November 7-13, 2025

Hello, friends!  

Lots of terrific movies continuing this week at the Pickford: On Bay St., the Yorgos Lanthimos stunner, Bugonia, continues, as does Guillermo del Toro’s lush and profoundly personal film, Frankenstein. Over on Grand Ave., there’s one last chance to see One Battle After Another, which plays on just Saturday and Sunday, and the electrifying Cannes winner from Jafar Panahi, It Was Just an Accident, continues, as does Scott Cooper’s deeply felt film about The Boss, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. 

We’ve also got three brand new films here for theatrical runs: Die My Love (on Grand Ave), Blue Moon (on Grand Ave), and Nouvelle Vague (at Bay St.). 

Scottish director Lynne Ramsay is one of my favorite directors working today--I love every one of her feature films (Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin, You Were Never Really Here)--and so her newest, Die My Love, could only come with the highest expectations for me. And I'm pleased to say those expectations were met. And then some. 

In Die My Love, as in her previous features, Ramsay foregrounds complex psychologies and fraught emotional landscapes and centers on a protagonist who is not always particularly likable -- or even, fully knowable. In Ramsay’s films, we are invited by way of image and sound into her characters' emotions without always being given a traditionally rational explanation for their behaviors, partly because it's clear the characters themselves can't necessarily explain why they're feeling what they feel or doing what they do. 

This choice--a privileging of image and sound above an explicit explanation of a character--is one of the things that makes her, for me, an especially cinematic director, “Cinematic” with a capital C.  And oh, the use of sound and music in her films, including this one! It’s unnervingly good. Ramsay has worked with the same sound designer on all her films, and their collaboration is positively magical.  We feel, hear, and see what her characters experience on a level that cannot necessarily be explained. And in this way, Ramsay gets at something about the human experience that a traditional narrative doesn't: People don't always know why they behave the way they do or feel the things they do, but they do feel them. Deeply. 

But it's not that her films -- or this film -- are especially opaque. The things that happen do make sense; there's some play with time and with imaginative inserts in Die My Love, but we know, at a basic level, what the plot is: a woman (Jennifer Lawrence) and a man (Robert Pattinson) buy a house in Montana and have a baby, and the woman experiences disillusionment with life and identity. The plot is pretty clear. It's just that the plot is not the most important thing in Die My Love; the woman's experience of her world and herself is. And it's riveting from start to finish. 

I have to note, too, that like Rose Byrne's performance this year in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Jennifer Lawrence is phenomenal. The film lives or dies by whether we believe her from moment to moment, even when she makes strange choices. And we do. Fully.  

The prolific Richard Linklater currently has two films out right now, and happily for us, we’ve got ‘em both. The first, playing on Bay St. is the effervescent Nouvelle Vague. 

This one will be with us for only a very short time, but if any movie deserves to be in cinemas, it's this one: it's a film that reimagines the making of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, one of the key films that marked the beginning of the influential French New Wave (aka "nouvelle vague") cinematic movement, and it’s a film that exploded into cinemas in 1960, remaking filmgoers’ notions of what "cinema" is and could be.  

It's not especially necessary to have seen Breathless before watching Nouvelle Vague --Nouvelle Vague is buoyant and wonderful on its own--although viewers' experiences certainly will be richer with a prior viewing of Breathless. Nouvelle Vague features a delightful series of "cameos" from the New Wave and Cahiers du cinema coterie, with actors playing historical greats such as Agnes Varda, Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and others, and it's a reminder of just how rich and vibrant a world of cinematic innovation the French New Wave filmmakers and thinkers lived in. 

But the most genius casting is of Guillaume Marbeck, who plays Godard wonderfully, and of Zoey Deutch, who plays Jean Seberg (the co-lead in Breathless), and  Aubry Dullin, who plays Jean-Paul Belmondo (the other co-lead in Breathless). If you've seen Breathless, you know the process of casting Belmondo and Seberg could only ever be fraught--who could play those two icons who made such magic on screen in Breathless??--but Linklater pulls it off, and the entire thing is a frothy delight.

It's a movie for cinephiles, not particularly profound in its insights about the New Wave, perhaps, but a film that offers us a picture of 1959 France in the middle of an explosion of cinematic creativity, a period I suspect most film lovers at some point wish they could have experienced first-hand for themselves. 

This film is perhaps the next best thing.

Linklater’s other new film, also with us this week, is Blue Moon, and this one is, perhaps, for music and theater lovers in the same way Nouvelle Vague is for cinephiles (although nearly every viewer will recognize the titular song).  

And it could, itself, almost be a play, as it's set in a single location--Sardi's Bar in New York--on a single evening in 1943. Ethan Hawke plays Lorenz Hart, the lyricist who collaborated with Richard Rodgers (of Rodgers and Hammerstein fame) and who wrote the lyrics to such songs as "Blue Moon," "The Lady Is a Tramp," and "My Funny Valentine." It's an extraordinary performance from Hawke (and the physicality of it will likely catch Oscar voters' interest), and he really carries the film. 

The film’s story catches Hart at a moment where he is, perhaps, past his prime (and indeed, he would die a few months later), and his colleague Richard Rodgers has surpassed him in fame, celebrating the wildly successful premiere of Oklahoma! Hart talks at the bar to everyone who will listen, and through his constant stream of talk, the portrait of a person emerges who is witty, self-aware, passionate about his art and incredibly talented but also quite vulnerable and feeling that the world is leaving him behind. It's a biopic that's sort of an anti-biopic, doing none of the things a biopic normally does, but giving us the same insights into a person's life in a wholly fresh way and primarily through dialogue. 

It's quite an extraordinary film, and Linklater has not made anything like it before--the Before trilogy, movies grounded in conversation--are perhaps the closest analogy, but this feels much different from those. I don't love everything Linklater has done, but I love that he's always trying something new. And this is wonderfully so.   

We’ve also got a bunch of events this week at the Pickford, starting our latest Third Eye selection, Branded to Kill, curated by one of our wonderful projectionists, Annie. It’s a wild ride of a film, and its director, “Japanese New Wave bad boy Seijun Suzuki,” was actually fired when he delivered it, “a brutal, hilarious, and visually inspired masterpiece[,] to the executives at his studio.”  As Annie notes, Branded to Kill is “a surreal Japanese New Wave crime comedy about a hitman who finds out a hit has been put out on him,” and it “features swarms of butterflies, bizarre sexual fetishes, and star Joe Shishido, aka the man with the largest cheekbones in the world.” 

There’s nothing quite like it! Join us on Saturday at 10 pm.

And because Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon isn’t quite enough Ethan Hawke for us, we’ve also got a modern classic this week: 

In partnership with the first ever Salish Sea Poetry Festival, which will hold a number of events around Bellingham November 7-9, we will be screening Peter Weir's marvelous Dead Poet’s Society on Sunday, November 9 at 1pm. 

This nostalgic gem was Robin Williams' first major dramatic role, and it taught an entire generation about Walt Whitman and the power of free-thinking. And yes, it includes an adorably baby-faced Ethan Hawke. Bring your tissues! 

For one screening only on Wednesday, November 12 at 12:30 at Grand Ave., in partnership with our longtime friends at Film Movement, we are screening the moving little indie film, Boxcutter: “set against Toronto’s gentrifying streets and its vibrant music scene,” it follows the story of “aspiring rapper Rome,” who is seeking a break in the Toronto's hip-hop scene and who might just get his chance when he learns that “megastar producer Richie Hill will be making an appearance at a local club.”   

As Courtney Small, for Cinema Axis notes, Boxcutter is “just the right mixture of comedy and drama,” “a delightful film that captures the vibrancy and sense of uncertainty that comes with city living,”  and “anchored by strong central performances.” As the feature film debut from Canadian filmmaker Reza Dahya, formerly a music producer, it makes Dahya a new talent to watch!

And the Storyteller’s Seasonal is back, this time, for the very first time, on Grand Ave! A very special event that provides a space for all aspiring filmmakers and hosted by Gary Washington (co-founder of Bleedingham Film Festival), Storyteller’s Seasonal is an hour-long event that consists of 5-minute films submitted from filmmakers from our area. The Seasonal is a remarkable opportunity to celebrate and nurture the visual storytelling of filmmakers at all levels and to provide a venue where these storytellers can share their ideas in an encouraging, joyful, and low-pressure environment. All are welcome to submit films -- see the Storyteller’s Facebook page for more info -- or to come see the filmmaking talents of our community.  

Join us on Thursday, November 13, at 8:30 pm! Tickets are just $7.

Finally, I could not be more delighted to say that our 2025-26 season of Cinema East begins this Thursday. And kicking things off is a legend who has never been featured in Cinema East before: Bruce Lee in The Big Boss, the film that represents “Lee’s return to the Hong Kong film industry after a decade in America”; it “proved to be his big breakthrough” and “launch[ed] him to instant superstardom, setting a new standard for kung fu heroics” (Janus).

Cinema East curator, Jeff Purdue, will be on hand on Thursday to give us an introduction to the film prior to the screening, and watch out for his newsletter, coming to your inboxes this Sunday for a discussion of The Big Boss you won’t want to miss.  

As a reminder, too, we are continuing to show our Cinema East films at two showtimes on Thursdays: an 11 am matinee and a 7:45 pm evening show. Double the chance this week to see the amazing, one-of-a-kind Lee on the big screen.

See you at the movies, friends! 

Melissa