ON THE BIG SCREEN AT THE RITZ
Most of Cinema Reborn’s screenings will take place in the Ritz’s Cinema 5. It has over 200 seats and includes a stalls and a balcony section. It offers excellent viewing.
However, three sessions of our 2024 season will be screened in the Ritz’s pride of place the 700 seat Cinema 1 with its huge screen and excellent sightlines both upstairs in the balcony section and downstairs in the stalls.
The three sessions in Cinema 1 are:
MIDNIGHT 7.00 PM ON WEDNESDAY 1 MAY.
Our opening program (regular ticket prices) is the World Premiere of Mitchell Leisen’s classic 1939 screwball comedy starring Claudette Colbert, John Barrymore and Don Ameche. “One of the liveliest, gayest, wittiest and naughtiest comedies of a long hard season” wrote Frank Nugent in the New York Times way back in 1939. To that you can add David Thomson just a year or so ago who said “yes it’s a great script (by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett) but it’s a great script rendered with terrific feeling and panache (by Mitchell Leisen).
Bookings for this session at this link
DAYS OF HEAVEN 8.15 PM ON MONDAY 6 MAY
Terrence Malick’s 1978 story of migrant workers fleeing west in 1915 has been called by Michel Ciment of Positif ‘one of the most original, complex films in the contemporary cinema”. Those who have seen the 4K restoration are still marvelling at the extraordinary qualities of Nestor Almendros’s Oscar-winning golden hour photography.
Bookings for this session at this link
LE SAMOURAI 8.15 PM ON TUESDAY 7 MAY
John Woo is one of many directors in awe of this film. He called it “the closest to a perfect movie I have ever seen.” It has taken Cinema Reborn several years of asking before we finally got the rights to screen the superb 4K restoration. Seeing it on the biggest screen possible will be a fitting finale to our 2024 season.
Bookings for this session at this link
A FINAL SHOUT OUT FOR OUR AUSTRALIAN CINEMA SELECTION FOR 2024.
All told we are screening four Australian programs – two classic documentaries LIGHT YEARS from 1991, Kathryn Millard’s superb portrait of the great photographer Olive Cotton (above), a session which will include a post-film conversation and Q&A with Kathryn and eminent photographer Sandy Edwards at the session at 2.30 pm on Sunday 5 May. The second doco is Peter Tammer’s JOURNEY TO THE END OF NIGHT, from 1982 described by Phillip Adams as “vivid as any chronicle of war you will ever see”. Melbourne film-maker Philip Brophy will be introducing the film at 4.45 pm on Friday 3 May.
Then we have two rather divergent titles from the national film heritage. First up is the World Premiere of the restoration of THREE TO GO a remarkable portmanteau from 1971 of three short films by then young directors Peter Weir, Oliver Howes and Brian Hannant. Also screening is an early short by Peter Weir 3 DIRECTIONS IN AUSTRALIAN POP MUSIC. Both films have been preserved by the National Archives of Australia. Richard Brennan who worked as Production Manager on THREE TO GO will do the introduction
Finally there is the cult classic and maybe the most overlooked Australian movie of the 90s BODY MELT, Quentin Tarantino’s favourite Oz movie of the time. BODY MELT is having its first screening in Sydney in over 30 years, in our first Friday Night Fright slot. Director Philip Brophy is coming up from Melbourne especially for the screening and will introduce the film along with scholar, critic and cinephile Jane Mills.
Click on the film titles to go through to the Ritz booking page or just roll up at the door.
AND IN THE MEANTIME
The Cinema Reborn 2024 page on the website of the Australian Cultural Fund enables our supporters to make a tax-deductible donation. All donations great and small are very welcome. The Australian Cultural Fund page can be found If You Click Here
