Notes From The Program Director | Week of March 14th, 2025

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Notes From The Program Director

Week of March 14, 2025

Melissa Tamminga

Rich Text

March 14-20, 2025

Hello, friends!

This week at Pickford, Bong Joon-ho’s uniquely wonderful Mickey 17continues for the second week of its run, and it’s joined by a rip-roaring new spy thriller: Black Bag.

Black Bag is the latest from Steven Soderbergh, who is as prolific as he is a master at his art, making at least one film per year for the last 30 years, earning multiple Oscar nominations (and one win), as well as Emmy nominations and wins for his TV work along the way. His filmography ranges from artsy-indie films (The Limey, Solaris, Unsane) to serious dramas (Traffic, The Good German) to crowd-pleasing genre entries (Ocean's Eleven, Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich), but no matter the tone, subject, budget, or genre, his films are always worth a look.

Black Bag is that, and then some.

Starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett and written by David Koepp (who also wrote several of Soderbergh’s other films, as well as the original Jurassic Park screenplay and Mission: Impossible from 1996), Black Bag is one of Soderbergh’s genre films, and it’s an absolute blast. Crackling with wit and swooning with style, the film also immediately launches into the action, quickly and effectively introducing us to our gorgeous, wonderfully and impossibly competent spies, George (Fassbender) and Kathryn (Blanchett), and then spinning out a most satisfying, twisty-turny thriller, complete with suspicion, romance, bitter betrayals, unexpected loyalties.

George and Kathryn, as married spies, are a little bit Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (a la Mr. and Mrs. Smith), a little bit Myrna Loy and William Powell (a la The Thin Man), a little bit George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez (a la Out of Sight) but with a healthy helping of James Bond, complete with the sleek Soderbergh special sauce. Nothing can quite touch what I think is Soderbergh’s best romantic crime thriller (Out of Sight), but Black Bag is a very smart film that, while light on its feet, shows it knows its audiences are smart, too, and it’ll please anybody who loves to watch great actors playing juicy, fun roles as well as anybody who just loves a good thriller, whether it’s Soderbergh’s own underrated recent thrillers, like Kimi and Unsane (both of which I love), or more recent iterations, like the terrific TV British show Slow Horses. Black Bag just hits the spot.

We’ve also got a handful of special events this week, starting with a silent crowd-pleaser, Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. Soundtracked to R.E.M.: A Silents Synced Film. Silents Synced pairs classic silent cinema with epic rock soundtracks, and back in October, we played Murnau’s seminal 1922 horror film Nosferatu synced to Radiohead to enthralled audiences. This month, we’re celebrating one of the greatest American filmmakers and comic actors, Buster Keaton, with two of his films, paired with new music: first, it’s “Balloonatic” paired with music from Amon Tobin, and second, it’s one of the greatest comic silent classics, Sherlock Jr., paired with music from R.E.M.’s Monster and New Adventures in Hi Fi. Sherlock Jr. is an end-to-end delight, containing the best of Keaton’s hilarious physical antics and gags while also offering loving and playful and innovative reflections on cinema itself to captivating effect.

As noted by BFI, “Buster Keaton’s third feature is a breathtakingly virtuosic display of every silent comedy technique imaginable, from his own formidable physical skills to some then-groundbreaking camera trickery. While there is endless debate as to which is the funniest of Buster Keaton’s 1920s features, there’s little doubt as to which is the cleverest. Anticipating Jean-Luc Godard and postmodernism by decades, the detective fantasy Sherlock Jr. largely takes place inside the head of a hapless and wronged cinema projectionist (Keaton) who – in a sequence that’s a technical marvel to this day – dreams himself into the screen only to be flummoxed by the film’s editing. But that’s merely one relatively early set-piece out of dozens, including a stunt so dangerous that it broke Keaton’s neck – something he wouldn’t discover until a routine medical examination over a decade later.”

Don’t miss this cinematic treasure, tremendously entertaining for kids, adults, cinephiles, and R.E.M. fans alike. It plays Saturday at 1:30 pm and Thursday at 8:00 pm.

Second, our Hitchcock Presents series continues with the wonderful and often underrated Rope, a terrifically innovative feature from the great Alfred Hitchcock, who was always pushing boundaries in his work, whether cinematically or thematically. Rope was a particularly freeing playground for Hitchcock, too, in that it represents the first film over which he had full creative control, the first film he both produced and directed. While the film was based on a 1929 English play by Patrick Hamilton (which was, in turn, based on a real life murder)--which features two gay lovers who murder a fellow college student and then host a dinner party with the body hidden in a chest, placed right in the midst of the unsuspecting party guests–Hitchcock, as he always did, puts his own unique spin on everything. Notably, here, he pulled what he later called a “stunt”: filming the movie in what looked like (and what nearly was) one, long unbroken take. And, indeed, there are only 10 cuts in the entire film. It’s a “stunt” Hitch never tried again, but the result, here, is extraordinary, and it showcases Hitch’s brilliant ability to develop narrative tension and suspense, even without the tool of cinematic editing.

And the film is unbelievably tense. Hitchcock once described the difference between “surprise” and “suspense” (the latter of which he preferred), as the difference between 1) observing a dinner party where a bomb under the table suddenly and unexpectedly explodes and 2) observing someone place a bomb under the table and then we must watch the party, knowing the whole time, the ticking bomb is about to go off. Rope is an exquisitely beautiful example of just such a “ticking bomb under the table,” only in this case, the “bomb” is a hidden dead body, and we wait and watch and wait and watch in increasing suspense for the horror of the body to be discovered by the innocent guests, whose dinner has been served atop the body.

I’ll have a bit more to say on Sunday, when I’ll be hand to introduce Rope – there is, for example, a provocative homoerotic subtext in the film, a subtext, in fact, that was not subtext enough to prevent it from being censored in some places in 1948, even though the censors couldn’t figure out – or didn’t want to say – what they found objectionable and settled on calling it “unwholesome.”

Join us, then, on Sunday at 1:00 for some wonderfully entertaining, “unwholesome” entertainment!

Third, the wonderful series Exhibition on Screen returns with The Dawn of Impressionism: Paris, 1874. This season’s series began with Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers back in November, and we continue this month with a more expansive look at the beginnings of the movement in which Van Gogh was a key part, Impressionism. Impressionist works today often grace the walls of college dorms and proliferate in wall calendars, tempting us to forget, perhaps, that the artists who built what came to be called the Impressionist movement were provocateurs, “mavericks,” and, initially, “scorned and penniless outsiders.” In coordination with the Musee d'Orsay and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., The Dawn of Impressionism is a fascinating – and beautiful – look inside the beginnings of the movement, as told by historians and curators and by the “artists, press and people of Paris” of their day, in 1874. Join us this Tuesday at 5:30 or next Sunday (March 23) at 11:00 am.

Finally, one other note before I close, I recommend reading this lovely piece from film critic Matt Singer over at ScreenCrush: “Go to the Movie Theater.” In an age of streaming and watching movies on the tiny little screens we call smartphones, it’s an insightful reflection on what makes experiencing movies on the big screen, with big sound and with a community of other movie lovers, so incredibly special. We at the Pickford remain grateful to you, Pickford patrons and supporters of independent cinema, for sustaining us and loving movie theaters just as much as we do.

See you at the movies, friends!

Melissa