets site directly.

Thursday & Friday, January 6 & 7

A Marlene Dietrich/Joseph von Sternberg double bill

The Oscar-winning cinematography of Lee Garmes (with an uncredited assist from a young James Wong Howe) is but only one reason to touch down at the New Beverly January 6-7 for SHANGHAI EXPRESS (1932), director Josef von Sternberg's stylistically influential, visually sensual ode to international intrigue, ill-fated romance and the pleasures of the flesh. All these qualities can be located within the burnished heart and insinuating personality of Marlene Dietrich, whom von Sternberg presented to Hollywood in this popular hit, the third collaboration between director and his muse/object of obsession (after Morocco and Dishonored). Dietrich is Shanghai Lil, a "coaster" living by her wits as she shuttles up and down the China coast on the Shanghai Express. Along for this voyage is an old flame, a military physician (Clive Brook) whose presence onboard the train makes things thick for Lil when he's taken hostage by Chinese guerillas. Von Sternberg's purple passion for his actress and his gorgeously atmospheric direction make this romantic thriller undulate with kitschy grace and purpose. The script comes courtesy of Morocco's Jules Furthman, whose pen also produced Only Angels Have Wings and Rio Bravo for Howard Hawks and, many years later, Jet Pilot, again for Von Sternberg.

This Week At The New Beverly: The Godfather Trilogy Plus Vincent Cassel as Mesrine!

Posted by phil blankenship, December 22, 2010 06:12pm | Post a Comment

This Week At The New Beverly

Our full upcoming schedule is available online:
www.newbevcinema.com/calendar.cfm

Wednesday & Thursday, December 22 & 23

And speaking of Christmas counterprogramming, the New Beverly initiates a week of pre- and post-Christmas and New Year festivities designed to make sure your cinephile heart stays merry and bright with a two-part tale of personal ambition, and that you strut into 2011 alive with the hopes and dreams of one of America's most celebrated families coursing through your spirit. Get warmed up for Christmas on December 23 with a chance to catch one of 2010's most heralded performances-Vincent Cassel as real-life Gallic gangster Jacques Mesrine in a two-part chronicle of the criminal's nearly two-decade-long dominion over the French underworld in director Jean-Francois Richet's MESRINE: PUBLIC ENEMY #1(2010) and MESRINE: KILLER INSITINCT (2010). This is probably your last chance to see Cassel's magnetic work here, in what will surely be an important performance in terms of year-end attention, perhaps also as an interesting point of comparison to how Bronson handles similarly themed material.

This Week At The New Beverly: Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Mann, Alan Ormsby, David Carradine, Woody Allen & More!

Posted by phil blankenship, December 3, 2010 09:06am | Post a Comment

This Week At The New Beverly

Our full upcoming schedule is available online:
www.newbevcinema.com/calendar.cfm

Friday & Saturday, December 3 & 4

Celebrating Godard's 80th Birthday!

BREATHLESS (1959; Jean-Luc Godard) The word "masterpiece" has been tossed around so often in this age of movie hype and hyperbole that it has all but lost its meaning. But the word "landmark," while perhaps not implying as much about the work, is much less frequently heard. Why? Because it cannot with any seriousness be bestowed upon a work of art absent the passage of time. In a culture of instant gratification that seeks to package movies as consumer product, where the formats in which a movie is available are often more important than the movie itself, a word or phrase requiring patience is a much less attractive one. But there is little doubt that for a generation of critics and filmgoers Breathless was a turning point, the unveiling of a new directorial sensibility where the iconography and attitudes of old Hollywood met the cresting soon-to-be-dubbed French New Wave. Breathless brought with it a whole new attitude about contemporary society and film architecture that could be folded into the most familiar of genre tropes with bracing, shocking results that continue to resonate within the grammar of films made 50 years after its initial release. (One need only imagine Breathless, in which Jean-Paul Belmondo co-opts the image and insolence of Humphrey Bogart on a crime spree with the lovely and reticent Jean Seberg, on a double feature with last week's Bonnie and Clyde to get a sense of how Godard's movie created waves that are still rocking the boat.) This print is the beautifully restored version on view in theaters this past summer, struck to celebrate the 50th anniversary of a movie that, alongside subsequent complacency-shattering films like Psycho, Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch, demarcates the emergence of a singular vision signaling the end of the Production Code and the breaking down of walls between "high" and "low" culture. Few films made after, say, 1962 could be said to have not at least registered the presence of Breathless along the timeline of film history. That it is such an integral part of the D.N.A. of most of those films, consciously or subconsciously, only speaks to its status as a true cinema landmark.

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