September 25 - October 11, 1998

Sponsored by

Note: This is the main New York Film Festival Program. You can also see information on the Youssef Chahine Retrospective, Views from the Avant-Garde, and special showings of Ingmar Bergman's IN THE PRESENCE OF A CLOWN and Eisenstein's STRIKE .

CELEBRITY
(Opening Night)
Fame: those who want it collide with those who have it in Woody Allen's acerbic look at star culture in late 20th Century Manhattan. Kenneth Branagh is a free-lance journalist whose ambitions lead him away from his marriage to schoolteacher Judy Davis and into the wobbly orbit of a number of hilariously caricatured superstars, including model Charlize Theron, movie queen Melanie Griffith and teen idol Leonardo DiCaprio. With additional amorous opportunities provided by Famke Janssen, Joe Mantegna and Winona Ryder, and a shimmering black and white New York captured by cinematographer Sven Nykvist, "Celebrity" ranks among Allen's richest, most nuanced work. 114 min. USA, 1998. A Miramax Films Release.
25A Fri September 25 at 8:00 pm ATH
25B Fri. September 25 at 9:00 pm AFH

A New York Film Festival Retrospective.
THE JOYLESS STREET
Reckless financial speculation; extravagant sexual decadence; corruption high and low --G.W. Pabst's devastating portrait of post-WWI Vienna was banned in England and severely cut elsewhere. Cited for its stark realism and featuring major performances by Greta Garbo, Asta Nielsen and Werner Krauss, the film has now been restored by the Münchner Filmmuseum, and will be accompanied by pianist/composer Aljosha Zimmeerman. Note: German intertitles with simultaneous English translation. app. 150 min. Germany, 1925.
26A Sat. September 26 at 11:30 pm

YOU'RE LAUGHING
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani have created two tragically beautiful fables based on the work of Pirandello. In the first, set in the fascist '30's, a man laughs uncontrollably in his sleep --an ominous bit of absurdism given the frustrations of his waking life. His mysterious laughter and glorious bursts of singing provide ecstatic moments of hope and joy in a life defined by despair. The second story is told in two parts --a contemporary and brutal political kidnapping of a young boy is set in contrast to an earlier and more traditional tale of abduction and enlightenment. Once again, the Tavianis seduce us with their lush vistas and precise interiors and their Pirandellian characters inextricably caught in lives of drama and consequence. 110 min. Italy, 1998.
26B Sat. September 26 at 3:00 pm
27C Sun. September 27 at 7:00 pm

GODS AND MONSTERS
This year's most moving love story is an extrapolation from real events in the life of James Whale, the British director who created the 1931 "Frankenstein" and died an apparent suicide in his Hollywood pool in 1957. Played by Ian McKellen, in a performance of immense dignity and feeling, Whale becomes a melancholy recluse enlivening the end of his days by spinning out fantasies around the handsome young pool boy (Brendan Fraser) who has suddenly appeared in his life. Directed by Bill Condon from Christopher Bram's novel "Father of Frankenstein," the film is both a deeply satisfying drama and a brilliant piece of criticism, exploring illuminating links between Whale's life and work. 105 min. USA, 1998. A Lions Gate Films Release.
26C Sat. September 26 at 6:00 pm
27A Sun. September 27 at 1:30 pm

SAME OLD SONG
Paying homage to British dramatist Dennis Potter, French filmmaking giant Alain Resnais imagines a circle of prevaricating Parisians who express their secret desires by breaking into snatches of popular songs. Light and vivacious on the surface, but with a subtle undercurrent of melancholy, this major success in France and throughout Europe features Sabine Azema and Pierre Arditi and the film's screenwriters Agnés Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri who also wrote Un Air de Famille. The City of Light has never seemed more illusional, as the rise and fall of apartment blocks and whole neighborhoods parallel the amorous entanglements of these characters. 120 min. France, 1997.
26D Sat. September 26 at 9:00 pm
27B Sun. September 27 at 4:15 pm

DR. AKAGI
It's summer 1945, in a Japanese seaside village near Hiroshima. The local physician, Dr. Akagi, trying to stem a life-threatening epidemic among his patients, enlists a motley but lively crew of outcasts from Japan's militaristic society to help him. Shohei Imamura's lifelong commitment to the idealism and comic absurdity of common life attains profound new levels of humanistic insight in one of the Japanese master's most powerful and satisfying films, brimming with humor, pathos, and natural wonders, in the impending shadow of the atomic bomb. 128 min. Japan, 1998. A Kino International Release.
28A Mon. September 28 at 6:00pm
29B Tues. September 29 at 9:00pm

KHROUSTALIOV, MY CAR!
A visually stunning, wildly provocative fever dream of a film, this new work by legendary Russian director Alexei Guerman (My Friend Ivan Lapshin) is a searing meditation on the crazed final days of Stalin's regime. Taking off from the infamous "Doctor's Plot," Guerman tells the story of Yuri Glinshi, Red Army general as well as famous brain surgeon, who is sent to the Gulag after an anti-semitic purge but then freed in a final effort to save the "People's Little Father" from his date with destiny. Guerman creates a consistently amazing visual and aural rendition of the charged atmosphere of those sad times, in which no point of view is ever fixed, nor any shadow devoid of possible danger, nor any stray remark free from potentially lethal consequences. 137 min. Russia/France, 1998.
28B Mon. September 28 at 8:45 pm

THE APPLE
Several residents of a Teheran neighborhood wrote to the authorities to denounce a man who had kept his young daughters locked up at home all their lives. Samira Makhmalbaf --17-year old daughter of director Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Gabbeh)-- approached the man and his daughters and asked them to re-create the girls' liberation and first encounters with the outside world. The result: a work of extraordinary charm and surprising wisdom, as the young Ms. Makhmalbaf resists turning their story into a "freak show," attempting instead to understand the underlying causes of such a desperate act. The two girls, Massoumeh and Zahra, despite having been shut away their whole lives, turn out to be movie naturals. 85 min. Iran/France, 1998. A New Yorker Films Release
30A Wed. September 30 at 6:00 pm
4A Sun. October 4 at 1:30 pm

MY NAME IS JOE
In a rundown Glasgow neighborhood, Joe Kavanagh (Peter Mullan, in a robust yet sensitive performance which earned him Best Actor Award this year at Cannes), an unemployed ex-alcoholic who coaches a pathetic soccer team, meets community health worker Sarah Downie (Louise Goodall). Against all odds they fall in love and start to create a life together until the outside world of violence, crime and drugs intrudes. A master of political cinema, director Ken Loach (Raining Stones, Land and Freedom) explores more deeply than ever before the bonds and strains of private intimacy buffeted by social forces in this heartwarming and ultimately heartbreaking film. 105 min. UK, 1998. An Artisan Entertainment Release.
30B Wed. September 30 at 9:00 pm
1A Thurs. October 1 at 6:00 pm

VELVET GOLDMINE
Described by director Todd Haynes as "a valentine to the sounds and images that erupted in and around London in the early Seventies," VELVET GOLDMINE conjures up the world of glam rock --that movement of heavily made-up, outrageously attired and sexually defiant singers and musicians who re-defined the revolutionary fervor of the Sixties into a new, decidedly more personal dimension. Brilliantly staged and conceived, the film traces the rise and fall of British rock star Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and his American inspiration Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor) while presenting glam as a kind of cultural turning-point, in which elements long confined to an urban gay underground suddenly and irrevocably burst forth into mass media --the repercussions of which are still being felt today. 120 min. USA/UK, 1998. A Miramax Films Release.
1B Thurs. October 1 at 9:00 pm
3E Sat. October 3 at 12 midnight

A TALE OF AUTUMN
In the final and possibly finest of his "Tales of the Four Seasons," Eric Rohmer sets aside his familiar concern with youth to explore the romantic yearnings of middle age. Béatrice Romand plays a feisty, divorced 45-year old vintner who's the target of a double machination: her best friend (Marie Rivére) schemes to set her up with an amiable businessman, even as her son's girlfriend plots to pair her off with a man who has a taste for young women. Carried along by the wonderfully-shaded performances of Rohmer favorites Romand (Le Beau Mariage) and Riviére (Summer), this treat of a movie finds the great director at his most affirmative and bouyant. 110 min. France, 1998.
2A Fri. October 2 at 6:00 pm
4D Sun. October 4 at 9:45 pm

Festival Centerpiece.
BLACK CAT, WHITE CAT
After the epic sweep and political thrust of Underground, Emir Kusturica returns to the anarchic comic style of his earlier work for this roaring, bursting farce set in a Gypsy settlement along the banks of the no-longer-so-blue Danube. The indescribably intricate plot involves star-crossed lovers, a trainload of smuggled Jordanian gasoline, a Gypsy godfather with gold-plated glasses and a souped-up wheelchair, and three generations of small time hustlers. Each shot seeems to explode with energy and bristling detail, as Kusturica taps again into the mysterious, manic life force of the Balkans. 135 min.Yugoslavia/Germany/France, 1998.
3D Sat. October 3 at 8:45 pm
4B Sun. October 4 at 3:00 pm

THE GENERAL
Shot in CinemaScope and creamy black-and-white, John Boorman's new film is a revelation, as energetic and coolly unsentimental as anything he's done since Point Blank. Based on the life of Dublin master criminal Martin Cahill, the film deftly mingles comedy and horror as Boorman traces Cahill's rise to notoriety, major heists, and dealings with the IRA and Loyalists factions --as well as his somewhat original approach to family life. As "the General" --Cahill's nickname-- Brendan Gleeson gives a sublimely self-assured performanc; Jon Voight plays inspector Ned Kenny, Cahill's Javert-like police nemesis who grudgingly admires his antagonistic audacity. 125 min. Eire/UK, 1998. A Sony Classics Pictures Release.
2B Fri. October 2 at 9:00 pm
3A Sat. October 3 at 12 noon

A New York Film Festival Retrospective.
POINT BLANK
John Boorman's dazzler is a genuine Sixties' touchstone, a crime picture that anticipated the paranoid thrillers of the Nixon Era, a stylistic tour de force that infused a traditional Hollywood genre story with the panache of Godard, Resnais and Antonioni. Lee Marvin plays a crook on a mysterious vendetta against the L.A. cronies who left him to die. His sharklike quest carries him from concrete underpasses to penthouses shimmering with malignity, and lands him in the arms of Angie Dickinson, whose futile attempt to beat him up is a classic movie scene. With its brilliant use of color and dehumanized cityscapes, this is the film that forever changed how the movies portrayed Los Angeles. Print courtesy of John Boorman. 92 min. USA, 1967.
3B Sat. October 3 at 3:00 pm

SLAM
Marc Levin brings his experience as a documentarian to create an authentic and highly charged drama about a talented young black poet from the Washington D.C. projects who is arrested on petty drug charges. In prison an engaging creative writing teacher helps him develop his slam style --an explosive combination of poetry and rap. His verbal virtuosity serves him in prison and out as he lets loose and gives voice to the anguish of his generation. The performances are emotionally powerful and brilliantly suited to the spontaneous, jittery form of the film which gives the film its unique flavor. Grand Prize, Sundance Film Festival. 92 min. USA, 1998. A Trimark Pictures Release.
3C Sat. October 3 at 6:00 pm
4C Sun. October 4 at 7:15 pm

THE FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI
Based on an 1894 novel, only recently rediscovered, by Han Ziyun, the latest triumph by Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien has the power and lulling beauty of an opium dream. It's set in the elegant brothels of late-19th century Shanghai --a hermetic world with its own highly ritualized codes of behavior--and traces the destinies of the beautiful "flower girls" whose lives depend on their ability to win, and then hold, the affection of their wealthy callers. At once a tale of sexual intrigue and a portrait of a patriarchal culture, this exquisite Eastern chamber-piece is as radiant as Vermeer, as refined as Henry James, as deadly as "Dangerous Liaisons." 124 min. Taiwan, 1998.
5A Mon. October 5 at 6:00 pm
6B Tues. October 6 at 9:00 pm

LATE AUGUST, EARLY SEPTEMBER
That moment when youthful freedom and optimism give way to an adult reality of consequences and compromise is the subject of Olivier Assayas' (Irma Vep) new film. Thirtyish Gabriel is in romantic transition from Jenny to Anne, while at his publishing job, much of his time and emotional energy is spent on his slightly older friend Adrien, a formerly "promising" novelist whose recent work fails to match the critical and commercial success of his first books. As Adrien's physical illness becomes more and more pronounced, the small world of Gabriel and his circle of friends is put into a delicate emotional perspective. One of the brightest talents in French cinema today, Assayas succinctly captures the textures and shades of feeling between people suddenly alerted to the reality of time passing. With Virginie Ledoyen, Mathieu Amalric and François Cluzet. 105 min. France, 1998.
5B Mon. October 5 at 9:00 pm
6A Tues. October 6 at 6:00 pm

THE INHERITORS
Something of an Alpine Western, Stefan Ruzowitzky's second feature is a sly, sneaky-powerful yarn about class conflict and utopianism in the Austrian farmland of the early 1930s. Its heroes are seven penniless peasants, male and female, whose tyrannical boss unexpectedly leaves them his farm in his will --they're each one-seventh farmers. Such an inheritance riles up the local landowners, who are dead against any change in the social order, and forces the heirs to discover the meaning of freedom, democracy, and genuine community. Beautifully performed by its ensemble cast, this gripping tragi-comedy announces Ruzowitsky's emergence as an international talent. 95 min. Austria, 1997. A Stratosphere Entertainment Release.
7B Wed. October 7 at 9:00 pm
8A Thurs. October 8 at 6: 00 pm

HAPPINESS
Controversial and ambitious, HAPPINESS takes director Todd "Welcome to the Dollhouse" Solondz into dangerous and riveting new territory. The lives of three sisters, their parents, friends and neighbors interconnect in this black comedy of missed connections. On the surface, they're your typical surburban extended family diligently seeking companionship, love and stability. Yet gradually, inexorably, darker forces bubble up from below the thin veneer of normalcy, eventually taking over their lives. The great power of this film and Solondz's true achievement is to bring us close to characters who become increasingly horrific yet remain familiar. 134 min. USA, 1998. A Good Machine Release.
9A Fri. October 9 at 6:00 pm
10D Sat. October 10 at 9:00 pm

RUSHMORE
Sheer delight, this bracingly fresh comedy by Wes Anderson ("Bottle Rocket") creates a wildly eccentric but completely persuasive romantic triangle. Max (the extraordinary Jason Schwartzman), a zealously over-achieving working class teen on a scholarship at the exclusive Rushmore Academy, strikes up an unlikely friendship with a local self-made millionaire (Bill Murray, reined in and utterly brilliant). But their relationship is rocked when both fall in love with the new second grade teacher (Olivia Williams). Full of quirky insights and marvelous set pieces...the high school theatrical recreation of the Vietnam war is a true tour de force. Anderson's wit and imagination would do Preston Strurges proud. 95 min. USA, 1998. A Touchstone Pictures Release.
9B Fri. October 9 at 9:15 pm
10A Sat. October 10 at 12:00 noon

RIVER OF GOLD
The sense of magic and wonder achieved in early cinema is rarely matched by contemporary filmmakers; Paulo Rocha's RIVER OF GOLD is a happy exception to this rule. After Antonio saves his niece Melita from drowning, his wife Carolina seethes with jealousy. Yet Melita may not be as innocent as she appears: on board a train, a Gypsy fortune teller peers into her soul and discovers the horrible fate of her lover. The film achieves a kind of operatic power as its characters grow increasingly larger than life, transforming this tale of a sensational crime on the bloodstained banks of the "River of Gold" into a battle of the most primordial natural elements. 103 min. Portugal, 1998.
10B Sat. October 10 at 3:00 pm

BOOK OF LIFE / LIFE ON EARTH
French television commissioned ten international directors to make films which all take place on December 31, 1999. Abderrahmane Sissako's LIFE ON EARTH, from Mali, is a sublime contemplation on the unhealed relationship between black Africa and the white world, and shares with us the daily life of a remote village seemingly untouched by time. Only the radio is there to remind us that the outside world is taking the millenium leap very, very seriously. 61 min. France/Mali, 1998.
From a a different corner of the world, THE BOOK OF LIFE by Hal Hartley is cool, hip and utterly original. Jesus (Martin Donovan) and Satan struggle to determine the ultimate destiny of man and yet manage to look very much at home in the groovier bars of SoHo. Shot with expressionistic images and structured like an espionage thriller, Hartley has crafted a film in which the ticking clock could lead us to the Apocalypse. 63 min. France/USA, 1998.
10C Sat. October 10 at 6 pm

THE DREAMLIFE OF ANGELS
(Closing Night)
First-time director Erick Zonca was the discovery of this year's Cannes Film Festival and his stars Elodie Bouchez and Natacha Regnier shared the Best Actress Award for their transcendant performances. Bouchez plays Isa, a vagabond of irrepressible buouyancy and Regnier, Marie, who is moody and withdrawn in the extreme. After Isa loses a temporary job on an assembly line Marie invites her to housesit with her in an apartment owned by people recovering from a dreadful car crash. Although they are totally different, an intense emotional bond develops which pervades their relationship with men and the world around them. This is an exciting and exuberant example of what French cinema does so well --to probe deeply into the lives of its complex characters. 113 min. France, 1998. A Sony Pictures Classics Release.
11A Sun. October 11 at 8:30 pm.