On our screens this week, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Lynden continue, with both films winding towards their farewells to us as we get closer and closer to Doctober, so now would be the time to catch both if you’ve not seen them yet. 

We’ve also got two new films on screen: Sugarcane and Whiplash. 

Sugarcane -- along with No Other Land, which we are screening during Doctober -- is perhaps one of the most important and shattering documentaries of the year, as harrowing as it is sensitive and beautiful.  Following the revelation in 2021 of unmarked graves at the site of an Indian residential school run by the Catholic Church near Williams Lake, B.C., Sugarcane traces the stories of those who survived the school and those who face the legacy of intergenerational trauma.  

Indigenous co-director Julian Brave NoiseCat is himself one of those who is a part of that legacy -- his father was an infant survivor, who'd been put in the trash -- and the film is thus a profoundly personal and empathetic document as well as a sweepingly historical one. 

It is, necessarily, a devastating watch because of its subject matter, but it could not be more vital, and as Esther Zuckerman put it for Indiewire, "Sugarcane is something more meaningful than a mere history lesson. It's a portrait of what remains when injustice occurs."  It's a film that has not only won top prizes at festivals, taking home the top directing prize at Sundance, but it's a film that demands a reckoning for what it reveals. It’s not a film viewers can walk away from unmoved or unchanged, and nor should we. 

And celebrating its 10th anniversary with a very special theatrical re-release is Whiplash, the film that launched Damien Chazelle’s directorial career, established Miles Teller as a star, and electrified audiences in 2014. It still has no less power to do so. As Pickford Events Manager, Lesley Schroeder, recently noted in a staff email about it, “[Whiplash] received five Academy Award nominations and three wins for Sound Mixing, Film Editing, and Best Supporting Actor (the always great JK Simmons) and achieved a rare feat: a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes with critics and audiences. Lots of people liked a film about two extremely unlikeable men. Taking a toxic relationship to new heights, Miles Teller and Simons play off of each other like jazz musicians jamming in a dark, smokey club. The fact that Whiplash is being re-released after only ten years speaks volumes to its appeal and popularity.” 

It’s a not to be missed big screen experience, and it’ll be here for just a week. 

We also have several special events this week, starting with screenings honoring one of the greatest actors of a generation James Earl Jones (1931-2024). While Jones was an actor who embodied his characters in every sense of the word, and his performances in films like The Great White Hope, Claudine, and Matewan are simply transcendent, there is no denying the unique power Jones had to create a full character with just his voice. He transfixed a generation with his warmly powerful performance as Mufasa in The Lion King, and he established what is perhaps the most iconic movie villain of all time: Darth Vader.  Jones’s Vader is the voice to haunt one’s dreams or perhaps one’s nightmares, and his line-readings of the shattering “No, I am your father” to the manipulatively complex “Now release your anger,” once uttered, were burned on our collective cultural consciousness forever.  

As Jones described to Terry Gross in a 1993 interview, however, he had no aspirations to become an icon. He suffered a debilitating stutter from the time he was 6 to 14, something he eventually overcame through poetry recitation and went on to fight to control during his career. And when he recorded Vader’s lines for Star Wars: A New Hope, he thought of his work merely as a “special effect,” and he was not even credited in the film. 

But we owe him all the credit now, and we’ll be honoring him and the great villain he created with screenings of the original Star Wars trilogy: A New Hope plays on Friday, 6:00 pm; The Empire Strikes Back plays on Saturday, 6:00 pm; and Return of the Jediplays on Sunday at 2:30 pm. 

Join us!  

Our Kid Pickford Pixar series also continues this month with the beautiful and very funny Up, directed by Pete Docter. The popularity and acclaim afforded to the Pixar brand is due not only to the technological advances in animation and the laugh-out-loud humor of the films but also to the often surprisingly moving and complex emotional beats incorporated into the screenplays. Up is no exception. When I first saw the film, I certainly didn’t expect to be reduced to a sobbing mess within the first 15 minutes, but there I was. Those first 15 minutes offer a beautiful film-within-a-film story while also laying the groundwork for the emotional complexity of the rest of the film. And that is not to say, of course, it’s all tears for this one; hilarity ensues, as it always does with Pixar, and the film also offers one of the most delightful renderings of a dog-character ever put to film, something that could have only been created by a true dog lover. 

Join us on Saturday at 1:30 pm or Sunday at 10:00 am for Up! Tickets are just $7. 

Finally, we have one Doctober sneak-peak lined up for you this week in One Hand Clapping: Paul McCartney and Wings. The film, recorded in 1974, is getting a wide release for the first time, and it promises to be a treat. It’s an intimate look at the Abbey Road recording sessions, and it features previously unreleased footage of a solo acoustic performance by McCartney, The Backyard Sessions. We’ll have one more showing of the film during Doctober on October 13, but if you want to catch it on its national release day, you can see it this week Thursday at 8:00 pm. 

See you at the movies, friends! 

Melissa