Upcoming Movies in CineStudio

THE BEACHES OF AGNES (NR)
Oct 26 27 @ 7:30

(France, 2009) Produced, written, directed and edited by Agnès Varda. Directors of photography: Alain Sakot, Hélène Louvart, Julia Fabry, Jean-Baptiste Morin and Agnès Varda.
Celebrated as the French New Wave's only woman director, Agnès Varda is simply one of France's best filmmakers of any genre or gender. Now 81, she takes a look back at her life with the same sense of humor, wonder and curiosity that makes her movies (including Vagabond, One Sings, The Other Doesn't, Cleo from 5 to 7) so completely engaging. Much like the collectors of found objects in her documentary The Gleaners and I, Varda collects images and memories from the people and places of her life, from fellow filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and her late husband Jacques Demy, to the many beaches around the globe that she has called home. "For filmgoers determined to see cinema not just as mass entertainment but as an art form, The Beaches of Agnès arrives like an exhilarating call to arms." - Ann Hornaday, Washington Post. 109 min. www.cinemaguild.com/beachesofagnes

TAKING WOODSTOCK (R)
Oct 28 29 30 @ 7:30
Oct 31 @ 2:30, 7:30

(2009) Directed by Ang Lee. Screenplay by James Schamus, based on the memoir by Elliot Tiber. Cast: Demetri Martin, Emile Hirsch, Eugene Levy, Imelda Staunton, Liev Schreiber.
Taiwanese director Ang Lee turns an outsider's lens on America's mythic past, from the Wild West (Brokeback Mountain) to the sexual revolution (The Ice Storm). In Taking Woodstock, Lee is less interested in the iconic concert than in its effect on a shy, gay-but-closeted interior designer. Comedian Demetri Martin is real-life Elliot Tiber, who leaves Greenwich Village to help his Russian-Jewish parents when the Woodstock organizers encamp in their Catskills motel. We witness Elliot's often very funny journey towards liberation as he meets a cross-dressing Marine, a radical theater troupe who do a nude version of Chekhov's Three Sisters, and his tortured high school buddy recently back from Vietnam, brilliantly played by Emile Hirsch (Into the Wild). " Lee instills a sense of spontaneity and wonder in an event that has been otherwise ambered in its own myth...a surprisingly subversive movie" - Ann Hornaday, Washington Post. 110 min. www.takingwoodstockthemovie.com

THIRST (R)
Oct 30 31 @ 9:40

(South Korea, 2009) Directed by Park Chan-wook. Screenplay written by Park Chan-wook and Chung Seo-kyung, based on Émile Zola's Thérèse Raquin. Cast: Song Kang-ho, Kim Ok-vin, Kim Hae-sook, Shin Ha-kyun.
Thanks to a suggestion on Cinestudio's Facebook page you can spend your Halloween watching a superb new Korean horror film! Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes Film festival, Thirst is a moody, beautiful to look at, and bloody tale of a Catholic priest (popular Korean star Song Kang-ho) who is initiated into vampirism by a transfusion. Trying to feed his desire while causing no harm, the priest gets along by sipping from intravenous tubes and taking advantage of assisted suicides. Until, that is, he falls in love with a fragile young woman whose erotic vulnerability turns inevitably to bloodlust... "Its cinematic daring, narrative wildness and, yes, full-throated romance make it the best vampire love story of the year. (If you're over the age of 14, that is.)" - Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com. 133 min. www.thirstmovie.com

THE HEADLESS WOMAN (NR)
Nov 1 @ 2:30, 7:30
Nov 2 3 @ 7:30

(Argentina, 2009) Written and directed by Lucrecia Martel. Director of photography, Bárbara Álvarez. Cast: María Onetto, Claudia Cantero, Inés Efron, Daniel Genoud.
The home of world cinema in Hartford presents a new movie from Argentina, joining films from Japan, Germany, France, and South Africa on the current Cinestudio flyer. An elegant mystery by director Lucrecia Martel (and produced by Pedro Almodóvar) is both an homage to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, and a exploration of the political and historical amnesia of the wealthy classes of Argentina. A well-to-do blonde woman (María Onetto) answers her cell phone while driving home in a rainstorm. There is a crash and although she thinks she may have hit a young boy, she keeps driving. While her corrupt and entitled family colludes in pretending that nothing has happened, the haunted woman finds it increasingly hard to know real crimes from imagined ones. "Martel's vision is visually rich and complex...a precise tour de force performance by Maria Onetto." G. Allen Johnston, San Francisco Chronicle. 87 min. www.strandreleasing.com