Kinonik

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)

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.

Atlantic City (1980) 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…

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.

Blue Collar (1978) 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…

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

Hud (1963) 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…

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.

Miami Blues (1990) 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).…

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.

Out of the Past (1947) 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,…

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.

Ladyhawke (1985) 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…

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.

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) 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…

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.

WarGames (1983) 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…

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.

Red River (1948) 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…