Kinonik

09/01/2026

MIAMI BLUES (1990)
Starring Alec Baldwin
WEDNESDAY September 2nd 7PM
SATURDAY September 5th 2PM / 7PM

For nine days this August, an entrepreneur going by “Cyberleek” dripped stolen footage of the year's most anticipated video game onto the internet, one clip at a time. Each leak carried a QR code and the ticker for a cryptocurrency they’d minted for the occasion. Buy the coin, they suggested, and more leaks would follow. They wrapped the enterprise in a manifesto about corporate greed and the death of physical media. Then, hours before the studio's big tickertape reveal, they sold their entire position for a quarter of a million dollars, the coin cratered, and they vanished.

We are, of course, living in the golden age of such grifts. Cyberleek didn't invent it, they were simply aping the national style at modest scale: when the head of state runs a series of rug pulls from the Resolute Desk, marching to his drumbeat is just showing initiative.

Alec Baldwin's Junior Frenger, in his first leading role, is a man who understands that in America a role is as good as a self. He steals Fred Ward’s gun and badge and then simply becomes a cop — fighting crime, shaking down dealers, playing house with Jennifer Jason Leigh in a rented bungalow of Jiffy Pop domesticity. Junior’s discovered that pretending is the only game anyone is playing, and the rules are made of Swiss cheese when you’re the main character.

Which brings us to what Cyberleek actually stole: Grand Theft Auto VI, the most lucrative entertainment property of the century. The series has always been sharp social commentary downstream from films like Falling Down, Repo Man, Something Wild… the whole strain of sunburned American black comedy where the joke is that the country itself is the crime scene. The games invite you to enjoy taking whatever isn't nailed down, and the enjoyment is the indictment. Which is to say: not unlike Miami Blues.

George Armitage got there in 1990, thirteen years before the first game. He makes you like Junior despite his awfulness, and then declines to tell you how to feel about it. The film never adjudicates. It just lets Baldwin radiate (boy howdy does he radiate) and leaves you holding your own delight — and that delight is the whole enchilada: comedy and violence in the same microwave entrée, each bite an absolutely delicious and prescient satire.

In his first leading role an unhinged Alec Baldwin brings the juice to what’s been called by some “the American Breathless” (never mind the actual remake).…

08/25/2026

OUT OF THE PAST (1947)
Directed by JACQUES TOURNEUR
WEDNESDAY August 26th 7PM
SATURDAY August 29th 2PM / 7PM

Out of the Past opened quietly in November 1947 and made a modest profit. It was one more well-crafted RKO thriller. Over decades it became revered among the purest examples of film noir anyone ever made, one that fused the doomed man, the untrustworthy woman, and the labyrinth of flashback into a single perfect specimen. Like its hero, it seemed at first to be one thing and turned out to be something far more consequential.

Having come up in Val Lewton's horror unit, known within RKO as “The Snake Pit,” director Jacques Tourneur understood darkness better than anyone in Hollywood. Together with his cameraman Nicholas Musuraca they made Out of the Past a film where the lighting is a moral map: luminous and open when freedom is at hand, closing into pools of shadow as the past tightens its grip.

Robert Mitchum, in the role that made him a star, plays Jeff Bailey with the sleepy, exhausted fatalism of a man too tired to fight a doom he can see coming from miles away — while 22-year-old Jane Greer plays Kathie Moffat, who might be post-truth in a single body; how disinformation would look if it had a face you wish you could touch. Every account she gives is calibrated to the listener. She lies, and when each lie is exposed she covers it with another… and the tragedy is that Jeff would rather be destroyed by her fiction than saved by anyone else's fact.

Jeff changed his name, opened a two-pump station in a small mountain town, and for a few years he was simply a nobody with no history, courting a local girl, waiting on cars in the clean Sierra light. Then came a black sedan driven by a man sent to verify a rumor.

That's the engine of Out of the Past, and it's why the film's somewhat banal title has quietly become one of the most chilling three-word phrases in American cinema. Because there is no out anymore. Every prior version of a person is archived and searchable by anyone with a grievance and a data broker… or an account with Flock. The clean interval Jeff got, those years of being nobody, is an option that may cease to exist. The past doesn't have to come knocking, because you’ll never leave it, and it paves the moonless road in front of you.

Five years after inventing a new breed of supernatural horror with Cat People, Jacques Tourneur would give us one of the best films noir of all time. Mitchum,…

08/17/2026

LADYHAWKE (1985)
Directed by RICHARD DONNER
WEDNESDAY August 19th 7PM
SATURDAY August 22nd 2PM / 7PM

I first saw Ladyhawke around 1990, on a television set, at an age when Matthew Broderick's motor-mouthed pickpocket was probably the only reason I stayed in the room. Without him the film would have been impenetrable: a beautiful, slow, European romance between two adults experiencing a grief I had no framework for. Broderick was the door. He was having fun, which gave me permission to have fun, which kept me in the seat long enough for Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer to do something to me I wouldn't understand for years.

Two lovers cursed to never occupy the same form at the same time. By day Navarre is human and Isabeau is a hawk. By night she returns and he becomes a wolf. They share every journey and never truly meet except in the fleeting instants of dawn and twilight. Richard Donner and the legendary Vittorio Storaro shot this as a genuine romantic agony. Hauer and Pfeiffer commit completely. Their performances are interior, aching, almost silent. They inhabit the curse as if it were real, because for them it is.

And then there's Broderick, doing something else entirely. He talks to God like a player negotiating with a DM. He narrates his own actions with ironic distance. He's entertained by the stakes rather than endangered by them. He is, essentially, a person in 2026 playing a medieval RPG; present in the world, absolutely committed to the quest, but never fully inside the story.

The film contains two incompatible movies sharing every frame. Andrew Powell's synth score sides with Broderick: it belongs to 1985, not to the thirteenth century. Storaro's camera sides with Hauer and Pfeiffer: every composition is a Renaissance painting over which the music feels like graffiti. Neither movie wins, but that’s sort of the magic here. They coexist without resolution, two registers of experience occupying the same space but never the same reality.

In 1985 this was a production problem, and a problem for audiences, but today it’s more like a diagnosis. The curse isn't a fairy tale anymore, but a precise description of what it feels like to live in a world where everyone inhabits the same physical space but operates in hypernormal realms where genuine contacts — seeing another person clearly, in their full humanity — are twilight moments that don't last.

A medieval romance in which two lovers can never occupy the same form at the same time — one a hawk by day, the other a wolf by night. Rutger Hauer and…

08/10/2026

THE OX-BOW INCIDENT (1943)
Directed by WILLIAM WELLMAN
WEDNESDAY August 12th 7PM
SATURDAY August 15th 2PM / 7PM

Over a two-week stretch in late June and early July, the president used the word "communist" 81 times. Not to describe an ideology or a geopolitical rival but to designate an enemy: a category of American citizen whose guilt requires no evidence because the label is the evidence.

William Wellman understood this in 1943. The Ox-Bow Incident is widely considered one of the first psychological Westerns. This was the moment the genre stopped asking what men do and started asking why they do it, and whether they can bear knowing. A rancher has been murdered — maybe. Word reaches a small Nevada town, and before anyone can verify the claim a posse forms. They ride into the mountains, find three drifters with the dead man's cattle, and hold a vote. The drifters say they bought the cattle legally, but almost nobody is interested.

Henry Fonda's Gil Carter knows something is wrong. He argues, he objects, he appeals to procedure and decency. He does everything short of the one thing that would matter, which is to put his body between the mob and its victims. His conscience is ultimately a spectator. Dana Andrews, as the most articulate of the accused, gives a performance so measured and so quietly desperate that it becomes nearly unbearable.

What makes the film devastating rather than merely bleak is its precision about how the mob actually operates. Nobody in the posse is a monster. Nobody is driven by bloodlust. Each man is simply watching the others, performing resolve because everyone else is performing resolve. What happens isn't a breakdown of social order but an emergence of its evolutionary roots.

In 2004 James Surowiecki published The Wisdom of Crowds and launched a thousand TED talks. What nobody quoted was the precondition: the judgments have to be independent. The moment people start watching each other you don't get aggregated wisdom, you get a posse. This year people placed over a million dollars in bets on whether wildfires that killed 31 people would reach specific Los Angeles neighborhoods. A platform called WyldFyre launched with the tagline: "You can't predict fire. But you can trade on it." The mob never disbanded: it got financial incentive, and an app.

Seventy-five minutes long, eighty-three years old, The Ox-Bow Incident has not aged a day.

Wellman's taut anti-Western packs more moral devastation into 75 minutes than most films manage in twice the runtime. Fonda, Dana Andrews, and Anthony Quinn…

08/02/2026

WarGames (1983)
Directed by JOHN BADHAM
WEDNESDAY August 5th 7PM
SATURDAY August 8th 2PM / 7PM

In 1983 Ronald Reagan watched WarGames at a private Camp David screening arranged by one of its writers (Lawrence Lasker had grown up attending the same Brentwood cocktail parties as the Reagans). The president was reportedly so unsettled that he spent the following week's national security briefing asking the Joint Chiefs whether any of it could actually happen. The answer, essentially, was yes. Within fifteen months, Reagan signed NSDD-145, the first presidential directive on computer security. A fizzy Matthew Broderick thriller about a teenager playing tic-tac-toe with a supercomputer changed American defense policy because the right people saw it in the right living room.

The film arrives at a strange intersection of anxieties. In the same year Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire home computers were proliferating in American households for the first time — the Apple II, the Commodore 64, the TRS-80. An entire generation of teenagers was developing a fluency with networked systems that the adults managing those systems did not possess. WarGames takes that gap and wires it directly to the launch codes. Broderick's David Lightman is not a rebel or a criminal. He's a kid who wants to play a game and discovers that the game is real, and that the men in charge can't tell the difference.

WarGames was not originally a John Badham film. Director Martin Brest was fired after producing footage that the studio found lifeless. Badham watched the dailies and identified the problem immediately: the kids weren't having any fun. Broderick and Ally Sheedy were playing the hacking scenes as if they'd stumbled into a terrorist conspiracy. Badham understood that the appeal of showing a pretty girl you can change her grades on a computer is that it's thrilling, not sinister. He rebuilt the film's entire tonal register around that insight, and he was right; the movie doesn't work without Broderick's delight. But it's the same instinct that drives every Badham film: the audience should be having a good time, even when the subject is annihilation.

This lovely 16mm print from John Badham's personal collection is itself a kind of metaphor about what the CIA once called “circular reporting” — four decades after its release we’re entirely suffused by the paranoid digital milieu it both predicted and inspired. When the WOPR delivers the film's most famous line, it might be worth considering who's still playing, and why.

Another pristine print from John Badham’s collection. Matthew Broderick in boy-genius mode hacks his way into an absurd can of worms that famously scared the…

07/21/2026

RED RIVER (1948)
Directed by HOWARD HAWKS
WEDNESDAY July 22nd 7PM
SATURDAY July 25th 2PM / 7PM

In 1948 John Ford watched a rough cut of Howard Hawks' Red River and reportedly said of John Wayne, "I didn't know the big son of a bitch could act." Ford had been directing Wayne for nearly twenty years. What he was seeing was what happens when you put Wayne opposite Montgomery Clift and force him to compete.

Wayne had been the dominant model of American screen masculinity for a decade: big, declarative, physically commanding, performing authority through sheer volume and mass. He occupied the frame the way he occupied a room. Then Clift showed up and did something nobody in the American Western had done before: he listened. He stood still. He let interior life become visible without announcing it. Clift doesn't fight Wayne for the screen. He simply makes Wayne's entire mode of occupying it look antediluvian.

The confrontation simmered off-screen, too. While Red River was in post-production, Wayne was serving as president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, actively working with the House Un-American Activities Committee to purge suspected subversives from the industry. He demanded that loyalty be performed loudly, publicly, without ambiguity — the same thing Dunson demands on the cattle drive. Clift was everything that apparatus existed to destroy: q***r, interior, unreadable, a man whose very presence on screen suggested that masculinity might be something other than a loyalty oath.

Hawks doesn't theorize the masculine codes he's dramatizing; he sets them in motion and photographs what happens. He works through genre the way a boxer works through combinations: by instinct, by rhythm, by knowing where the opening is before the other guy does. Russell Harlan's camera treats the landscape as a moral arena, vast and indifferent, where the only things that matter are competence and nerve.

The text is pure cowboy logistics; ten thousand head of cattle driven over a thousand dangerous miles by men with competing ideas about how it should get done. But the subtext is a succession crisis and an early foreshadowing of the ascendance of the New Hollywood and a very different kind of movie star.

The film's logic demands a killing. Hawks can't bring himself to deliver it. The cattle get sold regardless.

Howard Hawks sends John Wayne and Montgomery Clift on a cattle drive from Texas to Kansas and discovers that American masculinity contains at least two…

07/14/2026

SEBASTIANE (1976)
Directed by DEREK JARMAN
WEDNESDAY July 15th 7PM
SATURDAY July 18th 2PM / 7PM

Derek Jarman's Sebastiane (1976) is set in a Roman military outpost where exiled soldiers have nothing to do but exercise, argue, and desire one another. The plot, insofar as there is one, concerns the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian; the Roman soldier who refused to recant his Christian faith and was ordered shot through with arrows by Diocletian. But Jarman isn't interested in the hagiography. He's interested in the body. Specifically, in what happens when imperial authority encounters a body it can discipline but cannot make compliant.

Shot in Sardinia on a budget that wouldn't cover catering on Nolan’s The Odyssey, Jarman's first feature was made a full twelve years before The Last Temptation of Christ would scandalize mainstream audiences with a far milder provocation. The film premiered at the 1976 London Film Festival and was picketed. It is one of the most important British films of its decade, and one of the least screened. Luckily for you, we happen to have an astonishingly beautiful print.

The film is performed entirely in Latin by largely untrained actors. Not church Latin, not the ceremonial Latin of inscriptions and mottos, but a reconstructed vernacular; dog latin, soldiers' Latin, profane and quotidian. The effect is total estrangement. You can't settle into the dialogue as information delivery. You hear rhythm, tone, breath, and command. Language becomes another kind of physical act. The score, by Brian Eno, treats the landscape as an instrument.

Sebastian has been a q***r icon for six centuries, and the art historians knew it before anyone else did. Mantegna's Sebastian is an exercise in idealized male beauty that uses the arrows as an alibi. Reni's versions — he painted the subject at least six times — are frankly ecstatic. Il Sodoma's fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico gave the game away in the name alone. What Jarman did was strip the devotional frame and make the erotic substrate visible without apology. The arrows aren't metaphors. The body isn't allegorical. The desire is the content, and the empire is the thing that punishes it.

Derek Jarman’s first feature, entirely in Latin, reimagines the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian as a study in desire and discipline under Roman military…

07/12/2026

Our Summer Schedule begins this week with Sebastiane by Derek Jarman.

Derek Jarman's Sebastiane (1976) is set in a Roman military outpost where exiled soldiers have nothing to do but exercise, argue, and desire one another. The plot, insofar as there is one, concerns the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian; the Roman soldier who refused to recant his Christian faith and was ordered shot through with arrows by Diocletian. But Jarman isn't interested in the hagiography. He's interested in the body. Specifically, in what happens when imperial authority encounters a body it can discipline but cannot make compliant.

Shot in Sardinia on a budget that wouldn't cover catering on Nolan’s The Odyssey, Jarman's first feature was made a full twelve years before The Last Temptation of Christ would scandalize mainstream audiences with a far milder provocation. The film premiered at the 1976 London Film Festival and was picketed. It is one of the most important British films of its decade, and one of the least screened. Luckily for you, we happen to have an astonishingly beautiful print.

The film is performed entirely in Latin by largely untrained actors. Not church Latin, not the ceremonial Latin of inscriptions and mottos, but a reconstructed vernacular; dog latin, soldiers' Latin, profane and quotidian. The effect is total estrangement. You can't settle into the dialogue as information delivery. You hear rhythm, tone, breath, and command. Language becomes another kind of physical act. The score, by Brian Eno, treats the landscape as an instrument.

Sebastian has been a q***r icon for six centuries, and the art historians knew it before anyone else did. Mantegna's Sebastian is an exercise in idealized male beauty that uses the arrows as an alibi. Reni's versions — he painted the subject at least six times — are frankly ecstatic. Il Sodoma's fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico gave the game away in the name alone. What Jarman did was strip the devotional frame and make the erotic substrate visible without apology. The arrows aren't metaphors. The body isn't allegorical. The desire is the content, and the empire is the thing that punishes it.

06/24/2026

Tonight's showing of "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" is sold out online, but a little monkey tells us that there will be a few tickets at the door. These are strictly first come first serve, so if you missed out on grabbing a ticket online, our doors open at 6:30!

06/23/2026

Good morning folks. Tickets are moving quickly for tomorrow's screening of Werner Herzog's "Aguirre, the Wrath of God". We'd love for you to join us, so grab your tickets now!

A conquistador leads his men in search of El Dorado. The jungle is disinclined to acquiesce. Kinski spirals and crashes out while swarmed by his cousins.