Designed to showcase our new immersive sound system, laser projection and brand new screen, Total Cinema celebrates the elevated experience that comes with watching the best films on the big screen. This season highlights an exciting range of great movies in an ideal setting, and invites audiences to zero in on those aesthetic qualities which allow them to stand the test of time: bold use of colour (also the subject of our latest Film Studies series, Creating Colour), imaginative sound design, and the ambitious scope and scale which makes for spectacular, epic cinema.
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The Tree of Life
Malick's meditation on life, death and the whole damn thing is a sublime and beautiful, maddening and inspiring film, winner of the top prize a t Cannes, revered and reviled in roughly equal measure.
Amelie
One of the most popular French films of the past 25 years, Amelie is a delightfully whimsical confection from the ever-inventive Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Audrey Tautou stars as a young Parisienne who resolves to make the world a happier place...
Santa Sangre
Jodorowsky's unforgettable third film (after El Topo and Holy Mountain--and years trying to get Dune made) is a cavalcade of burning images, a circus of strange.
Fitzcarraldo
Herzog's grandest folly was almost his undoing, but became his greatest triumph. One of cinema's least convincing Irishmen, Klaus Kinski plays Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, who has a dream to bring opera to the Amazon.
Bram Stoker's Dracula
Coppola's audaciously woozy, cinematically audacious take on the vampire myth is like a symphonic silent movie in full colour.
Apocalypse Now: Final Cut
The definitive rendering of Francis Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War magnum opus marks the last hurrah of the New Hollywood of the 70s and the end of our Ragged Glory: Summer in the 70s season.
The Conversation
Gene Hackman is Harry Caul, 'the best bugger on the West Coast', a surveillance expert whose jealously guarded anonymity is threatened when he happens across what seems to be a murder plot.
Stop Making Sense
Universally acclaimed as one of the greatest concert films ever made, the Talking Heads at their peak. Showing here in the recently upgraded 4K version via our theatre's newly installed immersive sound system -- this really will burn down the house.
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Wings of Desire
Wim Wenders' iconic film -- in black and white and colour -- gives us kindly angels eavesdropping on life in Berlin at the tailend of the Cold War. One (Bruno Ganz) falls in love with a trapeze artist and yearns to be mortal again...
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Roma
An evocation of middle-class household in Mexico City in 1970, this scintillating black and white film focuses on Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), a live-in maid, who tends to the two children, and observes, discreetly, as her employers' marriage falls apart.
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Gravity
Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are US astronauts stranded in space after a calamitous close encounter with Soviet space junk. The International Space Station is 1500 km away, but time is tight before the orbiting space junk hammers them again...
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Inception
A meta-heist movie, Inception evokes Philip K Dick's cerebral sci-fi, the exploration of alternate states of consciousness, memory and fantasy. Leonardo DiCaprio is Cobb, an "excavator", who digs around in people's subconscious while they're sleeping.
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Children of Men
2027: 18 years since the last baby was born, disillusioned Englishman Theo (Clive Owen) becomes an unlikely champion of the human race when he is asked by his former lover (Julianne Moore) to escort a young pregnant woman out of the country.
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Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno
This extraordinary documentary -- saturated in sex, chroma, and madness -- tells the story of the movie that broke Henri-Georges Clouzot, "the French Hitchcock." It includes some of the most eye-bending colour effects ever put on film.
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Arrival
Denis Villeneuve's hit gives us an enigmatic alien incursion: a dozen spaceships strategically dispersed across the globe... To what end, nobody really knows. Enter Amy Adams' professor of linguistics, maybe our best hope to get everyone on the same page.
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Blade Runner: The Final Cut
Los Angeles, 2019. Harrison Ford is Deckard, a "blade runner" hired to "retire" four rogue replicants – organic robots so lifelike they don't even know they're not human. In the course of his pursuit, Deckard comes to question his own – ambiguous – humanity.
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Blade Runner 2049
All sequels should be so good. Director Denis Villeneuve and co bring their A-game to this immersively spectacular riff on Ridley Scott's seminal sci-fi classic. Set 20 years into the future Scott imagined so vividly, BR49 also feels very 2024.
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Speed Racer
The Wachowskis' enormously fun entertainment integrates live action and kaleidoscopic digital effects to create a highly artificial, color-saturated fantasy world where race cars come equipped with retractable weaponry and battle it out like beyblades.
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Tron: Legacy + Cinema Audio Society Panel
Filmed right here in Vancouver, the belated follow-up is ripe for reassessment after director Joseph Kosinski's recent triumph with Top Gun: Maverick. 28 years after the original Tron, Flynn's son gets an SOS from his dad in cyber space...
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The Silence
The life of a blind ten year old who makes a living tuning instruments is the basis for this hypnotic symphony of visual and aural rhythms from Makhmalbaf, replete with ecstactic spiritual symbolism and strains of Beethoven.
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There Will Be Blood
Paul Thomas Anderson's lacerating epic about the birth of the oil age: Daniel Day-Lewis is extraordinary as the prospector entirely consumed with his own enterprise, a Trumpian figure of naked self-assertion; Paul Dano the evangelist who may be his nemesis.
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Black Narcissus
For many, this hothouse melodrama is the greatest movie shot on the three-strip Technicolor process. It'sset in a nunnery in the Himalayas but almost entirely filmed in an English film studio.
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The Matrix
Can a computer hacker save the world? Maybe if you hack deep enough... One of the most influential movies of the past 25 years. The Matrix didn't just change the way films looked and moved, it altered the way we perceived the world(s).
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Lawrence of Arabia
David Lean’s sweeping, four-hour desert epic demands to be seen on the big screen. Peter O’Toole landed the role of a lifetime as the British cartographer who united the Arab tribes to fight the Turks in WW1.
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Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
In his best and most audaciously stylized movie, Paul Schrader blows up the literary biopic to give us not only insights into radical novelist Yukio Mishima's life, but also into his work. Mishima himself refused to see the difference.
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The Last Emperor
Puyi was born in 1906 and became regent Emperor of China from the age of three, forced to abdicate after the Chinese Revolution of 1912. But this was only the first chapter in a tumultuous life... Bertolucci's sumptuous epic won 9 Academy Awards in 1987.
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The Sound of Metal
Riz Ahmed deserved the Academy Award for his performance as a metal drummer who rapidly loses his hearing. At first he's in denial, and then despair -- but gradually he begins to accept a life that will be different, but not necessarily detrimentally so.
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Earthquake
This is the Big One: Who doesn't want to see Los Angeles burn? There is an awful lot of falling debris in Universal's contribution to the 70s Disaster Movie craze; much of it directed at Charlton Heston's noble brow. All recorded in glorious Sensurround.
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Jurassic Park
Two paleontologists are invited to preview a new Central American theme park by an avuncular entrepreneur (Richard Attenborough). What they encounter is truly a walk on the wild side. Spielberg's jaw dropping adventure movie still kills on the big screen.
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The Young Girls of Rochefort
The movie gives us virtually non stop dancing, sisters Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorleac, George Chakiris, and even Gene Kelly himself. It's an extraordinarily elaborate confection -- and one of the most sublime musicals you will ever see.
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The Player
Hollywood on Hollywood, vintage 1992. Robert Altman's entertaining comic thriller stars Tim Robbins as a mildly ruthless studio executive being harassed by an angry, anonymous screenwriter.
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Romeo + Juliet
With his second movie, Baz Luhrmann hit upon a "more is more" approach to make Shakespeare pop. And it worked. Updating the play and giving it a Latin crime family dynamic, Luhrmann suggests that the Bard would be Brian de Palma today.
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Sunset Boulevard
Hollywood on Hollywood: the tale of a screenwriter, Joe Gillis (William Holden), who stumbles into the orbit of a now-forgotten movie star, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), and realizes this silent film diva could be his meal ticket.
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Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen
A love story assiduously compiled from hundreds of movie clips, featuring a who's who of cinema greats, from Marilyn Monroe to Jackie Chan, Marlene Dietrich to Marcello Mastroianni, all recast as the emblematic Man and Woman.
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Amadeus
In which the celebrated court composer Salieri welcomes a much ballyhooed young prodigy to Vienna. To his dismay, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is an impudent, callow upstart. Worse, he's a genius. Winner of 8 Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
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Three Colours: Blue
The first of Kieslowski's acclaimed Three Colours Trilogy, inspired by the French Revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity and the French flag, the Tricolour. Blue stars Juliette Binoche as a young woman grieving her husband and child.
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