We’re delighted to bring you again this year the Oscar-nominated Live Action shorts and the Animated films, each playing once a day all week. Short films are a rarity on our screens due to the nature of the business, and so it’s wonderful to be able to celebrate these pungent little morsels, coming to us from all around the world. This year, the Live Action category includes films from Croatia, South Africa, the Netherlands, and the U.S. and the Animated films, from Japan, Iran, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium, offer a beautiful array of different kinds of animation. 

 But it’s not just the variety and quality that make the short films such a treat to watch: the films are usually made by first-time directors, and the nomination offers them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shine on a big stage, a stage that often opens doors for further work. Celebrating their work is thus a chance to cheer on those filmmakers who perhaps have not yet made a name for themselves but who deserve the chance to keep making films.

We hope to be able to screen the Oscar-nominated Documentary shorts as well in the week leading up to the Oscars ceremony, pending room in our schedule. Keep your fingers crossed that we’ll be able to play these terrific and deserving films, too!  

September 5 is a riveting, excellent little film, tightly constructed at 95 minutes, and rightfully nominated for Original Screenplay at this year's Oscars. It tells the story of the 1972 Munich Olympics, also documented in Spielberg's film Munich, where Israeli athletes were taken hostage, but September 5 creatively and alternatively focuses almost exclusively on the American TV sports journalists in Munich and on the 24 hours in which they were suddenly tasked with covering the event live and in real time, something they'd never done before and something, in fact, that hadn't really been done before in TV journalism at all. 

I love a good backstage drama; I love a good process-journalism drama; I love a good "ordinary people in impossible situation" drama -- and this is all three. It has the intensity and humanity of something like Apollo 13but with the journalistic intrigue and mechanisms of All the President's Men. 

The production design is fantastic, too -- offering the gritty, tactile nature of 1970's TV production -- and the cinematography itself has the feel of a 1970's-made film, which is perfectly-suited to the material. The film also beautifully employs archival footage, lending an air of tension to the film and aiding the overall realism. Likewise, there are terrific, understated but deeply felt performances all around from everybody, especially Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch (The Teachers' Lounge). 

Thematically, the film raises provocative questions about journalistic ethics--what happens if you inadvertently capture a murder on live TV? is it even ok for a camera to be filming such things, especially live? who decides how a politically-motivated occurrence is framed and its actors are labelled?--but it leaves those for the audience to decide, I think appropriately, and it should spur fascinating post-film discussions.  

There has been some criticism of the film for seeming not to take a position about a conflict that involves Israelis and Palestinians, particularly at this fraught moment in 2024/2025, but the movie was made prior to the tragic events of October 7 and prior to the now catastrophic aftermath, and the primary focus of the film is on the journalism itself and on the impossible questions that imperfect journalists, human as they are, are faced with in the midst of a good faith effort to cover the news. And over 50 years after the Munich Olympics, these are questions that are all the more pressing at this moment in history. 

September 5 won’t stick around for long. Don’t miss it. 

We also have several very special events this week: 

First, in celebration of Valentine’s Day, we’re playing the warm-hearted documentary The Age of Love, which follows a group of seniors between the ages of 70 and 90 who decide to participate in a speed-dating event. In a society that is often ageist, privileging youth over years, the film is a poignant and often funny reminder that love comes at every age, and “the universal theme of seeking companionship . . . is one that audiences of all ages can relate to.” And as film critic Craig Takeuchi points out, “Their anecdotes and confessions reveal their heartaches and longings, some of which aren’t different from adolescents but have deepened or become more poignant with time.”

Join us on Friday, February 14, at 10:30 am for this unique and lovely film!  

Next, our Science on Screen series – joining hands with our Kid Pickfordseries – continues with one of the great animated films of a generation, The Iron Giant, directed by Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille). 

All Science on Screen films are FREE, and this month we are happy to welcome engineering professor Chloe Boland, who will be offering a vibrant, kid-friendly introduction prior to the film, taking the audience on an exploration through space and discussing how space objects shape our planets and moons.

“Chloe is an engineer-turned-educator who currently teaches Engineering at Whatcom Community College. Her professional background includes manufacturing at SpaceX and Janicki Industries—yes, working with rockets and astronauts! Chloe has a long history of volunteering in K-12 classrooms and officially began her career switch to education as a science paraeducator during the Covid-19 pandemic. She is committed to breaking down stereotypes about who belongs in STEM and strives to make STEM more approachable, accessible, and inclusive for all.”

Join on Saturday at 1:30 pm for this wonderful film event! There are currently a handful of tickets left, and in the case of a sold out show, we encourage folks to come anyway: there will be a waitlist and a chance at any open seats. 

Our Alfred Hitchcock Presents series also continues this weekend with the brilliant film–reportedly one of Hitchcock’s own personal favorites–Shadow of a Doubt. Co-written by the great playwright Thornton Wilder, novelist and screenwriter Sally Benson (Meet Me in St. Louis), and Alma Reville (Hitchcock’s wife) and starring Joseph Cotton and Teresa Wright, playing the provocatively twinned characters, “Uncle Charlie” and “niece Charlie,” Shadow of a Doubt tells the story of an apparently happily innocent family residing in small town America, whose lives are disrupted when Uncle Charlie comes to visit–right around the same time there’s a nationwide search for the “Merry Widow Killer,” a serial killer who is in the habit of marrying rich widows and and then murdering them for their money. 

Made in 1943, smack dab in the middle of World War II, the film is, at some level, an exploration of the nature of evil, but, in classic Hitchcock style, it’s an exploration of evil that does not follow the obvious path, certainly not in the way most people might assume a film made in the middle of a war with the Nazis would do. Rather than being about an evil “out there,” outside the U.S., the film is more about the dark undercurrents residing in our very midst, not in an anonymous enemy or even a Nazi enemy, but right here in America. It is a vision of America where in even an idyllic small town with happy families, apple pies, and picket fences, there is something deeply transgressive.  And so, standing in stark contrast to many of the pro-America films of the day–films made to support the war effort and bolster patriotism–Shadow of a Doubt is Hitchcock at his cheeky, subversive best, by turns utterly chilling and wonderfully comic.

Join us on Sunday at 1:00 pm for this fabulous film, and I’ll be on hand to offer a few remarks by way of an introduction. 

Our Spike Lee Joint series also continues in celebration of Black History Month, and this week we’re screening Malcolm X, starring Denzel Washington in a dazzling performance for which he was nominated for (and should have won) Best Actor at the Oscars.  Malcolm X is an American epic, and this screening provides a rare opportunity to see the film on the big screen. At over three hours in length, it can be difficult for theaters to fit into a screening schedule, but it is a film that every American should watch, not only as one of the greatest of American movies, but also as it offers essential  insights in our own history and into a figure that has been often deeply misunderstood and misrepresented.  In the film, Lee offers a riveting, rich portrait of a complicated man whose ideas evolved over his lifetime and whose murder, like that of Martin Luther King Jr., deprived Americans of an historic leader in the Civil Rights Movement.  And as Brandon Wilson–who will be again offering us a superb introduction prior to the film–notes, Lee’s film is notable not just for its excellence but for doing the essential work of shattering long held erroneous assumptions about Malcolm X within the American psyche and within dominant narratives.  And while, much like Killers of a Flower Moon or The Brutalist, Malcolm Xrips along beautifully, belying its length (it’s a long film that does not feel long!), we will be offering a 15-minute intermission, so don’t let the length keep you away.  Join us on Thursday, Feb. 20, at 7 pm!  Last, horror fans, rejoice! We’re offering a sneak peek preview on Thursday, Feb. 20, of Osgood Perkins’s new film, The Monkey, in the lead up to its opening week.  I’ll have more to say about the film next week, but for now, just let me note, Perkins, as the son of famed actor Anthony Perkins (aka Norman Bates from Psycho), is doing a splendid job of living up to his horror roots–and then some. His film Longlegs last year was rightfully a breakout hit and almost instantaneously created devoted fans, who loved the intensely creepy slow burn that that film was. The Monkey is completely different in tone–more comedy-horror than a straight horror–but much like Longlegs, I knew just from the opening scene, I was in the hands of a superb filmmaker who intended his audience to have a very good time.  And I did. It’s another great week for cinema. See you at the movies, friends!  Melissa