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Total Cinema

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, imaginative sound design, and the ambitious scope and scale which makes for spectacular, epic cinema.

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Stop Making Sense

Dir. Jonathan Demme
88 min

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

Dir. Wim Wenders
128 min

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

Dir. Alfonso Cuarón
135 min

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

Dir. Alfonso Cuarón
91 min

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

Dir. Christopher Nolan
148 min

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

Dir. Alfonso Cuarón
109 min

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

Dir. Serge Bromberg & Ruxandra Medrea
102 min

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

Dir. Denis Villeneuve
116 min

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

Dir. Ridley Scott
117 min

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

Dir. Denis Villeneuve
164 min

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

Dir. The Wachowskis
135 min

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

Dir. Joseph Kosinski
125 min

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

Dir. Mohsen Makhmalbaf
76 min

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

Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
158 min

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

Dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
100 min

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

Dir. Lilly and Lana Wachowski
136 min

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

Dir. David Lean
222 min

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

Dir. Paul Schrader
120 min

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

Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci
163 min

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

Dir. Darius Marder
121 min

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

Dir. Mark Robson
129 min

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

Dir. Steven Spielberg
127 min

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

Dir. Jacques Demy
120 min

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

Dir. Robert Altman
124 min

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

Dir. Baz Luhrmann
120 min

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

Dir. Billy Wilder
111 min

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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Hukkle

Dir. György Pálfi
75 min

One of the quirkiest films in our Total Cinema series, and one of the quietest, Hukkle invites you to listen. Told almost entirely without dialogue, it's a bucolic portrait of a Hungarian village, and, on the sly, a murder mystery...

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Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen

Dir. György Pálfi
84 min

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

Dir. Miloš Forman
161 min

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

Dir. Krzysztof Kieślowski
98 min

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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Nope

Dir. Jordan Peele
130 min

The third and most spectacular Jordan Peele joint is a whole lot of movie: it's a contemporary Black cowboy, UFO horror film, self-reflexive, very funny, and wildly ambitious.

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The Tree of Life

Dir. Terrence Malick
139 min

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.

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Amelie

Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet
123 min

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...

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Suspiria

Dir. Dario Argento
92 min

Dario Argento's symphony of horror is a demented fairytale in saturated colours and features one of the greatest of all electronic scores by Goblin.

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Eyes Wide Shut

Dir. Stanley Kubrick
159 min

Loosely based on Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle, Kubrick's last masterpiece explores erotic desire with sly wit and dreamy insouciance. Co-Presented with Vancouver Opera.

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The Double Life of Veronique

Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski
96 min

Irène Jacob won Best Actress honours at Cannes in 1991 for her double role in The Double Life of Véronique, the haunting, seductive metaphysical fable that was Polish master Krzysztof Kieslowski's feature follow-up to The Decalogue.

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Fitzcarraldo

Dir. Werner Herzog
158 min

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.

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Santa Sangre

Dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky
123 min

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.

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Bram Stoker's Dracula

Dir. Francis Coppola
127 min

Coppola's audaciously woozy, cinematically audacious take on the vampire myth is like a symphonic silent movie in full colour.

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Apocalypse Now: Final Cut

Dir. Francis Ford Coppola
183 min

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.

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The Conversation

Dir. Francis Ford Coppola
113 min

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.

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The Maltese Falcon

Dir. John Huston
100 min

The first classic film noir, with Humphrey Bogart as the definitive cynical private eye, Sam Spade, based on the novel by former Pinkerton man, Dashiell Hammett.

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Hammett

Dir. Wim Wenders
97 min

Frederic Forrest plays Dashiell Hammett, the Maltese Falcon author who once worked for Pinkerton's Detective Agency. Agreeing to help an old friend, he gets sucked into a mystery as compelling as any he could have imagined...

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Winter Kills

Dir. William Richert
97 min

An inspired black comic adaptation of the ultimate conspiracy theory, based on a novel by Richard (Manchurian Candidate) Condon. It's a lunatic riff on the Kennedy assassination(s), with Jeff Bridges finding who really killed his brother, the President. Screening in 35mm print.

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The Manchurian Candidate

Dir. Jonathan Demme
130 min

Jonathan Demme's superbly orchestrated take on Richard Condon's 1959 paranoia novel feels weirdly prescient in its anxieties around global corporate brainwashing, war profiteering, assassination and election fixing.

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Come and See

Dir. Elem Klimov
142 min

One of the most powerful war films ever made, Elem Klimov's Come and See is an overwhelming and unforgettable experience.

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The Fall (4K Restoration)

Dir. Tarsem Singh
119 min

Shot over four years across 24 countries, cowritten by a six year old girl, and entirely self-financed by commercials director Tarsem, The Fall is such a mind- (and eye) boggling movie it's hard to believe it actually exists. Yet here it is!

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Fight Club (25th Anniversary)

Dir. David Fincher
139 min

1999 was a very good year for movies, but nothing captured millennial angst quite so vividly as David Fincher's bruising black comedy about what it means to be a man today. This modern classic does everything short of rattling your seat to get a reaction.

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Starship Troopers

Dir. Paul Verhoeven
129 min

It's Earth vs Space Bugs in Paul Verhoeven's sci-fi action splatter fest, which also doubles as a savagely satiric send up of dumb American fascism.

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Alien: Director's Cut (4K Restoration)

Dir. Ridley Scott
117 min

The crew of the Nostromo is awakened when the ship's computer, Mother, picks up a distress signal from an uninhabited planet... What they find they won't soon forget. By far the scariest in the long-running Alien franchise, this was the anti-Star Wars.

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Moulin Rouge!

Dir. Baz Luhrmann
130 min

Paris has never been gayer than in this headlong karaoke culture crash set in a poptastic 19th century Montmartre, where Ewan McGregor composes The Sound of Music and falls over his heels for Nicole Kidman's courtesan, Satine.

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The Shawshank Redemption (30th Anniversary)

Dir. Frank Darabont
142 min

Frank Darabont's directorial debut is an engrossing, slow burn prison drama with stellar turns from Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman. It's a firm fan favourite.

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