HamptonsFilm offers a popular NOW SHOWING Series, which takes place on select weekend nights, in partnership with Guild Hall, Southampton Arts Center. and Bay Street Theater.
Throughout the year, Now Showing brings notable films currently in theaters to the East End. Curated by HamptonsFilm, Now Showing features acclaimed first-run art house, independent, and world cinema.
PAST SCREENINGS
THAW FEST Screening: SILKWOOD
Guild Hall
Saturday, March 7 | 7:00 pm
Directed by Mike Nichols
(USA, 1983, 131 minutes)
In 1983, celebrated director Mike Nichols put his successful theater career on hold to tell the story of chemical technician and union labor activist Karen Silkwood. From a script by Alice Arlen, and a first time screenwriter named Nora Ephron, Nichols assembled an all star cast featuring Meryl Streep, Kurt Russell and Cher who gave one of her first dramatic performances on screen. The film would go on to be nominated for five Academy Awards, and its exploration of the importance of both whistleblowers and corporate accountability seems as relevant today as it did almost 40 years ago. A conversation about the film’s importance between HIFF Board chair Alec Baldwin and Artistic Director David Nugent will follow the screening.
Starring Meryl Streep, Kurt Russell and Cher.
Join us for this THAW FEST screening of this 5-time Oscar® nominee, followed by a conversation with HamptonsFilm Co-Chair Alec Baldwin.
YOUNG AHMED
Guild Hall
Saturday, February 29 | 6:00 pm
Directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne
(Belgium, 2019, 84 minutes)
“As starkly unsentimental as any of the Dardennes’ lean, urgent moral thrillers.” — The AV Club
The Dardenne Brothers won this year’s Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival for this brave new work, another intimate portrayal-in-furious-motion of a protagonist in crisis. The filmmakers’ radical empathy alights on a Muslim teenager (extraordinary first-time actor Idir Ben Addi) in a small Belgian town who has been radicalized by his Imam despite the desperate protestations of his single mother (Claire Bodson), and who winds up hatching a murderous plot targeting his beloved teacher (Myriem Akheddiou). Taking a serious view of a difficult issue—the effect of fanaticism on the body and soul—the Dardennes here remind viewers why they continue to be at the center of 21st-century cinema. – New York Film Festival
THE BOOKSELLERS
Guild Hall
Saturday, February 22 | 6:00 pm
Directed by D.W. Young
(USA, 2019, 99 minutes)
Antiquarian booksellers are part scholar, part detective and part businessperson, and their personalities and knowledge are as broad as the material they handle. They also play an underappreciated yet essential role in preserving history. THE BOOKSELLERS takes viewers inside their small but fascinating world, populated by an assortment of obsessives, intellects, eccentrics and dreamers.
Executive produced by Parker Posey, the film features interviews with some of the most important dealers in the business, as well as prominent collectors, auctioneers, and writers such as Fran Lebowitz, Susan Orlean, Kevin Young and Gay Talese.
Liam Neeson as Tom and Lesley Manville as Joan in directors Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn’s ORDINARY LOVE, a Bleecker Street release. Credit: Aidan Monaghan / Bleecker Street
ORDINARY LOVE
Guild Hall
Saturday, February 15 | 6:00 pm
Directed by Lisa Barros D’Sa, Glenn Leyburn
(UK, 2019, 92 minutes)
Joan and Tom (Academy Award® nominee Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson) have been married for many years. An everyday couple with a remarkable love, there is an ease to their relationship which only comes from spending a lifetime together. When Joan is diagnosed with breast cancer, the course of her treatment shines a light on their enduring devotion, as they must find the humor and grace to survive a year of adversity.
THE MISSION
Guild Hall
Saturday, February 8 | 6:00 pm | Tickets
Directed by Roland Joffé
(UK/France, 1986, 125 minutes)
In director Roland Joffe’s historical epic THE MISSION, Jeremy Irons stars as Gabriel, an 18th-century Jesuit priest sent to the jungles of Brazil to build a Guarani Indian mission. Upon his arrival, Gabriel meets the slave trader Mendoza (Robert De Niro), a cruel, bloodless man who kills as many of the Guaranis as he enslaves. His brother Felipe (Aidan Quinn) is another of his victims, killed in a duel over a woman. Because of Mendoza’s aristocratic background, he cannot be tried for his crimes; however, the weight of his conscience inspires him to ask Gabriel for the opportunity to do penance at the mission. When Spain sells Brazil to Portugal, the two very different men must join together to defend the mission against aggressors.
—RottenTomatoes.com
Starring Jeremy Irons, Robert De Niro, Ray McAnally, Aidan Quinn, Liam Neeson.
Join us for this special screening of this 7-time Oscar® nominee (winner for Best Cinematography for Chris Menges), followed by a conversation with HamptonsFilm Co-Chair Alec Baldwin.
Antonio Banderas as Salvador © El Deseo. Photo by Manolo Pavón. Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics.
PAIN AND GLORY
Guild Hall
Saturday, February 1 | 6:00 pm
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar
(Spain, 2019, 113 minutes)
PAIN AND GLORY tells of a series of re-encounters experienced by Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas), a film director in his physical decline. Some of them in the flesh, others remembered: his childhood in the 60s, when he emigrated with his parents to a village in Valencia in search of prosperity, the first desire, his first adult love in the Madrid of the 80s, the pain of the breakup of that love while it was still alive and intense, writing as the only therapy to forget the unforgettable, the early discovery of cinema, and the void, the infinite void created by the incapacity to keep on making films. PAIN AND GLORY talks about creation, about the difficulty of separating it from one’s own life and about the passions that give it meaning and hope. In recovering his past, Salvador finds the urgent need to recount it, and in that need he also finds his salvation.
Starring Antonio Banderas, Penelope Cruz, Asier Etxeandia, Leonardo Sbaraglia, César Vicente, and Asier Flores.
• Oscar® Nominee for Best International Feature Film (Spain)
INCITEMENT
Guild Hall
Saturday, January 25 | 6:00 pm
Directed by Yaron Zilberman
(Israel, 2019, 123 minutes)
In September 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin announces the Oslo Accords, which aim to achieve a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians after decades of violence. Yigal Amir, a law student and a devoted Orthodox Jew, cannot believe that his country’s leader will cede territory that he and many others believe is rightfully – by the word of God – theirs. As the prospect of a peaceful compromise approaches, Amir turns from a hot-headed political activist to a dangerous extremist. Consumed by anger and delusions of grandeur, he recruits fighters and steals weapons to form an underground militia intent on killing Palestinians. After his longtime girlfriend leaves him, Amir becomes even more isolated, disillusioned, and bitter. He soon learns of an ancient Jewish law, the Law of the Pursuer, that he believes gives him the right to murder Yitzhak Rabin. Convinced he must stop the signing of the peace treaty in order to fulfill his destiny and bring salvation to his people, Amir’s warped mind sees only one way forward.
LES MISÉRABLES
Guild Hall
Saturday, January 18 | 6:00 pm
Directed by Ladj Ly
(France, 2019, 103 minutes)
Starting his first day as a member of the Anti-Crime Squad in Montfermeil—the same Paris suburb that Victor Hugo set as the location for his eponymous novel—Stéphane (Damien Bonnard) finds himself thrown into a community rife with tension and nearing a breaking point. When a surprise ambush breaks up an otherwise routine arrest, an act of spontaneous violence at the hands of one of Stéphane’s colleagues pushes them deep into the fractured realities of the neighborhood and immigrant communities they are meant to protect. Provocatively drawing a line between Hugo’s classic and the country’s contemporary realities, director Ladj Ly’s debut is a thrillingly timely look at the crippling tensions at the core of modern France.
• Oscar® Nominee for Best International Feature Film (France)
THE AERONAUTS
Guild Hall
Saturday, January 11 | 6:00 pm
Directed by Tom Harper
(UK, 2019, 101 minutes)
In 1862, daredevil balloon pilot Amelia Wren (Felicity Jones) teams up with pioneering meteorologist James Glaisher (Eddie Redmayne) to advance human knowledge of the weather and fly higher than anyone in history. While breaking records and furthering scientific discovery, their voyage to the very edge of existence helps the unlikely pair find their place in the world they have left far below them. But they face physical and emotional challenges in the thin air, as the ascent becomes a fight for survival.
INVISIBLE LIFE
Guild Hall
Saturday, January 4 | 6:00 pm
Directed by Karim Aïnouz
(Brazil/Germany, 2019, 139 minutes)
Rio De Janeiro, 1950. Euridice and Guida are inseparable sisters bristling at the conservative rules of their household. Although their parents’ expectations are that they will get married and start a family, both sisters have their own secret dreams, shared only with each other. Euridice dreams of studying the piano at the Vienna Conservatory, while Guida dreams of great love and of traveling across the globe. But while Euridice complies with her parents’ wishes, Guida defies them, embarrassing her father, who resorts to deceit in order to keep the sisters apart. Hélène Louvart’s luscious, light-filtered cinematography shines in Karim Aïnouz’s heady, mesmerizing exploration of arrested dreams, which won him the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
• Brazil’s official entry for the Best International Feature Film Oscar®
OLIVER SACKS: HIS OWN LIFE
Guild Hall
Saturday, December 28 | 6:00 pm
Directed by Ric Burns
(USA, 2019, 110 minutes)
“A portrait of the poetic neurologist of ‘Awakenings,’ shot at the end of his life, takes a tender and thrilling look at the sacred demons that drove him.” — Variety
Shortly after receiving the news of a fatal diagnosis in early 2015, world-renowned British neurologist, historian, physician, and author Oliver Sacks sat down for a series of lengthy filmed interviews to discuss the story of his life. Beginning with the difficulties of his childhood relationship with a schizophrenic older brother and growing up as a queer man in 1950s England, Sacks charts his journey towards becoming one of the foremost chroniclers of the human mind. Interweaving these interviews with recollections from his longtime partner, closest friends, family, and colleagues, director Ric Burns creates a moving portrait of one of the 21st century’s greatest minds.
• WINNER: HIFF27 Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature
Revisit past seasons:
