Kinonik

10/13/2026

HOUSE OF GAMES (1987)
Directed by DAVID MAMET
WEDNESDAY October 14th 7PM
SATURDAY October 17th 2pm / 7pm
16mm - Color - 1h 42m

A man at the poker table turns his ring when he's bluffing. That's the tip, anyway. Mike, who runs the back room of a Seattle pool hall called the House of Games, needs someone to watch for it while he steps out, and he's found the most qualified observer in the building: Dr. Margaret Ford, psychiatrist, author of a best-seller on compulsion called Driven, who came down here at night to sort out a patient's gambling debt. She has spent her career reading people. Tonight she gets to read a stranger's hands for money, and she's very good at it.

David Mamet had a Pulitzer for Glengarry Glen Ross and screenplays for The Verdict and The Untouchables when he finally stepped behind the camera in 1987, and he arrived with opinions. He wanted a camera that reported rather than editorialized, and actors who didn't act. Lines land flat and exact, every comma and pause accounted for, until the dialogue starts to sound like an incantation. Joe Mantegna's Mike is the purest instrument of it: patient, amused, a teacher who enjoys his subject. Lindsay Crouse, Mamet's wife at the time, plays Margaret as a woman who built a life on control and is just beginning to enjoy losing it.

Mike's first lesson is the oldest one in the trade, and lately the most lucrative: the con isn't getting the mark to trust you. It's getting the mark to believe you trust her. Everything that follows comes out of that inversion, and the movie runs it on you as patiently as Mike runs it on Margaret. You're shown how the game works. You're told what to watch. You watch. A word of caution, then, from someone whose job is telling you where to look: in this house, the one explaining the game is never the one you should be watching.

A buttoned-up psychiatrist goes slumming in a poker room and gets played like a mark. Mamet's first film as a director, and every line lands like it was set…

10/05/2026

PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET (1953)
Directed by SAMUEL FULLER
WEDNESDAY October 7th 7PM
SATURDAY October 10th 2PM / 7PM
16mm - B&W - 1h 20m

A pickpocket lifts a wallet on the subway and comes up holding microfilm Hoover and the Commies will both kill to get back. He couldn’t care less about the Cold War — he just wants his cut. Samuel Fuller shoots the whole Red Scare as a grubby street hustle, and Thelma Ritter walks off with the picture as a worn-out stool pigeon saving up, tip by tip, for a decent burial. Tabloid pulp with a switchblade in its sock.

Fuller opens with a train screaming through the dark, then cuts into a packed subway car and lets the scene play out almost without a word. A woman hangs from a strap. Two men in hats watch her. A third man, pressed against her in the crush, watches her handbag. His fingers go to work under a folded newspaper while the onlookers never notice him at all.

That's Skip McCoy, Richard Widmark at full sneer, and the wallet he lifts holds microfilm that the Feds and the Reds would both kill for. Skip, who lives in a shack and keeps his b**r chilled in the East River, doesn't much care which side wins or what flag is waved in his face. He just wants to know what the film is worth.

Garden-variety noir drifts in on cigarette smoke and voiceover, already resigned to how the story ends. Fuller's comes at you like a tabloid front page. He crowds the camera so close to Widmark and Jean Peters that a kiss and a shakedown look exactly alike; lets a beating play out in one unbroken take with the actors themselves taking the falls; and shoots a subway-station brawl from high overhead so you watch the whole thing tumble. Nobody narrates and nobody broods. People lie, haggle, slap, and keep moving.
Fuller had covered crime for a New York tabloid at seventeen, and he knew this world from the precinct side: the pickpocket squad, the dips who called themselves cannons, the cop who could name a thief by the way he worked a crowd. Mostly he knew the economy of the informer. Thelma Ritter's Moe sells neckties out of a suitcase and names out of her memory, for whatever the traffic will bear, and every dollar goes toward a burial plot so she won't end up in Potter's Field.

Fuller maintained it was a yarn about marginal people, nothing more, nothing less. He was right… just not in a way that lets anyone off the hook. Pickup on South Street is a film about prices. Everyone in it has one, the patriots included, and the flag gets waved hardest by whoever's holding the checkbook. Fuller learned in the precincts what the rest of us keep relearning, these days during state-sponsored commercial breaks: when the government goes shopping, it starts at the margins.

A pickpocket lifts a wallet on the subway and comes up holding microfilm Hoover and the Commies will both kill to get back. He could not care less about the…

10/05/2026

JEUX INTERDICTS (1952)
(Forbidden Games)
Directed by René Clément
TUESDAY October 6th 7PM
In French with English subtitles
A co-presentation with the Alliance Française du Maine

"What's wrong with your dog?"
"He's dead."
Thus begins the friendship between young Michel and Paulette, a peasant French boy and a Parisian war refugee, and sets the foundation of their relationship. They are children within a war, among adults who hold to the same tried (though questionably true) habits and rituals to weather it, coming to terms with death and love. Able to encounter the absurdity in a way the adults around them cannot – though no less equipped to process it – the two children strive towards comfort, safety, and joy by way of building an animal graveyard with stolen crosses.

The challenging nature of the story troubled its realization. Forbidden Games (1952) started as a screenplay by French writer Francis Boyer; unable to sell it, he adapted it into a novel, The Secret Game, which sold so well in the United States that Rene Clement adapted it back into a screenplay with the assistance of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost. Originally intended as a short to be accompanied by two companion pieces, it was retained and expanded when the larger project lost financing. The result – which, similar to the novel, did better abroad than in its home country – was initially rewarded and well-regarded, but swept into semi-obscurity after Francois Truffaut lambasted Aurenche and Bost's ouvre as "stultifying". Unfairly taken down with the rest, Forbidden Games' delicate, at times humorous approach to the social realities of war is far from the dull old-school movie-making Truffaut labeled it as.

Rene Clement's masterpiece, shot with such a clear eye that "every shot achieves the quality of fate," is a landmark piece of both French and war cinema. Michel and Paulette are allowed to be children, strange and out of step with the assumed morals of their caretakers, not reduced to saccharine sweethearts for the comfort of the audience. Georges Poujouly and Brigitte Fossey deliver excellent performances, particularly in view of their youth. Their naturalistic acting is juxtaposed against adults directed to deliver near-goofy renditions of the rustic trope, a repeated re-emphasis of the children's role as intuits and seekers while the adults around them go through the same rehearsed motions. Michel and Paulette may achieve no more understanding of our strange reality than their parents did, but like all children, they must try. Forbidden Games gives them the playground on which to do so.

France declined to enter it at Cannes in 1952; it screened on the fringe and went on to take the Golden Lion at Venice and an Academy Award anyway. Critics at…

09/28/2026

NOTORIOUS (1946)
Directed by ALFRED HITCHOCK
WEDNESDAY September 30th 7PM
SATURDAY October 3rd 2PM / 7PM
16mm - B&W - 1h 42m

Alicia Huberman wakes up in last night's dress with a head like a cracked bell. When she turns over, Hitchcock turns the camera with her, and the man in the doorway swings slowly upright out of a sideways room. He has made her a drink she doesn’t want, but she drinks it anyway. Then he unwraps a phonograph record, sets the needle, and she hears her own voice arguing with her father. "We've had your bungalow wired for three months,” says Devlin.

The surveillance, ultimately, was a job interview. The record proves she's loyal — "I hate you all, and I love this country," she tells the convicted N**i who raised her — and loyalty is only half the job. The other half is a talent the men discuss with lowered eyes: "the young lady knows how to make friends with gentlemen." Her father's old associates are in Rio, and Uncle Sam wants to settle unfinished business. She has the name, the manners, the reputation… why waste a woman everyone already assumes is ruined? Whatever the job costs her, she was notorious before they found her.

The shooting script's revision pages are dated January 22, 1946 — the same day Harry Truman signed the directive creating the Central Intelligence Group, forerunner of the CIA. Hitchcock had settled on uranium for his MacGuffin months before Hiroshima, and when he and Ben Hecht asked a Caltech physicist how big an atomic bomb might be, the FBI, by Hitchcock's telling, spent the next several weeks with a keen interest in them. Notorious was written in the same months the permanent secret state came into being, and it understood the terms at once.

The terms are these: their secrets are classified; yours are evidence. Alicia is the most thoroughly documented person in the film and the least informed. Devlin, who has heard the record, tells her nothing, and when she all but begs him to forbid the assignment he fires back with the most Hitchcockian line ever filmed: "A man doesn't tell a woman what to do. A woman tells herself." He’s read her file, manipulated circumstance, and delivered her to the door of another man's house; the only thing left for her to decide is whether to walk through it, and that part, he assures her, is entirely hers. And it’s a bald-faced lie.

But Hitchcock makes it delicious. At the Sebastians' party the camera starts high above the staircase and floats down through the guests to the key hidden in Bergman's fist, and before anyone in the room, we know. Even the famous balcony kiss — two and a half minutes of Grant and Bergman refusing to let go, broken into pieces to slip past the Production Code's three-second rule — plays like something we're overhearing. We, the audience, are the best-informed agents in Rio. But every glance was placed for us, every secret timed to arrive when Hitch wanted it, and the one thing he's careful to leave us is the feeling that we chose where to look.

We think we're Devlin but really, we’re Alicia.

Hitchcock. Grant. Bergman. Need I say more? I can’t believe we haven’t screened this one yet.

09/25/2026

4Q26 Schedule! Tickets at www.kinonik.org

09/21/2026

Announcing the films for our Autumn Film Series, encompassing October 7th 2026 to January 7th 2027! Tickets for all shows are now available over at kinonik.org. Come join us!

Oct 7 & 10: Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller)
Oct 14 & 17: House of Games (David Mamet)
Oct 21 & 24: Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey)
Oct 28 & 31: The Handmaid's Tale (Volker Schlöndorff)
Nov 4 & 7: Duck Soup / Zero for Conduct (Leo McCarey / Jean Vigo)
Nov 11 & 24: A King in New York (Charlie Chaplin)
Nov 18 & 21: Inherit the Wind (Stanley Kramer)
Nov 25 & 28: Smoke (Wayne Wang)
Dec 2 & 5: The Killing (Stanley Kubrick)
Dec 9 & 12: Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa)
Dec 16 & 19: The Hustler (Robert Rossen)
Dec 23 & 26: Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch)
Dec 30 & Jan 2: Smiles of a Summer Night (Ingmar Bergman)

09/21/2026

ATLANTIC CITY (1980)
Directed by LOUIS MALLE
WEDNESDAY September 23rd 7PM
SATURDAY September 26th 2PM / 7PM
16mm LPP

In the fall of 1979, Louis Malle learned that a building near his set was scheduled for demolition. He moved a scene so the wreckage would land in the background… more than once. The city was tearing itself down faster than his shooting schedule, and he simply pointed the camera in the direction of collapse and called it production value. Every exterior in Atlantic City is a document of a place in its last weeks.

"So we never live, but we hope to live," wrote Blaise Pascal. "And, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so." There are accidents in dice, but not in the naming of characters.

Burt Lancaster was not the first choice for Lou Pascal. Henry Fonda was too frail to insure. Robert Mitchum, fresh out of cosmetic surgery, said he only played men under forty-five. Lancaster was sixty-six and not so choosy. He read John Guare's screenplay and said yes before Malle finished the pitch.

The film opens on Susan Sarandon at a sink, washing away the marine funk of her oyster bar shift with half of a lemon while Maria Callas sings on the radio. The camera pulls back to an old man watching her through the window from a dark room. It’s the architecture of their characters in a nutshell: Sally, preparing for an imagined future — a croupier's table in Monte Carlo — and Lou, who ran numbers for small-timers and has spent the decades since promoting himself, in the retelling, to a gangster he never was. Outside, wrecking crews clear ground that would become infamous in a few short years.

Out of the dust emerges Sally’s drifter ex-husband. Unwelcome, carrying something stolen and towing a great deal of trouble close behind — but perhaps a blessing in disguise. For a few days her future seems close enough to touch. Close enough, too, that Lou steps out of the past he'd invented and into a version of it that is suddenly, dangerously real. For a little while the whole dying town seems to shimmer with a borrowed life.

The casinos promised renewal and delivered a machine that moves money in one direction. The old resort had been a racket too — but a racket with a boardwalk on it, a place people actually walked. What replaced it wants its name on the building and nothing of the town beneath. Malle caught the swap at the exact instant it happened… and not unlike Malle, we’re also keeping an ear pricked for rumblings of demolition because we know the next sound that follows will be the hollow rattling of cans of gold spray paint.

Opposite a stellar Susan Sarandon, latter-day Burt Lancaster plays a small-time numbers runner narrating himself into a mythology that the city has already…

09/14/2026

BLUE COLLAR (1978)
Wednesday 9-16 7pm
Saturday 9-19 2pm 7pm

Coupla weeks ago a film reached theaters that Warner Bros. Discovery had tried to erase. Coyote vs. Acme — in which Wile E. Coyote sues the corporation whose exploding, misfiring products have maimed him for seventy years — was finished, tested well, and shelved for a thirty-million-dollar tax write-off, worth more to the conglomerate as a loss than as a movie. Paul Schrader's Blue Collar is that gag played in three layers.

First on screen: Zeke, Jerry, and Smokey — Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto — are Detroit autoworkers who rob their own union out of ordinary desperation. They come away with something worse than a small haul: a ledger which would damn the union as a criminal operation and no one to sell it to who isn't already part of what it indicts. A box of dynamite stamped ACME, right?

Second in the making. Directing for the first time off the success of Taxi Driver, Schrader got three combustible men into one film by meeting each alone and promising each he was the star. "Three bulls into a china shop," he admitted later. “You can't blame the bulls when things start getting wrecked." By the third day it was open war: a gun pulled, an ashtray flung into the lens, fists, a weaponized chair. He built this weird contraption, primed it himself, and it went off in his hands. He suffered a breakdown on set and quit the business for a while.

Third, and this is what the film is actually about: the worker whose every tool is sold to him by the company and built to fail. That is the Coyote's entire existence — infinite effort, elaborate schemes, each device ordered from the catalog and each one detonating in his own face. It's also the American shop floor as Blue Collar sees it, where every screw you turn turns against you. And it looks a lot like a chart of productivity versus wages since 1971.

The Coyote always gets up, opens the fresh catalog, and tries again. But Blue Collar is the gag played once, by people who don't get up — three men reaching for the lever, and the long moment after, when they understand the lever was wired to the floor beneath their feet.

In Paul Schrader’s first attempt at direction Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto are Detroit autoworkers who rob their own union and discover that…

09/08/2026

HUD (1963)
Wednesday 9/9 7pm
Saturday 9/12 2pm 7pm

Homer Bannon belongs to an endangered consensus which believes you spend enormous public effort to prevent a disaster before it lands, acting on the theory rather than the co**se. When Hud reached theaters, the United States sat at the high-water mark of exactly this kind of ambition: foot-and-mouth held at bay since 1929, screwworm on the verge of total eradication, brucellosis being ground out of the national herd one tested cow at a time.

Unglamorous collective machinery built on the premise that the right moment to stop a plague is before you can see it.
We’re living through the destruction of that machinery, during the quiet it produced, after a campaign to rebrand the quiet as proof it was never needed. The governing doctrine of the season, spoken from podiums as innovation and from benches as restraint, holds that regulating a theoretical danger is a kind of tyranny.

Hud Bannon makes this philosophy magnetic, which is the film's deepest honesty. Paul Newman is so beautiful, so easy, so right in his contempt for his father's scruples that audiences left theaters wanting to be him — a reaction that appalled Ritt and Newman both, who had set out to indict the man and instead minted an icon. James Wong Howe shot him in a black and white so lucid you can feel the heat coming off the dust, and the camera loves Hud the way the country would learn to love him: completely, and against its own interest.

Because Hud wins. Homer is right, and Homer is ruined, and the last sixty years are the slow tally of how thoroughly the son inherited the earth

Martin Ritt was firing on all cylinders when directing this elegantly managed four-hander. In one of his best turns as an antihero, Paul Newman plays a Texas…

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).…