Winter 2020 |
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THURSDAY 20 February
Doors: 6.30pm Film: 7pm NT Live: Cyrano de Bergerac By Edmond Rostand, in a new version by Martin Crimp Directed by Jamie Lloyd James McAvoy returns to the stage in an inventive new adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, broadcast live to cinemas from the West End in London. Fierce with a pen and notorious in combat, Cyrano almost has it all - if only he could win the heart of his true love Roxane. There’s just one big problem: he has a nose as huge as his heart. Will a society engulfed by narcissism get the better of Cyrano or can his mastery of language set Roxane’s world alight? Edmond Rostand’s masterwork is adapted by Martin Crimp, with direction by Jamie Lloyd. This classic play will be brought to life with linguistic ingenuity to celebrate Cyrano’s powerful and resonant resistance against overwhelming odds. |
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SUNDAY 23 February
Doors: 2.30pm Film: 3pm Fighting With My Family (12A) Here is a heart-warming comedy based on the incredible true story of WWE Superstar Paige. Born into a tight-knit wrestling family, Paige and her brother Zak are ecstatic when they get the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to try out for WWE. But when only Paige earns a spot in the competitive training program, she must leave her family and face this new, cut-throat world alone. Florence Pugh shows there’s no role and no genre she can’t handle with aplomb, effortlessly taking on this nuanced comedic role. |
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FRIDAY 28 February
Doors: 7.30pm Film: 8pm If Beale Street Could Talk (15) The incredible documentary about James Baldwin, “I Am Not Your Negro” blew our audience away last season. Now here is one of his novels brought to the screen by the director of “Moonlight” Barry Jenkins. The story of two young lovers torn apart by prejudice, bigotry and injustice. Gorgeous, powerful, and stunningly crafted, If Beale Street Could Talk is a masterpiece. A visually stunning and emotionally intense meditation on young love, family and social injustice in America. The book was written 20 years ago, but it is utterly relevant today. |
Spring 2020
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Thursday 12 March
Doors: 7.30pm Film: 8pm Maborosi (12A) Here is a rare chance to see the 1995 debut film by the Japanese giant of World Cinema, Hirokazu Kore-eda (Our Little Sister, Shoplifters, Afterlife, Still Walking). The film never had a UK cinema release when it first came out and we are delighted to have the chance to screen it.. This exquisitely beautiful film follows the spiritual odyssey of Yumiko a young Japanese woman recovering from her husband's inexplicable suicide. Several years pass, and Yumiko takes the train from Osaka to Noto, a fishing village on the Sea of Japan, to marry a widower in a match arranged by a friend. She seems to find happiness in her new life, but the rugged seaside landscape, harsh weather and seasonal changes become powerfully emblematic of Yumiko's emotional state. Powerful, deeply moving and filled with stunning images and superb performances, this is a truly wonderful film. |
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Sunday 15 March
Doors: 2.30pm Film: 3pm Fisherman's Friends (12A) A fast-living, cynical London music executive (Danny Mays) heads to a remote Cornish village on a stag weekend where he's pranked by his boss (Noel Clarke) into trying to sign a group of shanty singing fishermen (led by James Purefoy). He becomes the ultimate 'fish out of water' as he struggles to gain the respect or enthusiasm of the unlikely boy band and their families (including Tuppence Middleton) who value friendship and community over fame and fortune. As he's drawn deeper into the traditional way of life he's forced to re-evaluate his own integrity and ultimately question what success really means. |
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Friday 27 March
Doors: 7.30pm Film: 8pm Bait (15) This abrasive seaside parable is a quietly thrilling piece of filmmaking. Cornish writer-director Mark Jenkin has conjured up something truly arresting: a debut film rooted in local traditions, with a dark humour and an atmosphere that’s as brooding as its Atlantic backdrop. Its central character is scowling Cornish fisherman Martin. He’s a fundamentally good-hearted man who nurses a bundle of unexpressed grudges over the flood of new money into his fishing village. His equally gruff brother uses their dad’s old trawler to take tourists on pleasure cruises, while the family’s quayside home has been sold to the kind of well-heeled urbanites Martin so resents. To add insult to injury, they’ve installed a porthole. ‘Bait’ is a story of gentrification and class friction that builds and builds, But it has deeper currents too, as Jenkin explores the day-to-day slog of maintaining a generations-old way of life and the near-spiritual pain of being prised, like a barnacle off a rock, from your place in life by forces beyond your control. As visually distinctive as it is narratively satisfying, Bait is a thrillingly original and uniquely enriching drama. |
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Thursday 9 April
Doors: 7.30pm Film: 8pm Pain & Glory (15) Antonio Banderas gives perhaps his greatest performance as Salvador Mallo, a film director in physical decline, in this sublime film from Pedro Almodóvar. He reflects on his life and the choices he’s made: his childhood in the 60s, the first desire, his first adult love in the Madrid of the 80s, the pain of the breakup of that love, the early discovery of cinema. The act of writing is his only therapy to forget the unforgettable and there is a void he feels that stops him continuing to make films. Filled with his trademark stunning visuals and the amazing performance by Banderas, Pain and Glory finds Almodóvar drawing on his own life to immensely rewarding effect - and honouring his craft as only a master filmmaker can. |
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Friday 24 April
Doors: 7.30pm Film: 8pm Ash is Purest White (15) A tragicomedy initially set in the criminal underworld setting, Ash is Purest White is perhaps a melodrama masquerading as a gangster movie. It begins by following the quick-witted Qiao and her mobster boyfriend Bin as they stake out their turf against rivals in post-industrial China in 2001. After pulling Bin's illegal gun to defend him against an attack, Quio takes the fall, claiming the gun is hers, and is sent to jail. 5 years later she emerges to look for Bin, who has disappeared. Director Jia Zhangke’s film is a gripping and poetic record of 21st-century China and its warp-speed transformations, with a riveting central performance from Zhao Tao as Qiao. |
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Sunday 26 April
Doors: 2.30pm Film: 3pm The Good Liar (15) There’s embellishing a dating app profile. And then there’s creating an entirely fictitious persona. But for dapper charmer Roy Courtnay (Ian McKellen), a grizzled grifter and veteran conman, lying is a way of life. When he meets well-heeled widow Betty McLeish (Helen Mirren), he settles comfortably into her suburban lifestyle, a world of polite pastels that he privately describes as like being “smothered in beige”. Betty, meanwhile, seems determined to grasp late-life happiness with Roy, despite the reservations of her grandson Steven (Russell Tovey) . Adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher from a novel by Nicholas Searle, The Good Liar is at its sparky best when Mirren and McKellen are on screen, waltzing smoothly through a plot that feels like a Russian doll of deeper and deeper deceptions. |
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Thursday 7 May
Doors: 7.30pm Film: 8pm By the Grace of God (15) Alexandre, a bastion of the French Catholic bourgeoisie and fervent church-goer, learns that Father Preynat, the priest who abused him when he was a Boy Scout, is still working with children. He decides to take action and is soon to be joined by two other victims of the priest, in a search for justice. That brilliantly impish provocateur, François Ozon, shows he can handle a deeply serious story with dignity and gravitas. Patient in its approach and stirring in its conviction, By the Grace of God draws soberly gripping cinema from real-life horror. |
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THURSDAY 21 May
Doors: 6.30pm Film: 7pm NT Live: The Welkin One life in the hands of 12 women. Rural Suffolk in England, 1759. As the country waits for Halley’s comet, a young woman is sentenced to hang for a heinous murder. When she claims to be pregnant, a jury of 12 matrons are taken from their housework to decide whether she’s telling the truth, or simply trying to escape the noose. With only midwife Lizzy Luke prepared to defend the girl, and a mob baying for blood outside, the matrons wrestle with their new authority, and the devil in their midst. James Macdonald (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) directs Maxine Peake (The Theory of Everything, Funny Cow) and Ria Zmitrowicz (Three Girls, Mr. Selfridge) in this bold and gripping thriller from Tony Award nominated writer Lucy Kirkwood (Chimeric Skins). Broadcast live from the National Theatre in London. |
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Sunday 24 May
Doors: 2.30pm Film: 3pm 1917 (15) At the height of the First World War, two young British soldiers, Schofield (Captain Fantastic's George MacKay) and Blake (Game of Thrones' Dean-Charles Chapman) are given a seemingly impossible mission. In a race against time, they must cross enemy territory and deliver a message that will stop a deadly attack on hundreds of soldiers--Blake's own brother among them. Both thrilling and moving, it's a tense, unnerving ride that accomplishes its goal of translating the first-person experience of war better than any war movies that have come before it. |
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Friday 29 May
Doors: 7.30pm Film: 8pm Everybody Knows (15) The film follows Laura (Penelope Cruz) on her travels from Argentina to her small home town in Spain for her sister's wedding, bringing her two children along for the occasion but, amid the joyful reunion and festivities, the eldest daughter is abducted. In the tense days that follow, various family and community tensions surface and deeply hidden secrets are revealed. Antonio Banderas and Ricardo Darin are outstanding and Iranian director Asghar Farhadi demonstrates once again human nature is the greatest puzzle of all. |
