Just in time for the start of the Major League Baseball season, the Mariemont Theatre is showing a movie that should elicit joy from fans of that sport and, if the reviews are any indication, from those who like good indie movies as well. Perhaps this and other new-to-market indie films will help take the sting out of Sundance’s announcement to relocate to Boulder, Colorado, instead of Cincinnati.
Find my thoughts on indie and arthouse titles that are still be playing from February and March openings here on the Cincinnati Magazine website.
Eephus
[Watch the trailer. Now playing at the Mariemont Theatre.]
Named after a kind of pitch, Eephus concerns the last game for a New England Sunday league team before its stadium is demolished. As players and opponents battle for victory, the game becomes more meaningful to the amateur players, as do feelings of regret over passing time. First-time director Carson Lund, who also co-wrote the screenplay, has been winning comparisons to Robert Altman for the way he coaxes disarmingly appealing performances from his actors.
In a New York Times Critic’s Pick review, Alissa Wilkinson wrote, “The screenplay, written by Lund, Michael Basta and Nate Fisher, exists outside sports movie tropes altogether, though it’s most certainly a baseball movie. It dwells in some languid liminal space between hangout movie and elegy, a tribute to the community institutions that hold us together, that introduce us to one another and that, in an age of optimized life choices and disappearing public spaces, are slowly fading away. That makes it sound very serious, which Eephus is not.”
The Annihilation of Fish
[Watch the trailer. Screening April 4-10 at the Esquire Theatre.]
One of this year’s most notable art film discoveries is an until-now unreleased 1999 movie from esteemed director Charles Burnett, whose 1978 drama Killer of Sheep has slowly but steadily taken its place as a great American film. Annihilation of Fish is being presented at special Esquire screenings this month, part of what Diane Janicki of Theatre Management Corp. (operator of the independent Esquire and Mariemont theaters) describes as a new “event film” approach to booking in which such films are scheduled for a full week but with only special screening times, not multiple times every day.
The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s film program recently showed Annihilation of Fish with Burnett as a guest, and the Academy explained the choice aptly in its program notes: “Director Charles Burnett’s powerful films—including Killer of Sheep, To Sleep With Anger, and The Glass Shield—changed cinema forever and earned the director an honorary Oscar. The Annihilation of Fish continues his explorations of race, humor, and humanity, but in a different key. The charming, tender comedy/romance centers on Poinsettia (Lynn Redgrave), an older woman passionately devoted to her lover—the long-dead composer Giacomo Puccini. When no one in San Francisco will perform a marriage with a noncorporeal groom, she moves into a Victorian Los Angeles boarding house run by Mrs. Muldroone (Margot Kidder). There, Poinsettia encounters a Jamaican widower named Fish (James Earl Jones), recently released from a mental institution, whose mission in life is wrestling an invisible demon named Hank. Burnett’s long-lost 1999 feature, unreleased until 2024, is hilarious, heartfelt, and timeless.”
Make Me Famous
[Watch the trailer. Screening April 18-25 at the Esquire Theatre.]
Another new movie coming to the Esquire this month as part of the new booking strategy is a 2021 artworld documentary by Brian Vincent that’s independently distributed and has been slowly building an under-the-radar following. When Make Me Famous had a sold-out screening at the Museum of the City of New York, it was introduced by the museum this way: “The film tells the story of the Lower East Side art movement through an unknown artist, putting creativity itself centerstage. Set during what was arguably the last great art explosion in American history, Make Me Famous explores the life and work of painter Edward Brezinski in his quest for fame. The film provides an intimate and original look at NYC’s 1980s downtown art scene, which spawned such famous break-out artists as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Some of the many artists and voices interviewed include Eric Bogosian, Patti Astor, Kenny Scharf, Marguerite Van Cook, James Romberger, and more.”
By the way, the late New York gallery owner Astor was actually Patti Titchener, who was born and raised in Cincinnati.
Henry Fonda for President
[Watch the trailer. Screening April 25-May 15 at the Esquire Theatre.]
And watch for what should be a real treat, a just-released documentary that’s three hours long, so there will only be a handful of screenings. “It’s a portrait not only of Fonda but also of America,” wrote J. Hoberman in Artforum magazine. “It’s even a sort of road film in which, always in connection with Fonda’s movies, Horwath visits sites ranging from the upstate New York village of Fonda and the actor’s Nebraska birthplace to the actual migrant labor camp that served as a set in The Grapes of Wrath (and still functions as one) and the hokey tourist attraction that is Tombstone, Arizona, mythologized in another Ford film, My Darling Clementine (1946).”
Yellow Springs Mini-Film Festival
The major Yellow Springs film festival occurs in October, but this programming can hold its own with other regional festivals. The major event, an April 17 discussion with John Waters following the 25th anniversary screening of his Cecil B. Demented film, is sold out.
The Little Art Theatre is screening Seeds, this year’s Sundance Best U.S. Documentary winner, on April 18. Brittany Shyne’s film follows the lives of three Black farmers as they work to succeed with their work (and lives) while aware of the threats and hardships that come with owning land. Writing for Variety, Lisa Kennedy said, “A languid, loving portrait of Black farmers in the South, Seeds is a mixture of celebration and lament. Family farming has been endangered, but for African American farmers, the land—holding onto it, cultivating it—is even more precarious and precious.”
Get more festival info and tickets here.
No Other Land
[Watch the trailer. Screens at 4 p.m. April 12 at the Garfield Theater and at 1 p.m. April 27 at the Woodward Theater.]
Both the Woodward and downtown’s Cincinnati World Cinema are screening this year’s Oscar winner for Best Documentary in April. Made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective, it was recorded between 2019 and 2023 and shows the destruction of a Palestinian community in the occupied West Bank. The April 12 screening at CWC’s Garfield Theatre will be its fifth there; the first four sold out.
Even More David Lynch Retrospective
David Lynch’s death in January deprived us of one of America’s most distinctive directors ever, but it at least had one positive effect. No less than four major regional film presenters hastily programmed Lynch retrospectives: the Esquire/Mariemont, Woodward Theater, Cincinnati World Cinema, and Louisville’s Speed Museum cinematheque. And, with those efforts as a model, film programmers are continuing with retrospective presentations in April.
The Esquire/Mariemont, under programmer Diane Janicki, is continuing its deep-catalogue Lynch programming with two final Lynch movies, both of which are offbeat selections. The 1997 commercial film Lost Highway (screening at 7:30 p.m. April 2) was a “lost” Lynch movie in more ways than one and a critical disappointment, so much so that his next film, Straight Story, dropped the weirdness and went for a more realistic narrative. Those who have seen Lost Highway, including me, mostly acknowledge it’s not one of his best, but it does have one surreal character who’s absolutely unforgettable: Robert Blake’s Mystery Man. The film is worth seeing just for him.
An illuminating and informative documentary about Lynch’s artistic work and interests from 2006, David Lynch: The Art Life, will be presented at 2 p.m. April 6.
Get more screening info and tickets here and here.
Gene Hackman Retrospective
Janicki is starting a more modest-in-scope retrospective this month at the Esquire to honor the extraordinary American actor Gene Hackman, who passed away in February at age 95. Considering that he acted in movies for five decades and won two Oscars for his work, where do you start?
Two of his major hits demonstrate the breadth of his work. Birdcage, a 1996 comedy with a gay theme, has Hackman playing a conservative senator. And, before that in 1988, Mississippi Burning featured his Oscar-nominated role as an FBI agent investigating racist murders in the South. It’s based on the 1964 killing of three Civil Rights workers near Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Get more screening info and tickets here.
Wes Anderson Films
At the Woodward Theater in Over-the-Rhine, the momentum from recently showing David Lynch films continues in April with four movies by Wes Anderson, one of our most peculiarly idiosyncratic and artfully accomplished American auteurs. His 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums screens on April 2, featuring Gene Hackman as the title character, a father whose children (Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson) struggle to adapt to both their problematic father and the greater world.
Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou screens on April 9, featuring Bill Murray as an oceanographer chasing a very large shark. The story takes some inspiration from the career of Jacques Cousteau, but it isn’t really based on his life. Anderson’s stop-motion animated Fantastic Mr. Fox screens on April 15. And his first film, still regarded by many as his best, Rushmore, screens on April 16. It stars Jason Schwartzman as one of the most audacious teenagers in movie history and features a high-school play about the Vietnam War (I thought of Miss Saigon as I saw it) that needs to be experienced by every movie fan at least once.
The Anderson retrospective is presented by Phantom Cinema, which is booked by Adam Sweeney. He explained his choice via email: “Wes Anderson is one of the most thoughtful and imaginative storytellers in cinema history. Like him, I grew up in Houston, Texas, and moved to Austin to become a writer and filmmaker, a choice inspired by seeing his films. Curating a series of Anderson’s films offers a chance for movie-lovers old and new to celebrate the vibrant colors and charming characters in his work on the silver screen. And it also offers a chance to honor the life and work of Gene Hackman, an undeniable acting legend, as we kick off the series with The Royal Tenenbaums.”
Get more screening info and tickets here.
Green Room
[Watch the trailer. Screens at 7:30 p.m. April 21 at the Woodward Theater.]
Phantom Cinema is also presenting Jeremy Saulnier’s punk-rock thriller, which the Woodward’s website describes this way: “The punk band Ain’t Rights, after a canceled gig, finds themselves performing at a neon-Nazi skinhead bar. A series of violent events unfolds, leading to the band members fighting for their lives against the dangerous skinhead group. In a desperate struggle for survival, the band members must outsmart and outfight their attackers to escape the deadly situation.” Among the cast is Patrick Stewart!
Peter Pan
[Watch the trailer. Screens at 7 p.m. April 24 at the Music Hall Ballroom.]
This film lives in the hearts and imagination of everyone, especially Boomers, thanks to Disney’s 1953 animated version and especially the 1955 live TV adaptation starring Mary Martin as Peter. When broadcast, it attracted 65 million viewers, a record at the time, and it was restaged again in 1956 and 1960.
But few people realize that the first Peter Pan movie was way back in 1924 during the silent film era. The Friends of Music Hall is offering a rare chance to see that version, accompanied by organist Brett Valliant on the Mighty Wurlitzer Organ. A Q&A with Valliant will follow the screening, so attendees can learn about the art of accompanying silent films as well as the organ’s history.
Tickets are $37, with discounts available at $31 for seniors, students, and groups of 10 or more and $20 for children under the age of 12.
Outer Cinema Screenings
Cincinnati film presenter Outer Cinema invited Camilo Idrobo, an Ecuadorian student of film at Northern Kentucky University, to program its April schedule at Northside’s PAR-Projects. Here is the lineup:
April 1: I Am Cuba (1964), directed by Mikhail Kalatozov [Cuba/ Soviet Union]
April 8: The Wolf House (2018), directed by Cristóbal León and Joaquin Cociña [Chile]
April 15: Rodents (1999), directed by Sebastián Cordero [Ecuador]
April 22: Blood of the Condor (1969), directed by Jorge Sanjinés [Bolivia]
April 29: La Ciénaga (2001), directed by Lucrecia Martel [Argentina]
Get more screening info here.
Facebook Comments