May 15-21, 2020
Fourteen (Dir. Dan Sallitt, 2019)
*From May 15-21, Fourteen will be available to stream via Grasshopper Film. Acropolis Cinema will receive 50% of all revenue. Click here to rent.
If you'd like to offer additional support, you can make a tax deductible donation to Acropolis by clicking here.*
Mara and Jo, in their twenties, have been close friends since middle school. Jo, the more outgoing figure, is a social worker who runs through a series of brief but intense relationships. Mara, a less splashy personality than Jo, bounces among teacher aide jobs while trying to land a position in elementary education, and writes fiction in her spare time. She too has a transient romantic life, though she seems to settle down after meeting Adam, a mild-mannered software developer. It soon becomes apparent that Jo, despite her intellectual gifts, is unreliable in her professional life, losing and acquiring jobs at a troubling rate. Substance abuse may be responsible for Jo’s instability… but some observers suspect a deeper problem. Over the course of a decade, the more stable Mara sometimes tries to help, sometimes backs away to preserve herself, but never leaves behind her powerful childhood connection with Jo.
A highly affecting portrait of female friendship.
David Erlich, Indiewire
Two outstanding performances... Medel is marvelous, utterly engaging. Kuhling is a knockout.
Neil Young, The Hollywood Reporter
A wonderful, subtly devastating film from a voice in American independent cinema that will hopefully become better known.
Ian Mantagni, Little White Lies
A bittersweet breakup movie. It’s rare in cinema to see such a fine-grained portrait of friendship, particularly a spiky female one.
Jamie Dunn, Sight & Sound
Rich with scenes of affection and reconciliation... the most charming thing about Fourteen is the degree to which Sallitt finds a balance between his own brand of independent filmmaking and the kind of French middle-class realism he’s clearly influenced by.
Patrick Gamble, Cinevue
May 29 - June 4, 2020
Joan of Arc (Dir. Bruno Dumont, 2019)
*From May 29 - June 4, Joan of Arc will be available to stream via KimStim. Acropolis Cinema will receive 50% of all revenue.
If you'd like to offer additional support, you can make a tax deductible donation to Acropolis by clicking here.*
In the 15th century, both France and England stake a blood claim for the French throne. Believing that God had chosen her, the young Joan leads the army of the King of France. When she is captured, the Church sends her for trial on charges of heresy. Refusing to accept the accusations, the graceful Joan of Arc will stay true to her mission.
Bruno Dumont’s decision to work with a ten-year-old actress re-injects this heroine’s timeless cause and ideology with a modernity that highlights both the tragic female condition and the incredible fervor, strength and freedom women show when shackled by societies and archaic virile orders that belittle and alienate them.
A cinematic miracle.
Jean-Michel Frodon, Slate
More than ever, Bruno Dumont’s cinema confirms its originality and wealth.
Stéphane du Mesnildot, Cahiers du Cinéma
[Joan of Arc] achieves the miraculous feat of poking at the dogmatism of religious institution, while celebrating faith in all its mysterious, obscure powers.
Leonardo Goi, The Film Stage
[Joan of Arc] is the wiser, raspier relative to the spry and turbulent Jeannette... Dumont teaches us how to experience this quite verbose film: attendant to song, glances, visual patterns, and the animated body above all else.
Blake Williams, Cinema Scope
Dumont transforms the tale into a dialectical spectacle: he stages military musters like Busby Berkeley productions, seethes at the torturers’ rationalizations, delights in hearing his actors declaim the scholars’ sophistries, and thrills in the pugnacious simplicity of Joan’s defiant responses, which reduce her captors’ pride and privilege to ridicule.
Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Still available to stream:
Vitalina Varela (Dir. Pedro Costa, 2019)
*Beginning March 27, Grasshopper Film is making Vitalina Varela
available to stream via their website. Your screening of the film
supports Acropolis Cinema and the Lumiere Music Hall. Click here to rent.
If you'd like to offer additional support, you can make a tax deductible donation to Acropolis by clicking here.*
A film of deeply concentrated beauty, acclaimed filmmaker Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela stars nonprofessional actor Vitalina Varela in an extraordinary performance based on her own life. Vitalina plays a Cape Verdean woman who has travelled to Lisbon to reunite with her husband, after two decades of separation, only to arrive mere days after his funeral. Alone in a strange forbidding land, she perseveres and begins to establish a new life. Winner of the Golden Leopard for Best Film and Best Actress at the Locarno Film Festival, as well as an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival, Vitalina Varela is a film of shadow and whisper, a profoundly moving and visually ravishing masterpiece. (Grasshopper)
The best movie of the year.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Sight & Sound
A ravishing masterpiece. Gorgeous. Dreamlike. Transcendent.
Eric Kohn, Indiewire
Spellbinding. Dazzling. Conjures chiaroscuro wonder after chiaroscuro wonder.
Neil Young, The Hollywood Reporter
Spectacular images, ideas, emotions, and performances… several glorious outdoor sequences…have the visionary rapture of scenes by John Ford.
Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Gorgeously photographed. Has a conceptual rigor comparable to the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet and a visual beauty that evokes Rembrandt.
J. Hoberman, The New York Review of Books
Still available to stream:
Heimat Is a Space in Time (Dir. Thomas Heise, 2019)
*From April 6 - June 30, Icarus Films is making Heimat Is a Space In Time available to stream via their website. Your screening of the film directly supports Acropolis Cinema and the Lumiere Music Hall
during our temporary hiatuses. Click here to rent.
If you'd like to offer additional support, you can make a tax deductible donation to Acropolis by clicking here.*
In Heimat Is a Space in Time, German filmmaker Thomas Heise shares the stories of three generations of his family, in their own words.
Heise sets the tone early, reading an anti-war essay written in 1912 by his grandfather Wilhelm, when he was a schoolboy. The director uses the same matter-of-fact, uninflected tone throughout the film – as he reads letters and notes from relatives who lived through the horrors of the First World War, Nazi Germany, and then life in Communist East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Heimat Is a Space in Time defies easy description. Heise offers no context, no talking heads, no analysis. Yet this unadorned approach, coupled with the potent imagery accompanying the words, is one of the documentary’s greatest strengths. One particularly memorable sequence involves Heise’s grandparents, a “mixed” Jewish-Gentile couple living in Vienna during the Nazi era. Their letters capture the increasing measures taken against Jews: banned from buses, losing access to coal ration cards, and lastly being forced to a concentration camp in Poland. All the while, as Heise reads, lists with the names of Jews slated for deportation scroll by on the screen for nearly half an hour.
Clearly influenced by his own previous work (much of it banned in the former East Germany, where he lived until the fall of the Berlin Wall), Heimat is the culmination of Heise’s career. It is an understated epic that brilliantly marries the written word, image, and sound design. The unspoken message is that the past, even as those who remember it slip away, remains with us.
A monumental film.
Ioana Florescu, Cineuropa
Mesmeric, persuasive and cumulatively powerful, as each piece of the puzzle falls into place.
Scott Tobias, Variety
A masterpiece; an exceptional record of the persistence of history and memory in the current moment.
Kate Taylor, The Globe and Mail
Heimat is elliptical yet detailed, generous even while withholding, distanced but compelling, heady to the max and just as emotionally absorbing.
J. Hoberman, Film Comment
[Heimat] is, in the fullest sense, a Foucauldian project... [Heise's films] are like points on a curve, provisional answers to the question of how best to interrogate a particular social problem, and whether to forge connections down through space or over across time—archaeologically, genealogically, or both at the same time.
Michael Sicinski, Cinema Scope