Upcoming Screenings

COLOSSAL YOUTH
Tuesday, November 10 @ 7:30pm

“The film consists of a series of hieratically lit and colored encounters between a Cape Verdean immigrant named Ventura and assorted friends, family and neighbors, each more down and out than the next, shot in low-angled single takes in a near-abandoned old quarter of Lisbon and a new government-run apartment complex...A truly incantatory experience, Colossal Youth is an impressive, often transfixing excavation of emotionally dark territory, and its duration is directly tied to its overall shape and impact. It’s a singular vision of underclass existence, simultaneously decrepit and monumental.” -Kent Jones, FILM COMMENT

Director Pedro Costa in person!

Curated in association with the American Film Institute. Co-hosted by the UCI Film and Video Center, the UC Humanities Research Institute, the UCLA Departments of Film, TV, and Digital Media and Spanish and Portuguese, and the Los Angeles Film and TV Office of the French Embassy.

"electrified by this raw existential intensity...visually rapturous" -Nathan Lee, VILLAGE VOICE
"It's unlike anything else I've seen—mysterious, exalted, demanding, leisurely paced, and very beautiful" -Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

WRITTEN and DIRECTED by: Pedro Costa
In Portuguese with English subtitles
155 min         View the Japanese trailer!

RED CLIFF
Thursday, November 12 @ 7:30pm

Melnitz Movies, in co-sponsorship with the Asia Institute presents Red Cliff, the most expensive Chinese film ever made and the first collaboration between John Woo and Tony Leung since the 1992 classic Hard Boiled. This breathtaking war epic, immortalized in the classic Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, brings to the screen the legendary tale of the Battle of Red Cliff that heralded the end of the Han Dynasty in 208 AD. Vastly outnumbered by Han General Cao Cao's brutal, fast-approaching army, two troublesome warlords band together to mount a heroic campaign – unrivaled in history – that changed the face of China forever.

The film that broke Titanic's box office record in mainland China!

"Red Cliff scales the heights. It balances character, grit, spectacle and visceral action in a meaty, dramatically satisfying pie that delivers on the hype." -Derek Elley, VARIETY
"Woo weaves incidents together with astonishing dexterity, proving himself a worthy heir of the Kurosawa-Peckinpah tradition of superior dialectic montage and movement." -Christoph Huber, CINEMASCOPE

DIRECTOR: John Woo
WRITERS: Terence Chang, Woo, Khan Chan
CAST: Tony Leung, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Chang Chen
A Magnet Releasing film
In Mandarin with English subtitles
148 min      View the trailer

NO IMPACT MAN
Tuesday, November 17 @ 7:30pm

A New York City liberal takes a giant leap and makes the decision to spend 12 months without television, taxis or take-out, turning off the electricity to become a walking, bicycling, composting, tree hugging, polar bear saving, local food-eating, 100% sustainably living citizen of planet Earth. All while taking his baby daughter and caffeine loving, luxury seeking, retail-obsessed wife along with him. Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein's film provides an intriguing inside look into the experiment that became a national fascination and media sensation, while examining the familial strains and strengthened bonds that result from Colin and Michelle’s struggle with their radical lifestyle change.

Co-presented by the UCLA Institute of the Environment and the Documentary Salon. Director Laura Gabbert in person!

"Terrifically entertaining. Compelling and extremely funny." -Betsy Sharkey, LOS ANGELES TIMES
“Proof that 'eco' and 'entertainment' aren’t mutually exclusive.” -John Anderson, VARIETY

DIRECTORS: Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein
CAST: Colin Beavan, Michelle Conlin
An Oscilloscope Laboratories release
93 min

View the trailer

THE SUN
Thursday, November 19 @ 7:30pm

In the last days of August 1945, as the Japanese prepare to surrender to occupying American forces, Emperor Hirohito rummages around his palace, trying to make sense of the impending defeat and his own responsibility for it. In an unforgettably poignant performance by Issey Ogata, Hirohito is fully brought to life as an educated, ineffectual gentleman, aware of his fallibility but trapped by rituals of adoration behind the mask of divinity. Aleksandr Sokurov, brings his customary imagistic brilliance to this tour-de-force of historical reconstruction. As controversial for its interpretative conjectures as it is visually arresting, The Sun is a complex, important work by a major filmmaker. - New York Film Festival

A co-presentation of Melnitz Movies and the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies

“A mind-boggling essay on the end of divinity and the pleasures of life as an ordinary mortal” -Olaf Moller, FILM COMMENT
“One of the best films of the year.” -James Quandt, ARTFORUM

DIRECTOR: Aleksandr Sokurov
WRITERS: Yuri Arabov, Jeremy Noble
CAST: Issei Ogata, Robert Dawson, Kaori Momoi
Opens at Laemmle Theatres, November 27.  A Lorber Films Release
In English and Japanese with English subtitles
115 min

View the Japanese trailer