MIDNITE SCREENINGS / ONE NITE ONLY
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Friday, October 31, $50, 12 midnight
718-384-3980
www.nitehawkcinema.com
Last year Williamsburg’s Nitehawk Cinema celebrated Halloween with the inaugural Nite to Dismember, an all-night horror-movie marathon that included An American Werewolf in London, Burn Witch Burn, Fright Night, The Burning, and Dawn of the Dead. For the second annual event, which begins at midnight on Halloween, Nitehawk will be honoring the sequel with an all-night marathon of horror sequels. The frightful fun begins with a 35mm screening of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II, which is really more of a parody remake, followed by digital projections of James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein, Steve Miner’s Friday the 13th: Part 2, Terence Fisher’s Dracula: Prince of Darkness (with Christopher Lee and dubbed Scream Queen Barbara Shelley), and Dan O’Bannon’s The Return of the Living Dead, with the Pathmark man himself, James (Poltergeist) Karen. In addition, there will be horror shorts, trivia, giveaways, and a costume contest, all hosted by Fangoria’s Sam Zimerman and Nitehawk’s Kris King, eighteen and over only, please. This is likely to sell out well in advance, so don’t wait to get tickets for this sequel-filled sequel. (Keep on watching twi-ny as we highlight other crazy, weird, funny, scary, bizarre, wacky, eclectic, and downright stupid things to do for Halloween this year.)
In July 1959, Cahiers du cinéma published a roundtable discussion with Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and others about Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, in which Rohmer said, “Hiroshima is a film about which you can say everything. . . . Perhaps Hiroshima really is a totally new film. . . . I think that, in a few years, in ten, twenty, or thirty years, we shall know whether Hiroshima was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema. . . . In any case it is an extremely important film, but it could be that it will even gain stature with years.” Some four and a half decades later, Rohmer’s prediction has come true, as a stunning new 4K digital restoration reveals Hiroshima Mon Amour to indeed be one of the most important films in the history of cinema, redefining just what the medium is capable of, as fresh and innovative today as it was to Rohmer, Godard, Rivette, et al. upon its initial release. As the black-and-white film opens, two naked, twisted bodies merge together in bed, first covered in glittering ashes, then a kind of acid rain. The woman (Emmanuelle Riva) is a French actress who is in Hiroshima to make a movie about peace. He (Eiji Okada) is a Japanese architect, a builder working in a city that has been laid to waste. Both married with children, they engage in a brief but torrid affair; as her film prepares to wrap, she gets ready to leave, but he begs her to stay. Theirs is a romance that could happen only in Hiroshima.
The film 20,000 Days on Earth might sound like a 1950s low-budget sci-fi cult classic you’ve never seen, but actually it’s an unusual and vastly inventive document of the life and times of Australian rocker, poet, novelist, film composer, screenwriter, and all-around bon vivant 
Real-life partners Mathieu Amalric and Stéphanie Cléau strip Georges Simenon’s short 1955 novel The Blue Room to its bare essentials — and we do mean bare — in their intimate, claustrophobic modern noir adaptation, which made its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival last week. In addition to being one of the world’s most talented actors, starring in such films as Kings and Queen, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, A Christmas Tale, and 
Winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders is a sweet little gem of a movie, focusing on a German-Italian family that finds itself at a critical crossroads. Set in Rohrwacher’s (Corpo celeste) hometown in the countryside between Umbria-Lazio and Tuscany, the film follows the travails of a beekeeping family led by the gangly Wolfgang (Sam Louwyck), a grumpy ne’er-do-well from one of the Germanic countries who is trying to live some kind of back-to-the-land life away from authorities in an undeveloped backwater. His allegiance to old-fashioned tradition includes overworking his four young daughters while his wife, Angelica (Alba Rohrwacher, the director’s older sister), keeps at a distance and live-in friend Cocò (Sabine Timoteo) keeps stirring up the pot. At the center of it all is twelve-year-old Gelsomina (first-time actress Maria Alexandra Lungu, who was discovered in a catechism class), an exceptional beekeeper who wants her father to allow the family to participate in a television contest, Countryside Wonders, that could earn them much-needed money. But her father prefers taking care of things himself — though not very well, particularly when he acquires a camel for no apparent reason. Suspicious of the government and contemporary society, Wolfgang likes living in relative isolation; inviting strangers into their world could reveal the illegal working conditions, not to mention abuse of child labor laws. But Gelsomina is determined to improve their existence, starting with the competition, which is hosted by the beguiling, fairy-tale-like Milly Catena (Monica Bellucci in a marvelous white head piece, partially poking fun at her own sex-symbol image).