On YouTube - David Hare excavates the title song and dance of LES GIRLS (George Cukor, USA, 1957)

In advance of attempting a critique of Cukor’s 1960 HELLER IN PINK TIGHTS here’s the “Les Girls” number from LES GIRLS three years prior.

The choreography isn’t really choreography, it’s movement around and up and over a set designed to articulate the cinemascope frame, while the camera barely ceases moving. Genius that he was, George Hoyningen-Huene does the entire wardrobe in black and white defiantly challenging color to make a return. It does, only later in the reds of the lining from the three principal actress's gowns who sing and dance what is in essence the title song.

The movie abounds in sequences like these, pure mise-en scène both punctuating the narrative action and continually looking back on the three disparate directions of Kelly’s attention. It’s a miraculous film of many parts, and in a sense defiantly NOT a musical.

So indeed is HELLER IN PINK TIGHTS, a movie I’ve always asociated in concert with Renoir’s 1953 THE GOLDEN COACH in which art and performance and life and action and comedy and tragedy are knitted together defiantly in a purely cinematic form. I cannot help but cite Cukor as Renoir’s equal in so many ways when they both come to directing the theatre as life. And life as performance.

The Current Cinema - Overwhelming mayhem unleashed in BY ANY MEANS (Elegance Bratton, USA, 2026)

Spoiler alert. The whole plot is given away

OK. First start with the last. At the end of By Any Means there are forty five people credited as producers, executive producers, co-executive producers and co-producers. There is also a person credited as “Associate Producer”. With all that creative input how could anything go wrong.

 

I don’t suppose it does in a way. There are parallel openings to the movie. First we see Marc Wahlberg taking a baseball bat to a man who is tied up, battered and bruised. Wahlberg, playing gangster Greg Scarpa, wants names of the battered man’s criminal associates. He gives them up and Wahlberg continues to lay into him with the baseball bat. OK…we’ve got the message he’s a cold-blooded sadist as well as everything else we’ll discover about him. It took a moment to recognise Wahlberg because here he sports a rather prominent false nose. If you follow it, it's been on the online low-rent media for over a year.…

 

Cut to  an African American in a suit walking down a corridor.  We learn he’s an FBI Agent and quickly discover he’s a token black guy. He’s sidelined and ignored.  We learn that in the days when and where the movie is set, 1960s Mississippi, since the FBI was created a half a century or more ago, there have been barely a couple of handfuls of black FBI Agents. Agent Wayne Strider (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II)  has asked for a transfer to an office in the south where he is treated mostly with disdain and not allocated any meaningful detective work. He wants to take on the Ku Klux Klan but it’s not until the regional FBI manager, in some desperation, decides that he’s going to play fast and loose that things start to happen.  Scarpa has a sideline as a fixer for the FBI when all else fails. He and Strider are given the job to find the KKK killers of civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer. Then the mayhem really starts. 

 

Scarpa is a psychopath. After the initial bashing, in case you weren’t convinced he might have an evil streak, he shoots a traffic cop for basically no reason at all.  Then a series of extremely violent scenes take place until some kind of honour is finally served. Scarpa goes back to his criminal life in New Jersey and Strider accepts you have to make compromises to bring some people to some kind of justice. That’s it…. another film that’s inspired by true American events…

Screening somewhere - Rod Bishop retrieves the overlooked THIS MUST BE THE PLACE (Paolo Sorrentino, Italy, 2011)

Robert Smith, the creator, writer, and vocalist of British band The Cure has made no public comment about this Sorrentino film. 

But Smith’s face-painted, lip-sticked, gothic, ragged visage has clearly been lifted by the Italian director for Sean Penn’s Cheyenne: a dissolute, squeaky-voiced, former rock god who gave up the profession after a couple of young brothers committed suicide from listening to his angst-ridden “depressed songs for depressed kids”.

Sorrentino has said: “I saw [Robert Smith] backstage after a concert in Rome…it’s a disconcerting dichotomy to see a guy of fifty years with the look of a sixteen-year-old, you don’t know what to focus on. Apparently Robert Smith keeps this look because his wife loves it, so he has that look all day, not only when he goes to a concert.”

Cheyenne is living a lonely life in a Dublin mansion with his wife Jane (Francis McDormand), who loves him and his “look”. If the idea of a Robert Smith lookalike shacking up with Francis McDormand seems unbelievable, well yes, it is. Sorrentino clearly knows it’s unbelievable, but he has only just started playing games with his audience.

Unfortunately, the first act is almost as bad as the film’s title. Sometimes, a song title for a film title isn’t a great idea, even if this one does come from Talking Heads. Serious audience endurance is required for the rambling first 40 mins, but the film does eventually take a dramatic tonal shift as Cheyenne travels to New York to see his dead father, a former survivor of Auschwitz. Cheyenne then enlists the help of a veteran Nazi hunter (Judd Hirsch), clearly modelled on Simon Wiestenthal, and pursues his father’s on-the-run Nazi tormenter, through New Mexico and Utah. 

It’s incongruous, of course – seeing a Robert Smith look-alike drag his suitcase through desert and mountain landscapes, to take revenge on a World War II monster, but Sorrentino pulls off a final confrontation between the goth and the 95-year-old Nazi, that’s as memorable as most things in cinema.

Made on a budget of $28 million, it grossed a ridiculous $144,000 in the USA, despite the presence of Oscar-winners Penn and McDormand and a soundtrack and live performance from David Byrne. 

However, it did take $8 million in Italy and close to a million in both Germany and France. It’s a film about the USA for Europeans.

The weirdness of This Must Be the Place is reminiscent of a small group of other notable Americana road movies written and directed by Europeans that tanked at the box office.

US friends of mine were scathing about Paris, Texas (1984) from the German Wim Wenders, sneering at what they perceived as an Americana fetishization of billboard signage. It didn’t appear that way to Europeans, however, who promptly gave the film the Palme d’Or.

The prolific Spanish director Bigus Luna also had a go at Americana in Reborn (1982). Dennis Hopper is a television evangelist who enlists the Italian mafia to supply him with a stigmatist to help him reap in donations at Texan church meetings. A real Italian woman who can’t speak English but who can bleed at Christ’s crucifixion wounds turns up, and Hopper’s evangelist abruptly turns virtually catatonic. Reborn is almost certainly the only time in the cinema where three petrol pump jockeys appear as The Three Wise Men. The film never made it past VHS and is now only available in dodgy bootlegs.

The crazed Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, twice winner of the Palme d’Or, went all Americana in 1993 with the surrealist Arizona Dream, casting Johnny Depp as a flying fish expert who loves listening to the dreams of fish while working for New York’s Department of Fish and Game. He journeys to Douglas, Arizona, to work in a car dealership (run by Jerry Lewis) and becomes romantically involved with a husband-killer (Faye Dunaway), who is trying to build a flying machine, and with her daughter (Lili Taylor) who plays accordion to her pet turtles. It’s a film about magic realism and dreamers, and was very cooly received in the USA and elsewhere. 

Made for a budget of $19 million, it played in only three cinemas in the USA for a ridiculous gross of $112,000. The New Zealand box office gross was $24. Europeans, however, gave it the Special Jury Prize at Berlin.

These weird USA road movies by Europeans for Europeans - despite the star power of Penn, Depp, Dunaway, McDormand, Hopper, Jerry Lewis and David Byrne - haven’t come within a coo-ee of covering their budgets. Paris, Texas did the best, even though Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski can’t be classed as star power. It grossed $3.5 mill worldwide and on a budget of $1.8 mill, it might have broken even. But for the backroom executives, $3.5 mill is a poor return on a Palme d’Or winner.

But who wants to live in a world where Arizona Dream, This Must Be the Place, Reborn and Paris, Texas can’t be made?

On 4K Warner Archive Blu-ray disc - David Hare unpacks NIGHT AND DAY (Michael Curtiz, USA, 1946)

Screens from Warner Archive’s new 4K to Blu-ray of the perplexing festival of illusion and pretence that is Michael Curtiz’ “biographical” movie of Cole Porter, NIGHT AND DAY from 1946.

The screen (above) of Cary Grant as Cole and Monty Woolley as himself is the first gesture of straightwashing that, given Code enforcement buries the homosexuality of either/or both personalities.

But this is only the beginning for this two hour excursion into artifice, illusion, denial, reinvention and massaging via screenplay and production design. The only thing Curtiz and the crew appear to render naturalistically is the presentation of the 23 Porter numbers that are beaded throughout the action of the picture in what can basically be called diegetic form. In other words, in situ. But even here the shots only show Cary/Cole playing the piano, while the full might of the giant brassy Warner Orchestra blasts away in synch, albeit nowhere to be seen.

The artifice keeps multiplying with the advent of new characters. In an early sequence set in France after the war (Great) the movie introduces a French chanteuse, “Gabrielle”, played by an almost unrecognizable Eve Arden. For the one and only time in her career, Eve opens her mouth and starts speaking with a broad French accent. Or is it? As she moves around the set gesticulating as only Arden could the accent seems, and in fact is, perfectly genuine and convincing. Arden finishes the sequence with a rendition of “I’m Unlucky at Gambling” sung perfectly in French. We never see her again.(More’s the pity.) 

The movie casts some still fresh actors in bits, like Dorothy Malone here in short bobbed hairstyle and a polished quietly spoken New England Patrician accent. Other performers include Jane Wyman in Auburn Blonde rinse, directed to shout her lines. At one point Cole/Cary is introduced to an up and coming vedette, played by Mary Martin, as “herself” as she takes on an ingenue bit. She’s the one and only “real” thing or characterization in the picture. Other delights include Paul Cavanaugh, a Warner second stringer sporting a blonde rinsed marcel wave. And Sig Ruman also playing himself, badly.

But by far the strangest and most intriguing aspect of the film’s quasi-realist-artifice is the color design. I cannot figure who determined it but the picture color codes major sequences with massed blocked single color. Thus in an early number an unnaturally acid Blue is sprayed to cover the entire background of the frame effectively creating a kind of geometric picture frame effect for the sequence. The wardrobe has been put together in a combination of drabs and secondary acids including that eye burning blue, morbid taupes, and dirty greens. Only when the show moves outdoors do we get a “natural” palettte. The duality seems rigorously enforced.

For the players, Curtiz manages to horsewhip almost everyone into brisk delivery, given the doggedly adulatory nature of the biographical screenplay and the downplaying of Cole’s wife, played by Alexis Smith with a gloomy resignation. The strangest performer in the show is Cary Grant who looks more often than not like he’s definitely not enjoying the job. Gossip records major clashes between Curtiz and Grant all through the shoot But so did Errol Flynn who loathed Curtiz’ dictatorial method. In Errol’s case the whip cracking paid off. With Cary it doesn’t always. But all this makes for compelling, sometimes hair raising viewing.

Nobody can call this movie in any way a success, but the presentation of 23 numbers is an unalloyed joy, and the sheer perversity that seem to cloak the picture in supernatural shade is frankly irresistible.

The new 4K master and disc is, as always with Warner Archive, flawless.

For much more comment and reaction scroll down to this item on David's Facebook Page where his thoughts were first posted.

The Current Cinema - The Editor talks to Jim Jarmusch about his new film FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER

 This interview was recorded on 1st April 2026.

GG: Good to see you again.

JJ: We’ve met before?

GG: I suppose I could say I’m surprised you don’t remember, but it was maybe your first brush with European celebrity at the Mannheim Film Festival in 1980. You screened Permanent Vacation and I saw it and invited it to the Melbourne Film Festival.

JJ: Now I remember…. How did the screening go?

GG: You never sent the film. You gave it to the Australian Film Institute for a season of New York Independents they ran. Lindsay Smith put it all together.

JJ: Oh… now I remember. Lindsay, huh? He used to spell his name L-I-N-Z-E-E. 

GG: Right. I suppose the AFI must have offered you more money than the MFF which offered only honour and glory in those days.

JJ: I know you are joking. Nobody paid you anything to screen your film in those days. Festivals and everyone else thought, as you said, you should be grateful for their attention.

GG: Things have changed.

JJ: Not everything.

GG: That’s right. You have just done another ‘film a sketches’  as the French called them. Did you like all those films made by the French and the Italians in the 60s and 70s when people like Godard, Pasolini, Truffaut, Visconti, Fellini, Louis Malle, Roberto Rossellini, Polanski, Wajda and more made episodes?

JJ: Loved ‘em. Really smart. Did you see Rogopag? Rossellini, Godard, Pasolini and someone else. RO – GO – PA-G. Who was the final G? 

GG: Ugo Gregoretti. Never heard of again. I often wondered though whether Mystery Train started out as a movie where you were going to intercut the stories but instead just kept it as three separate ones.

JJ: I don’t remember.

GG: So why another film a sketches at this time.

JJ: Well I wanted to make a movie about just how complicated families can be in all their rich diversity and finally it came down to something about a dad with a secret, a daughter with a secret and a brother and sister who uncover a secret. There you are …and Bob’s your uncle.

GG: Very witty. The common element joke about the fake or not Rolex watches was rather good and in each there are also the skateboarders and some jokes about plumbing and the local water.

JJ: Hey you picked that up? Well done.

GG: Too easy. I did like the moment when Tom Waits as the apparently somewhat befuddled father in the New Jersey episode assures his two children that he’s not taking any drugs and then reels off  the names of about fifteen drugs he’s ‘not taking’. 

JJ: Yes. Tom enjoyed doing that scene.

GG: Waits was one of your early stalwarts, a go to for you? By that I mean do you write parts that you know he’ll fit like a glove. 

JJ: Well as I said once before, Tom and I have a kindred aesthetic… An interest in unambitious people, marginal people. 

GG: Except in Father, Mother Sister Brother there’s a trick ending…

JJ: Agree that was a bit odd ….but the ep lacked oomph until that moment…

GG: Yes you couldn’t really get why the two middle-aged kids had decided to pay a visit. It’s one of three stories about families set in three different parts of the world. The backblocks of New Jersey, a nondescript part of Ireland and Paris. You do get around. One other common trope is the overhead shot of the tables and the food and drink. It’s sort of an abstract image you use to denote time passing.

JJ: Yeah

GG: In the Irish story the food on the table doesn’t seem to disappear. Nobody seems to actually eat anything. Is that so that the mother can give them a doggy bag to take home..

JJ: That’s right…

GG: Was the Irish story located somewhere else when you first wrote it…

JJ: Not really. I think all three have a universal quality …but then reality intrudes and you have to follow the money and go where all those thirty or forty executive producers lead you.

GG: Like Ireland. You never filmed there before?

JJ: Never.

GG: So why this time?

JJ: Come on. Irish film money is excellent. They really want major filmmakers to go there. They were happy I was willing to go as well.

GG; Did they ask if you had an ‘Irish story’. Irish in quotation marks.

JJ: I said sure I’ve got this great story about a mother who sees her two daughters once a year. It’s very Irish. 

Vicki Krieps, Cate Blanchett, Charlotte Rampling
in the Mother story

GG: Was it cast before the Irish money came through?

JJ: I don’t quite recall the timing… but I know I always wanted Cate Blanchett… and Vicki Krieps has been in my sights since Phantom Thread…  and I always remember the way she responded when she was asked about the MeToo movement and said “Maybe it's very European, but I always see both sides. I feel very sorry for the people who have been harassed, but I also feel very sorry for the people who have lived a life where they have been harassing people.”

GG: Wow…an exact quote. You don’t think she should have had an Irish accent…or indeed any of the three women, including Charlotte Rampling, should have had Irish accents?

JJ: Didn’t worry me …and nobody in Ireland mentioned  it after the film won the Golden Lion at Venice. 

GG: The Paris episode is the most enigmatic. The others are about reunions but this one focuses on discovering something secret. 

JJ: Yes. It’s the one I most enjoyed making. What’s not to like about making a movie in Paris almost like the New Wave guys did way back. Shooting in the streets, natural dialogue, unknown actors…and you’re in Paris for a month or so.

GG: Good to catch up.

JJ: You too. Stay safe…

Possibly Soon at the Cinema or possibly on Apple TV - From New Zealand - David Hare recommends DEAD MAN'S WIRE (Gus Van Sant, USA, 2025)

Al Pacino

Three actors on a telephone hammering out life and death: Al Pacino, Bill Skarsgard and Dacre Montgomery from Gus Van Sant's new picture, Dead Man's Wire, based on the real-life kidnap and holdup of a loan shark’s son by Tony Kiritsis in Indianapolis 1977. Lumet's justly famous 1975 movie Dog Day Afternoon seems to also forecast the same mode d'emploie by the real-life Indiana kidnapper two years' later which is the basis for Gus' movie. 

Bill Skarsgard

Without wishing to stretch too far into the winds of metacinematic narrative with history, the reprisal of Pacino in this superb new movie makes it impossible to miss a now totally alienated America in the thrall of late era Death-cult Capitalist greed and mindless International land-grab wars. Gus really gets the era and tone just as firmly as he gets the past with all his humanity at his disposal to make us care about these people. A lot. 

It's a real joy to see Gus out again in a picture that's entirely cut to his cloth with all the illustrious tics of his own style and mise-en-scene in play. Sequences of highly agitated long take shouting-out drama within four walls and a telephone start to give way to moments of apparent serenity before the next storm in Austin Kolodney's terrific screenplay. Just as "Kiritsis"/Skarsgard seems to catch each small concession in his baroquely insane negotiations with the FBI and Police to reach apparent short term agreements, Gus pumps a key music track each time into the audio to create an orgasm-like hold-still meditation on all-these too-brief moments of satisfaction. The score is a vibrant '70's hip compendium knockout curated by Danny Elfman. 

 

Dacre Montgomery

The picture had not yet had a general release in this territory since its debut at Venice last year until this January. May the gods of success attend to this terrific movie penned so movingly and richly by a real movie hero of mine so long absent since his last great work.

On 4K UHD - David Hare recommends "the 4K of the year" - BEN HUR (William Wyler, USA, 1959)

Another recent release is Warner's huge and vastly gorgeous, manifestly detailed new 4K two disc (Plus third BD extras disc) steelbook set of 1959's Ben Hur, directed by the great William Wyler with a superb score (some think his best) from Miklos Rosza, second unit direction by the great Yakima Canutt for the Chariot Race and a cast of thousands including grand muscle and toga work from Chuck Heston and Stephen Boyd.

On those two let's remind ourselves of second string writer Gore Vidal (one of at least four more) on outlining the motivation for the two old adolescent friends, Judah (Heston) and Messala (Boyd) now reuniting after a youthful love affair only to be ripped apart by Judah's monotheistic zealotry. The first embrace has Heston literally slathering and drooling over Messala's neck. This barely concealed queerness gets another huge workout in the late Act 1 galley slave sequence when Jack Hawkins, fresh from The Bridge on the River Kwai takes to adopting Chuck as his "son" (one word for it) , fortuitously indeed as this grace and favour ultimately leads the "hero" into getting the rounds of a lifespan to shadow his near invisible contemporary, Jesus Christ. The movie darts around the religiosity very nicely but that's Wyler for you. A total expert at extracting the essences of narrative from the acres of flowery prose in the original novel.

Whatever else you want to make of it the show is genuinely epic with absolutely expert, tight direction from Wyler who stuck with the seemingly unwieldy 2.65 Aspect Ratio of the new Metro65 anamorphic 70mm format which manages to set everything up basically from (rarely) full wide to medium wide to occupy the focal depth with detail of importance while the script blocks and stages the players with long takes and very great, limpid technique. Wyler has a very attractive tic, not noticed by me previously, of doing edits from wider to closer shots of the same actor while speaking or listening to animate what Gore Vidal and the other credited and uncredited writers kept of the original thousand pages Lew Wallace nightmare.

The movie, I must confess has the very grand status of having introduced me to my first stirrings of homosexuality as a boy child, in particular the raft scene with Chuck and Jack Hawkins cut loose from the wreckage on the Roman barge. Hawkins and me both could not get enough of Chuck's very fine figure at this stage of his career (the year after he got Welles the gig to make Touch of Evil at Universal.) If anyone could ever be said to have tamed a performance of range and sublety out of Chuck, it was Wyler.

All the cast members are right, and fine, even Dame Frank Thring, late of Melbourne, playing Balthasar as a screaming dinner party queen. It works. He works, and everyone around him works with it. Even in his first shot and dialogue Thring manages to eyeball-undress Chuck and lick him remotely from top to toe in five seconds of screen time.

Movies like this don't get made any more. They're actually too sophisticated and the audiences are no longer there to really "get" them.

I recommend this as 4K of the year so far.

Streaming on SBS On Demand - Barrie Pattison stumbles across REALITY (Tina Satter, USA, 2023)

 

Sydney Sweeney as Reality Winner, Reality

Reality is very much a movie of the moment. It features rising star Sydney Sweeney (of the Jeans Commercial furore) and puts her up as a Trump era whistle blower. 

The twenty five year old real life subject, who is genuinely named Reality Winner, was ex-military,  working as N.S.A. translator because of her Farsi and Pashto language skills (we never do find out about that) while waiting for her military deployment. 

We watch as FBI agents arrive on her suburban tract home lawn, producing a search warrant.  The exchange is subtly unnatural,  with her taking it all calmly and their questioning casual. Agent Marchánt Davis jokes about having  three guns in the house being like his own home. They load her groceries into the fridge and help round up her pets but they are quick to keep her from handling her cell phone and make a point of calling in someone so she is never alone with one of them. It builds menace.

The team get down to work in the empty back room - “if you want to sit on the floor.”  The spectre of Edward Snowden hovers. Josh Hamilton’s agent re-assures “I don’t think you’re a big bad master spy.” Gradually incriminating detail is worked into the exchanges (the leaked document was folded once) while she denies the suggestion that she took documents off her business premises - classified information which may be of value to the enemy.

The film works up interest as an exact transcription of the interrogation recordings. I hate to think of the billable hours studio legal put in on checking. It comes complete with action to match noises-off and jump cuts and pixel splash to account for redacted material or switch offs. First feature writer-director Tina Satter had already staged this as a theatre piece. The minimalist form is opened out by glimpses of the Augusta Georgia neighbourhood where Sweeny/Reality Winter waits for her proposed active service - electric wiring poles, fenced yards, bare streets whose residents probably drive there from their day jobs. The final pull back from the red tile roofs is a resonant comment. This calm gets to be disrupted by jagged news clip montages that flash the James Comey dismissal, Fox News, Bill Maher.  We sense world events funnelling down into this unremarkable location.

The film’s laid-back approach doesn’t hide where their sympathies lie and, with minimal help from makeup and costuming, Sweeney is faced with the most demanding role of her beginner career. She aces the vulnerable, conflicted, winning, and finally justified (Senate Hearing) character. Equalling this one will now be her challenge.

The film certainly deserves more than being buried in the SBS schedule. Though I spend more time than I like breaking that down each week, I only chanced on Reality because it came on after Adam Elliot’s endearing Mary & Max. Close call.

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

For an earlier report by Rod Bishop following the film's screening at the 2023 Sydney Film Festival click here

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