CINEMA REBORN – JANUARY NEWSLETTER ANNOUNCING THE FIRST TITLES and MULTI-TICKET DISCOUNT VOUCHERS

 

Shirley MacLaine, Artists and Models

Cinema Reborn 2026 is off and running with screening details announced of our first four titles. We’ve taken over the Classic Matinees and Make it Musical weekend time slots at the Ritz (1-10 May) and the Lido (8-17 May) and we’ll be presenting four Australian premieres of four films from Hollywood’s Golden Age all in beautiful new 4K restorations. We’re also announcing here details of our multi-ticket concession price passes which you will be able to buy and use to book these titles as well as the eighteen titles to come. 

The Heiress (Dir. William Wyler, USA, 1949)                                                                               

‘It’s a peerless, super-controlled movie … Wyler’s greatness here is that he can hold the elements of the film in his palm without constricting the actors. He frees them.’ – Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

‘It’s immaculately acted and crafted – it’s one of the finest films ever made about nineteenth-century America.’ – Martin Scorsese

In mid-nineteenth-century New York, the timid and ungainly Catherine Sloper (Olivia de Havilland) lives with her wealthy father (Ralph Richardson), who spitefully measures her up against his beloved late wife. When Catherine is courted by the beguiling but fortuneless Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift), her father’s resistance leads to grievous revelations about the true feelings of both men. 

Montgomery Clift, Olivia De Havilland, The Heiress

Based on a stage play adaptation of the 1880 Henry James novel Washington Square, William Wyler’s elegantly mounted character study is a prime example of classical Hollywood filmmaking and among the director’s finest achievements. It was the biggest winner at the 1950 Oscars, taking home awards for art direction, costume design, Aaron Copland’s score and de Havilland’s performance.

For session times and bookings at the Randwick Ritz click here

For session times and bookings at the Hawthorn Lido click here

Only Angels Have Wings  (Dir. Howard Hawks, USA, 1939)

‘A completely achieved masterpiece … drawing together the main thematic threads of Hawks’s work in a single complex web.’ – Robin Wood

‘The most amiable great movie ever made.’ – Michael Sragow, The Criterion Collection

Cary Grant, Rita Hayworth, Only Angels Have Wings

In South America, a group of intrepid pilots led by the laconic Geoff Carter (Cary Grant) navigate treacherous conditions to deliver airmail across the Andes, facing the possibility of death with every flight. Director Howard Hawks drew from his own experiences with aviation in creating this seminal adventure drama, which represents a masterful synthesis of the themes of his 1930s output. Co-starring Jean Arthur as spirited outsider Bonnie Lee – whose emotional openness contrasts Geoff’s stoicism – alongside Richard Barthelmess and Rita Hayworth in her first major role, Only Angels Have Wings is perhaps the quintessential demonstration of Hawks’s unparalleled ability to balance existential preoccupations with dazzling action sequences, humour and warmth.

For session times and bookings at the Ritz click here

For session times and bookings at the Lido click here

Artists and Models (Dir. Frank Tashlin, USA, 1955)

‘Provided the Dean Martin–Jerry Lewis duo with its finest screen hour … a dizzily reflexive play on movie illusion.’ – Adrian Martin

Comic book addict Eugene (Jerry Lewis) has lurid dreams about the adventures of avian superhero Vincent the Vulture. In waking hours, his favourite character is sexy crime fighter Bat Lady; unbeknownst to Eugene, however, not only is the comic strip’s creator Abigail (Dorothy Malone) living in the very same apartment block, but Abigail’s flatmate – and model for Bat Lady – Bessie (Shirley MacLaine) has taken a shine to him. Meanwhile, Eugene’s own roommate, self-assured painter and ladies’ man Rick (Dean Martin), has his sights set on Abigail – and, thanks to Eugene’s habit of talking in his sleep, an idea for a sneaky new business opportunity … 

Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Artists and Models

Shot in glorious VistaVision and featuring colour schemes that only Hollywood could invent, Frank Tashlin’s musical romantic comedy Artists and Models satirises mid-’50s moral panics over the supposedly corrupting influence of comic books while offering a sublime canvas for Martin and Lewis’s legendary double act.

For session times and bookings at the Ritz click here

For session times and bookings at the Lido click here

One Hour With You  (Dir. Ernst Lubitsch, USA, 1932)

‘This charming, richly detailed film is a jewel in the director’s crown, and one of the finest musical comedies of the early sound era.’ – Wheeler Winston Dixon, Senses of Cinema

Maurice Chevalier, Jeannette MacDonald, One Hour With You

Even though this pre-code reimagining of his 1924 silent film The Marriage Circle was originally handed to a young George Cukor to direct, Ernst Lubitsch stepped back in midway through production to take the reins, lending his inimitable style to this comic tale of a loving couple simultaneously encountering opportunities for infidelity with each other’s unscrupulous friends. Brightened by a dash of Viennese operetta, some Parisian boulevard humour and recurring fourth-wall breaks from male lead Maurice Chevalier, Lubitsch’s musical also benefits from the gorgeous voice of fellow star Jeanette MacDonald and eight songs mostly composed by Oscar Straus and Leo Robin. Nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, One Hour With You is a fine example of the slyly subversive sex comedies that Lubitsch and his contemporaries perfected in early 1930s Hollywood – the likes of which would shortly be wiped out by the arrival of the censorious Motion Picture Production Code.

For session times and bookings at the Ritz click here

For session times and bookings at the Lido click here

MULTI-TICKET DISCOUNT PASSES

We are responding to public demand by introducing a discount pass for those who want to see the maximum of Cinema Reborn at the lowest possible price. Five ticket passes are $80 and ten ticket passes are a super-bargain at $140. Each ticket allows a maximum of two redemptions per session.

To buy a pass for sessions at the Ritz click here and fill in the box for which Voucher  you wish to purchase

To buy a pass for sessions at the Lido click here and fill in the box for which Voucher  you wish to purchase

Volunteers

Cinema Reborn always has a need for volunteers to help on our information desk and to monitor the door at the screenings. If you would like to know more send your name to cinemareborn2025@gmail.com and mention which city you are in and your availability (Nights, Weekends, Daytime). If you would like to know what it’s like to volunteer then here’s a glowing testimonial from one of those who worked on the 2025 program.

“I’m happy to share that I’ve been involved as a volunteer with the Cinema Reborn film festival 2025. Over the course of the festival, I assisted with the smooth running of ten film sections, welcomed audiences and supported venue operations. Grateful to be part of a passionate community celebrating film heritage and restoration. Special thanks to Grace Boschetti and Kevin Cassidy for creating a warm, supportive environment for all the volunteers; it made the experience even more memorable! Looking forward to more opportunities like this in the future!

If you know a young person who might enjoy being involved in the presentation of Cinema Reborn don’t hesitate to pass this newsletter to them and suggest they contact cinemareborn2025@gmail.com to make known their interest.

Charitable Donations

The major cost of presenting Cinema Reborn comes from the screening fees paid to archives and producers. Since our inception supporters have understood the need for continuing support to ensure that the annual season is able to present the very latest and very best international and Australian film restorations.

Tax deductible charitable donations have enabled us pay these fees and keep our admission charges to regular Ritz and Lido prices (with the lowest student concessions of any similar film-related event). We have once again set up a page via the Australian Cultural Fund to receive donations of any size,  from large or small. You can find it IF YOU CLICK ON THIS LINK

The Current Cinema - David Hare runs through his best films of 2025 - Richard Linklater and Kelly Reichardt star

 Let me start with the two best movies of last year. 

The four screens above show Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon wiping out the set with his performance of Larry Hart in Richard Linklater’s frankly dumbfounding six scene re-imagining of Larrys last Night in Sardi's to horn in for a moment on Rodger's new triumph, Oklahoma! with his new lyricist, the appalling but brilliant Oscar Hammerstein II, and Larry's loss to him. 

 

Coming as this does after watching Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague earlier this year, but made after that one, itself a totally winning and transparently affectionate song to Godard and 1960 from someone who loved and remembers it for those of us who lived through it and remember it too. 

 

With Blue Moon, I think Linklater has confected a six scene Kammerspiel in a single Sardi's set in a remembered 1943 on that night of the Oklahoma! premiere. The first fifty minutes are almost entirely a monologue in what might be the Oscar winner for the year, but it's more than a tribute from me to Ethan Hawke to characterize such a complex and paradoxical genius as Hart with so much finesse, never allowing the gloom and self-pity to overrun the brilliance, nor pure fancy free to undermine the razor sharp ear for dirty truths. His humour stands beyond everything and the delivery is up there in lights at the level of a Hildy Johnson/Ros Russell high speed soliloquy. 

 

Unlike Nouvelle Vague, in which Linklater so brilliantly and lovingly homages the cinephilia and the whole art of mise-en-scene, Blue Moon does a Dreyer-esque containment to the six movement structure of the kammerspiel and orchestrates the rivers of dialogue, all of it brilliant (because perhaps largely reported truth) with the sheer, simple grace of the cinema's most primal tools, slow diagonal tracks, tight close shots to medium close shots. Minimum resort to shot/reverse, constant and regular staging in depth to entail conversations and moveable lighting to encase and amplify the mood 

 

And of course the music. 

 

Kelly Reichardt's new movie, The Mastermind is another total surprise formally from Kelly for me if not quite at the smoothly-paced and endlessly rewarding movie about achievement, her previous Showing Up from 2023 in which the simple but painfully difficult act of creating art succeeds to give its own reward. 

 

The Mastermind spends the first half of the picture simply showing us the unravelling of a man (Josh O'Connor, above) who is both doomed to failure, but who it seems may have no other options in life. After the distinctive slow-cinema tempo of the first half the movie takes off into a catastrophic narrative disconnection for a man, by now alone without any badly needed love except for his remaining friend played by a wonderful John Magaro (with O'Connor, screen below). Magaro may be the last friend he'll ever have.

 

If you've got the patience for Kelly's pacing and quiet, clear headed and endlessly rewarding observational cinema this work satisfied me and moved me very greatly. Up there with Blue Moon for the year. 

 

Not everything in the USA is going to hell in 2025 if these two movies can come out of arthouse/studio streaming funding .

 

…and now some more.

 

Paula Beer, Miroirs No. 3

Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3. Paula Beer, as usual radiant, and joined deftly if too late in the piece by the very appealing Enno Trebs with whom she was coupled initially in Petzold’s last film Afire/Rote Himmel from 2023. That film for me is a masterpiece. If  Miroirs No. 3 doesn’t come near its emotional intensity and impact, I can only think Petzold wanted to make a return to his blurred and displaced/missing identities pictures from earlier titles like Barbara and Phoenix. Regardless, I’ll watch everything he makes.

 

And a callout for del Toro’s big, blousy Frankenstein. What can I say? Oscar Isaac gives a characterization of the doctor that puts him beyond Oscar territory. Like Ethan Hawke, albeit somewhat younger, Isaac really is a dedicated actor’s actor, peerless in appeal - the first movie I watched him in was the Coen’s very fine Inside Llewyn Davis. I also found him/find him totally babe-licious. Never hurts does it? 

 

Oscar Isaac, Frankenstein

Back to Frankenstein, is there anything more wonderful than Del Toro’s sumptuous love for and recreation of the sublime Romantic world of Gothic Horror. Is there any greater genre? And his work continues, with Universal that studio's fantastic transition of 20s Weimar Germany with all its magic and miracle then to America’s and Laemmle’s Universal Studios literally rebirthing the total UfA tradition. Del Toro’s new movie is not his best - I find a few too many gestural narrative steps that seem redundant to the pacing. But who else is doing this stuff anymore? And so well?

 

And a mention in anticipation of P.T.Anderson’s new gig, One Battle After Another which will be viewed when the UHD disc arrives next week.

 

Also running high, Ozon’s big return to seductively transgressive form with Quand Vient l’Automne. It’s as he were if in radical gay brotherhood with his younger colleague, the great Alain Guiraudie, whose hilariously subversive social undermining takes the bejesus out of French Provincial bovinity in Miséricordia in which only the old Catholic priest seems to get laid.

 

Quand Vient l’Automne

The Goddess knows the world needs all the anarchists and transgressives it can get in these terrible dying days of rotting, corrupt Western Societies.

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison takes another look at NOUVELLE VAGUE (Richard Linklater, USA, 2024)

Nouvelle Vague, the new Richard Linklater film, has arrived. It is an Academy frame black and white effort, in English sub-titled French, claiming to present the break out film-making of the sixties as we follow Jean-Luc Godard putting together À bout de souffle/Breathless.

Lookalikes appear as the celebrities of the French film making scene - Jean Cocteau, (“Art is not a business. It’s a priesthood”) Jean-Pierre Melville in his cowboy hat or Roberto Rossellini hitting up his driver for a loan. They are filmed in the original locations in the Paris of Linklater’s After Midnight. There's Guillaume Marbeck/Godard’s contemporaries grouped outside the Le Champo display with a Jerry Lewis poster prominent, a script conference on a bench in Richelieu-Drouot Metro, wheeling Matthieu Penchinat/Raoul Coutard’s camera concealed as a baby carriage  down the Champs Elysées following Zoey Deutch in her Jean Seberg Herald-Tribune T-Shirt or the unit playing pin ball in (is that?) the bar where they launched into spontaneous dance in Bande à part. Visitors on the nude scene shoot include Georges de Beauregard because he’s the producer and José Bénazeraf because he’s a lech.  There is a nice moment where Benjamin Clery, their Pierre Rissient, has a camera set up calculated to film the Latin Quarter street lights coming on. 

Aubry Dullin & Zoey Deutch and the Arc de Triomphe

Linklater was clearly aiming at evoking Godard’s free-wheeling style, which was so electrifying to those sixties audiences I saw sit stony faced through the earlier, master-crafted classic French films which I absorbed with such enthusiasm.

Linklater is likely to bluff viewers who didn’t live through that era but I’m continually distracted by departures from narratives with which I’m familiar. The story was that Godard made off with Cahiers du Cinéma’s petty cash to bankroll his first attempt at filmmaking. Here he uses it to get to the Cannes festival. We heard Truffaut's credited original story for A bout de souffle was a handwritten page which he scribbled to provide name prestige from his bonanza success with Les 400 Coups to fundraising.  

I haven’t handled a copy of the film but wide screen was firmly established by 1959 and the film's projections that I watched all seemed to fit comfortably on that.  We heard that Godard’s first cut was stunningly boring, so he just went through and lopped out the bits he didn’t like, joining up what was left and claiming to have invented the jump cut, which incidentally was already part of the classic film vocabulary. Look at William Wyler’s 1958 archetypically traditional The Big Country! What about the nose job Belmondo got between his earlier Godard short and their feature.Throw in an inexplicable glimpse of Françoise Arnoul’s birthday party.  

History is repeating itself here when unknown Aubry Dullin and lively visiting U.S. starlet Zoey Deutch get to animate the original movie star characters. 

Guillaume Marbeck & Richard Linklater

I’m a fan of Linklater and I can see the appeal of his version to the director of Dazed & Confused or Boyhood  but personally I’m getting over-familiar with the Godard narrative - the Richard Gere Breathless, Kristen Stewart in Seberg. By and large, I find Michel Hazanavicius’ 2017 Godard mon amour, with Lou Garrel as a  cantankerous Jean-Luc, battling middle-aged celebrity, more convincing. He always struck me as someone disturbingly undisciplined, who lucked out because he recruited talented people like Seberg and Belmondo, Raoul Coutard and Michel Legrand and I don’t know that we need two Godard bios, while Agnes Varda’s beautiful study of Jaques Demy,  Jacquot de Nantes, is all but unknown.

Maybe I’d have regarded the uneven J-LG output with more sympathy if he hadn’t been unable to come up with the names of any of the Monogram movies he’d dedicated  À bout de souffle to, when called on, a plausible test of poltroonhood.

********************************

For another report on the film click here to read Rod Bishop's thoughts

The Best Awards Night in Australia - Nominations for the Film Critics Circle of Australia Awards - All welcome - 11 February at the Rose of Australia Hotel Erskineville

N0MINATIONS FOR THE BEST AUSTRALIAN FILMS OF 2025

 

 

BEST FILM

 

Inside

INSIDE                                                                                               

PRODUCERS: KATE GLOVER, MARIAN MacGOWAN

KANGAROO ISLAND                                                                     

PRODUCERS: TIMOTHY DAVID, PETER HANLON, BETTINA HAMILTON, DANIEL M ROSENBERG, LEONA CICHON

THE SURFER                                                                                    

PRODUCERS: LEONORA DARBY, JAMES HARRIS, ROBERT CONNOLLY, JAMES GRANDISON, BRUNELLA COCCHIGLIA, NATHAN KLINGHER, NICOLAS CAGE                                                                     

THE CORRESPONDENT                                                               

PRODUCER: CARMEL TRAVERS            

BRING HER BACK                                                                          

PRODUCERS: SAMANTHA JENNINGS, KRISTINA CEYTON

 

BEST DIRECTOR

Bruce Beresford

BRUCE BERESFORD, THE TRAVELLERS

LORCAN FINNEGAN, THE SURFER 

DANNY PHILIPPOU, MICHAEL PHILIPPOU, BRING HER BACK   

KRIV STENDERS, THE CORRESPONDENT

CHARLES WILLIAMS, INSIDE

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A MALE ACTOR IN A LEADING  

ROLE

Richard Roxburgh, The Correspondent

LUKE BRACEY,THE TRAVELLERS

BRYAN BROWN, THE TRAVELLERS

VINCENT MILLER, INSIDE

GUY PEARCE, INSIDE

RICHARD ROXBURGH, THE CORRESPONDENT

BEST SCREENPLAY

Kiah Roache-Turner

PETER DUNCAN, THE CORRESPONDENT

DANNY PHILIPPOU, BILL HINZMAN, BRING HER BACK

KIAH ROACHE-TURNER, BEAST OF WAR

CHARLES WILLIAMS, INSIDE

                                                                      

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Radek, Ladczuk

ANDREW COMMIS ACS, INSIDE

GEOFFREY HALL ACS, THE CORRESPONDENT

RADEK LADCZUK, THE SURFER

AARON McLISKY ACS, BRING HER BACK
MARK WAREHAM ACS, BEAST OF WAR

 

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A MALE ACTOR IN A

SUPPORTING ROLE

Jai Courtney, Dangerous Animals

JAI COURTNEY, DANGEROUS ANIMALS

COSMO JARVIS, INSIDE

JULIAN MCMAHON, THE SURFER

JONAH WREN PHILLIPS, BRING HER BACK

 

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEMALE ACTOR IN A LEAD

ROLE

Rebecca Breeds, Kangaroo Island

REBECCA BREEDS, KANGAROO ISLAND

SALLY HAWKINS,  BRING HER BACK

SUSIE PORTER,  THE TRAVELLERS

DAISY RIDLEY, WE BURY THE DEAD

LILY WHITELEY, KANGAROO

 

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEMALE ACTOR IN A

SUPPORTING ROLE

Deborah Mailman

ADELAIDE CLEMENS, KANGAROO ISLAND

MARTA DUSSELDORP , WITH OR WITHOUT YOU

DEBORAH MAILMAN, KANGAROO

BROOKE SATCHWELL, KANGAROO

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

BUT ALSO JOHN CLARKE, DIRECTOR: LORIN CLARKE, PRODUCER: RICHARD KEDDIE

EDGE OF LIFE, DIRECTOR: LYNETTE WALLWORTH, PRODUCER: JO-ANNE McGOWAN

JOURNEY HOME, DAVID GULPILIL, DIRECTORS: MAGGIE MILES, TRISHA MORTON-THOMAS, PRODUCERS: RACHEL CLEMENTS, JIDA GULPILIL, LLOYD GARRAWURRA, TRISHA MORTON-THOMAS, MAGGIE MILES

THE WOLVES ALWAYS COME AT NIGHT , DIRECTOR: GABRIELLE BRADY, PRODUCERS: JULIA NIETHAMMER, ARIUNAA TSERENPIL, RITA WALSH

YURLU | COUNTRY, DIRECTOR: YAARA BOU MELHEM, PRODUCER: YAARA BOU MELHEM, MAITLAND PARKER, TOM BANNIGAN PARKER, TOM BANNIGAN

                                                                                                            

BEST MUSIC (ORIGINAL SCORE)

Cornel Wilczek (left)

MATTEO ZINGALES, JOSIE MANN, KANGAROO

ARIEL MARX , KANGAROO ISLAND

FRANCOIS TETAZ, THE SURFER

CORNEL WILCZEK, BRING HER BACK

MICHAEL YEZERSKI, DANGEROUS ANIMALS 

 

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN

Sheree Phillips

NICHOLAS DARE, TOGETHER

ESTHER ROSENBERG, BEAST OF WAR

FIONA DONOVAN APDG, THE CORRESPONDENT

VANESSA CERNE, BRING HER BACK

SHERREE PHILLIPS, WENT UP THE HILL

 

BEST EDITING

Kasra Rassoulzadegan

TONY CRANSTOUN, THE SURFER

VERONIKA JENET, THE CORRESPONDENT

GEOFF LAMB, BRING HER BACK

KASRA RASSOULZADEGAN, DANGEROUS ANIMALS   

STEPHEN EVANS, KIAH ROACHE-TURNER,REGG SKWARKO,                            BEAST OF WAR       

                                                                                                     

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

Lesbian Space Princess

LESBIAN SPACE PRINCESS, DIRECTORS: EMMA HOUGH HOBBS, LEELA VARGHESE, PRODUCER:TOM PHILLIPS

MAGIC BEACH, DIRECTOR: ROBERT CONNOLLY, PRODUCERS: CHLOE BRUGALE, ROBERT CONNOLLY, KATE LAURIE, LIZ KEARNEY

THE LOST TIGER, DIRECTOR: CHANTELLE MURRAY, PRODUCERS: NADINE BATES, RYAN GREAVES, CHANTELLE MURRAY, KRISTEN SOUVLIS

 

SPECIAL AWARD IN HONOUR OF DAVID STRATTON

 

THE DAVID STRATTON AWARD FOR INTERNATIONAL

CINEMA

BUGONIA, DIRECTOR: YORGOS LANTHIMOS

EMILIA PEREZ, DIRECTOR: JACQUES AUDIARD

I’M STILL HERE, DIRECTOR: WALTER SALLES

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, DIRECTOR: PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON

Emilia Perez

DATE: WEDNESDAY 11TH FEBRUARY 2026

 

TIME 7PM FOR 7.30 START

 

VENUE: THE ROSE OF AUSTRALIA HOTEL, ERSKINEVILLE 

1 Swanson Street Erskineville (just near Erskineville Station)

 

TICKETS: $35 PER HEAD (INCLUDES A LIGHT SUPPER)

 

CASH ONLY EVENT: BOOKING ESSENTIAL. BOOK @ filmcriticsaust@bigpond.com

 

DRESS CODE CASUAL/LOUNGE

 

DRESS CODE: CASUAL/LOUNGE