MCU Park
1904 Surf Ave.
August 9-14, $10-$17
www.brooklyncyclones.com
The Brooklyn Cyclones are having a tough season, hovering around the .500 mark, but they’re still only four and a half games out of first place, even in the midst of a three-game losing streak. The team returns to Coney Island on August 9 to kick off a six-game homestand, with three matches against the lowly Vermont Lake Monsters, followed by three versus the West Virginia Black Bears. To help lure in fans, all six games will feature special giveaways and appearances. August 9 is Joe Torre Safe at Home Night, with the first 2,000 fans receiving a Joe Torre Brooklyn Cadets Bobblehead, a live appearance by the former Mets and Yankees manager, pregame celebrity softball (with John Starks, John Wallace, Nelson Figueroa, Rosanna Scotto, Greg Kelly, and members of the DSNY, NYPD, and FDNY) and postgame fireworks. August 10 is 90s Night, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Ren & Stimpy Show, with a Jersey off the Back Raffle, and, after the game, everyone gets to run around the bases. On August 11, Jesse Orosco will be part of a tribute to the 1986 World Champion Mets, with the first 2,500 ticket holders receiving a 1986 Mets jersey. On August 12, the Black Bears come in for Military Appreciation Night and the thirtieth anniversary of Top Gun, with postgame fireworks and an aviator sunglasses giveaway. August 13 is Augtoberfest, featuring fireworks and a stein mug giveaway. Finally, there’s a lot going on for Sunday’s match-up (all tickets are only ten bucks), including a Cyclones T-shirt giveaway (to the first 1,500 fans), Bark in the Park (yes, you can bring your dog and join a pregame parade or adopt a pet there), a pregame catch on the field, and a postgame run around the bases for kids.
Director and star Clint Eastwood paints the town red in High Plains Drifter, one of the best films of his long, distinguished career. In the ultimate revenge drama, Eastwood stars as an unnamed stranger who rides into the town of Lago, where a motley group of men are terrified that a trio of outlaws (Geoffrey Lewis, Dan Vadis, and Anthony James) will be returning to terrorize them further after having previously murdered their marshal while they cowered, offering their lawman no help. Hired by the town to defend them from the outlaws, the Stranger quickly starts changing things, making little Mordecai (Billy Curtis) both the sheriff and the mayor and infuriating the town’s businessmen and political leaders, cowards all, including Dave Drake (Mitchell Ryan), Lewis Belding (Ted Hartley), his wife, Sarah (Verna Bloom), Lutie Naylor (Paul Brinegar), Mayor Hobart (Stefan Gierasch), and Sheriff Shaw (Walter Barnes). The final showdown is a doozy, with a great twist ending. Written by Oscar-winning screenwriter and novelist Ernest Tidyman (The French Connection, Shaft), who was influenced by the real-life murder of Kitty Genovese as a Queens community listened and watched and did nothing (events that have been called into question by the recent documentary 
In his photographs, short films (both fiction and documentary), and installations, Alsace-born visual artist Clément Cogitore explores different aspects of faith and ritual, focusing on the nature of the image of the sacred, in nonreligious terms. In his feature-length debut, the existential war thriller Neither Heaven nor Earth, Cogitore breaks through the boundaries of conventional Hollywood storytelling, incorporating several genres as he challenges viewers’ expectations of the sacred ritual that is watching movies. In the mountainous Wakhan Corridor in Afghanistan in 2014, a troop of French soldiers is defending a small village from the Taliban. They are stationed in the middle of nowhere, a vast, empty landscape that ends up serving as a kind of way station that is, as the title states, neither heaven nor earth. At first, the company’s dog goes missing, followed by two of the soldiers. Captain Bonassieu (Jérémie Renier) assumes that the Taliban, led by a nearby tribal leader known as the Sultan (Hamid Reza Javdan), has taken the men hostage and so he insists on their release. But when the Taliban claims that it doesn’t have the men but in fact argues that the French are taking their men, it becomes apparent that something else is going on in the valley, something that cannot be explained — but that doesn’t stop either side from taking up arms and continuing the battle. When the French encounter a young boy (Yashar Vah) who seems to know something about the disappearances, they ask him when men began vanishing. “When the soldiers came?” translator Khalil Khan (Sâm Mirhosseini) says. “No, long before,” the boy answers. 
