No surprise that Mocky makes himself the only heroic character in his own film - but he plays it so cool - you almost think he can beat every odd. This is a noir, a political thriller, a police procedural and a chase movie all rolled into one quick-paced, tension-filled piece of cinema.

One wonders whether the proto-Epstein err conferences portrayed in this film are part of a deep-seated lurid folk horror-story we tell continually ourselves, or if its a evil that repeats -- truly repeats -- throughout history. Probably a bit of both. Either way, its fascinating to see these horrors portrayed with such strong adherence to the tropes with which we've become so familiar.

This had to have been an influence on Bonello and Nocturama right? Either way, its a phenomenal piece of genre/noir/crime filmmaking - as only the French could deliver.

C'est magnifique!

This short film is our review of the festival.

It takes you inside Alice Tully Hall and the Walter Reade Theater for seven new films that each ask how and why we keep loving one another: James Gray’s Paper Tiger, Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus Zero, Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut, Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth!, and Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything. Add to that a new 4K restoration of Powell and Pressburger’s Gone to Earth, introduced by Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker.

You’ll hear the filmmakers in their own words, from James Gray and Lee Chang-dong to Pedro Pascal and Scorsese himself, and see the festival from our seats.

And you’ll see why a Japanese monster movie and a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes are now two of the biggest hits of the fall.

Watch it before you buy your tickets.

Godzilla Minus Zero and You Can See Everything are in theaters now, Possible Love is streaming on Netflix, and the rest arrive in theaters between now and Christmas.

Where to Watch

• Paper Tiger: in theaters Nov. 13 (Neon)

• Godzilla Minus Zero: in theaters now (Toho / GKIDS)

• Possible Love: streaming now on Netflix

• All of a Sudden: opens Nov. 25 at Film Forum (Neon)

• Behemoth!: in theaters Dec. 4 (Searchlight)

• The Debut: in theaters Dec. 11, wide Dec. 25 (A24)

• Gone to Earth (1950): new 4K restoration from The Film Foundation, playing festivals

• You Can See Everything: in theaters now (A24)

Q&A excerpts courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center. Music by Jung Jae-il from Possible Love. Festival photographs and Scorsese/Schoonmaker footage by the author.

Last November our Noir-Vember screening of Detour filled the Gold Theater. Two Hewlett High seniors played jazz standards before the film, and neighbors who’d never seen a noir left wanting more.

This year we’re going to Chicago.

On Sunday, November 22, the Cognitive Film Society is proud to present Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987) for Noir-Vember — Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Andy Garcia and Robert De Niro as Al Capone, a David Mamet script and one of Ennio Morricone’s great scores.

And like last year, we’ve got a few surprises planned for the afternoon. You’ll just have to be in the room.

Three Strikes

The Untouchables might be the hinge of Brian De Palma’s whole career.

By 1987 he was down to his last strike. Body Double (1984) and Wise Guys (1986) had both flopped, and as he told producer Art Linson, “In Hollywood, three strikes and you’re out.”

In response, De Palma took the most Hollywood job he’d ever been offered and knocked it out of the park. The Untouchables made $76 million in the US, won Connery an Oscar and put De Palma back in business.

Somebody Is Always Watching

De Palma came up in the Village in the late sixties making scrappy satires with a young Robert De Niro. In Hi, Mom! (1970), De Niro plays a would-be filmmaker who shoots his neighbors through their apartment windows and tries to sell the footage to a porn producer. It wouldn’t be the last time De Palma explored the seedy side of the entertainment industry.

Many of my favorites of his films come from his “Hitchcock period” — Sisters, Obsession, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out — where somebody is always watching through a window or a telescope or a pair of headphones.

For much of the seventies you couldn’t see Vertigo or Rear Window anywhere — Hitchcock had pulled them from circulation. De Palma kept remaking Jimmy Stewart’s obsessions anyway, pushing genre filmmaking as far as it would go.

Body Double is Hitchcock meets eighties sleaze, a perfectly grimy movie and one of the few noirs that uses color to its advantage. It is my favorite of De Palma’s films — even though it is (by design) not nearly as mainstream as The Untouchables.

The Untouchables is where he takes all those tricks out of the shadows and into broad daylight. Most crime pictures of the late eighties are practically scored with a sexy sax. De Palma got Morricone, long before Tarantino made it a hipster badge of honor.

What Are You Prepared to Do?

Costner’s Eliot Ness is a Treasury agent with a young wife (Patricia Clarkson, in her first film). Capone owns the cops, the judges and the papers, and Ness’s first raid is a bust.

Connery’s Jim Malone, an old Irish beat cop, teaches him the Chicago way. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. Malone embodies the question that hangs over the film — what are you prepared to do?

That’s the fundamental question of all noir filmmaking.

Enthusiasms

Seventeen years after Hi, Mom!, De Palma made De Niro Al Capone. He put on weight for the part and tracked down Capone’s original tailors for the suits and the silk underwear. (Nobody was ever going to see the underwear. That’s De Niro.)

He gives the best speech about teamwork in the movies. If you’ve never seen it on the big screen, we’re thrilled to present it in its full glory.

Late in the film Capone weeps at the opera through “Vesti la giubba” while one of his men whispers that Malone is dead. He keeps crying, and he starts to smile. It’s De Palma all over — a man watching a show while the real violence happens somewhere else.

We can’t wait to discuss De Palma and his contributions to the noir genre. We’ll open with a short talk — from Hi, Mom! to Chicago — and after the film we’ll keep the conversation going with an audience Q&A. With a surprise or two along the way.

The Afternoon

Never stop fighting till the fight is done.

2:00 PM — Program begins: a short talk on De Palma and the film
2:10 PM — The Untouchables (1987), 119 minutes
~4:10 PM — Audience Q&A

Location: Gold Theater at the Hewlett-Woodmere Public Library, 1125 Broadway, Hewlett, NY 11557

Free and open to everyone, as always.

See you Sunday, November 22! Get there early!

The Cognitive Film Society is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to cultivating film culture through educational programming and community engagement.

A strait-laced detective investigating the strange murder of a beautiful woman named Laura filled with secrets? Ok Lynch I see all the myriad of influences coming together. 

Gene Tierney is such a star you can imagine falling in love with her memory (isn’t that what cinema does?) and the myriad of characters who she captivates.

Love Vincent Price and the woman who played the maid killed by Nefertiti in The Ten Commandments.
Preminger really helped define the “weird noir”. And this one is one of the best.

Do not mess with Letty Lynton! Joan Crawford is so deeply deranged and intense, that you cannot help but root for her. There’s an almost proto-Hitchcock/Noir suspense in this film, that thrills even today.

Today’s filmmakers can take note of how much cinema’s effectiveness relies little on budget or flash - and much more on lighting, mise-en-scene and performance.

Brilliance!

This film is so 80’s it’s practically scored with a “sexy sax”. Honestly considering the pedigree of the screenwriter this film’s script is not much different from the myriad of late night Cinemax films that we watched in the 90’s. So perhaps this film was more influential than I originally thought.

The performances are also similarly cheesy, even given the star power. Although Raul Julia is probably the best of all of them. 

Michelle so much better in the Fabulous Baker Boys and even Grease 2!

Woof!

Textured and saturated like the 16mm film stock which its images are captured. Feels halfway between a Bradbury short story and a trip to the deep end of the Twilight Zone. So many films these days asking us what we need to accept reality. 

Rose of Nevada offers no easy answers, save for the need for human connection and a deep sense of loss when they’re broken.

Phenomenal performances from McKay and Turner. As haunting as the landscape it surveys.

Movies!

Every block in the Five Towns has one house that goes all the way on Halloween. The fog machine, the twelve-foot skeleton, the dad on the porch in full makeup who will not break character while your kid takes a third Kit Kat. You know which houses they are. So do your kids.

Charles Addams drew that house for fifty years. His family first turned up in The New Yorker in August 1938, nameless, living in a Victorian pile modeled on one he got caught breaking into as a boy in Westfield, New Jersey. The joke never changed and never got old. The weirdos on the hill are the happiest, most devoted family in America. Everyone else is the problem.

On Thursday, October 29, two nights before Halloween, the Cognitive Film Society is proud to present Barry Sonnenfeld’s The Addams Family (1991) at the Gold Theater — in celebration of Hewlett High School’s production of The Addams Family musical, which opens November 20.

Creepy and Kooky

The film opens on an Addams cartoon brought to life: the whole family on the roof, carolers below, a cauldron of boiling oil tipping over the edge. It never lets up from there. Sonnenfeld had spent the eighties as the Coen brothers’ cinematographer — Blood Simple (1984), Raising Arizona (1987), Miller’s Crossing (1990) — and this was the first thing he ever directed. You can tell. Every shot is a single-panel gag with a wide-angle lens on it.

The production was a mess. Orion ran out of money and sold the picture to Paramount while it was still shooting. Two cinematographers went down, so Sonnenfeld shot it himself. It opened in November 1991 to the biggest non-holiday weekend Paramount had ever had and made $191 million worldwide, and a generation of kids learned to snap on the twos and fours.

(Snap, Snap)

Raul Julia and Anjelica Huston are the reason it works. Gomez and Morticia are the only married couple in American movies who are still visibly, ravenously in love after two kids and a houseful of relatives. He fences with his lawyer and crashes model trains for fun. She snips the blooms off the roses and keeps the thorns. Julia plays Gomez as pure appetite, and Huston — in a face pulled taut by elastic straps that gave her headaches for the entire shoot — never raises her voice and never loses a scene.

And then there’s Wednesday. Christina Ricci was ten years old, and the deadpan she perfected here has outlived the movie, the sequel, the cartoons and a Netflix series. When Sonnenfeld wanted to leave Fester’s true identity hanging at the end, it was Ricci who argued him out of it. He later admitted the actors were right. She was ten.

Altogether Ooky

The 1991 film has exactly one musical number, the Mamushka, in which Gomez and Fester celebrate their reunion by throwing knives at each other. Test audiences hated how long it ran and Sonnenfeld cut it down. He should have let it go on for an hour.

The musical came much later. Andrew Lippa’s The Addams Family opened on Broadway in April 2010 with Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth, and it has since become one of the most performed shows in American high schools, for a simple reason: Wednesday is grown up, in love with a nice boy from Ohio, and dreading dinner with his parents. Every teenager in the cast knows exactly what that’s about.

Hewlett High School performs it Friday, November 20 and Saturday, November 21. The same building sent us the soloists who sang before The Way We Were last month, so consider Thursday the warm-up act. Come see where the family came from, then go see what the kids do with it.

The Evening

7:00 PM — Program begins: a short introduction to Charles Addams and the film
7:10 PM — The Addams Family (1991), 100 minutes
~8:50 PM — Out the door before the library locks up at 9

Location: Gold Theater at the Hewlett-Woodmere Public Library, 1125 Broadway, Hewlett, NY 11557

FREE ADMISSION. Free and open to everyone, as always. Costumes encouraged.

And save the date: Noir-vember returns on Sunday, November 22 at 1:00 PM with Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987).

Cara mia.

See you Thursday night.

The Cognitive Film Society is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to cultivating film culture through educational programming and community engagement.

No man is above temptation - especially when it comes in the form of Rosanna Schiaffino. Feels at times like a proto-"The Devil's Advocate", and I wouldn't be surprised if this film was an inspiration. The film is beautiful and the performances are very strong, but like the script - a bit on the nose.

A lovely tone poem that explores mortality, legacy and family through the fascinating German writer Thomas Mann. Having read Buddenbrooks earlier this year, this serves almost as an epilogue or additional chapter to that tragic family saga. 

Sandra Huller shines in this film, as the true keeper and scholar of Mann’s brilliant legacy and the family’s tragic curse. 

I’d have liked a longer exploration of Mann’s life and legacy - but this is somewhat perfect almost Wild Strawberries-eque tale it wishes to tell. A fascinating slice of history, that shows how some of these issues can never be resolved.

*post-screening Q&A with director Pawel Pawilkowski

How many Full House favors did Bob Saget have to pull to get this movie made? Incoherent for long stretches, but punctuated with laugh out loud bits and set pieces. So many great cameos. Honestly Norm McDonald (like Sandler who cameos memorably as Satan) might’ve found greater success in the streaming era.

Netflix might’ve made a million of these if they had been around back in the day. As it is -  the thought of big screen Norm is kind of nuts. 

I remember seeing an interview with Norm saying that Dirty Work had given him a lifetime sentence to Movie jail. Can’t say I disagree as far as features go.

America is perpetually reaching for the green light of Daisy Buchanan's porch. A perfect place, innocent and filled with the romance and recognition we are surely entitled to. If only... the device worked. If only... she wasn't lying. If only... the press and the media were fair. If only... they could truly see me, in all my fulfillment and glory.

And so we take on the trappings of that life that we so deeply desire. We obsfucate and overpromise. We rationalize the danger signs we hear in the back of our head. We begin to live in a lie in pursuit of money and status. Everyone makes these compromises - but so many these days feel license to take it so much further. In this respect Elizabeth Holmes is a prophet of the age.

Which is why the "twist" in this film is both surprising (I gasped) and completely necessary. The story could not be told without our prophet's greatest interpreter.

But this is just one of the many ways that You Can See Everything brilliantly lives in the uncanny cognitive valley of 21st century life. It interrogates alternative facts and reality distortion fields and their unceasing ability to get smart, moral people to empathize with complete and utter sociopaths.

Are we so starved for true connection and love - that even the smartest are willing to accept the simulacrum? Is there any hope for finally shoveling away the bullshit?

Nathan Fielder gives us no easy answers.

A masterpiece that reinvents the form. The movie of the year. Give everyone all the awards.

Lady Macbeth has never been more terrifying or powerful than when Lise Davidsen dreamwalks through a dystopian hall of mirrors. In the room for this, and lucky enough to have orchestra seats close enough to see the actors expressions.

This is a timeless adaptation that is both bloody and bleak. Macbeth's ambivalent ambition is fully voiced through Quinn Kelsey's resonant baritone. Do you feel sympathy for this devil? Even in his full descent to hell, he remains sympathetic.

The witches herky unnatural movements gives the entire production a deep sense of dread. Its phenomenal. This is an opera that envelops you and fills you with the emptiness of Macbeth learning of the death of his wife, and his ambition.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Lady Macbeth has never been more terrifying or powerful than when Lise Davidsen dreamwalks through a dystopian hall of mirrors. In the room for this, and lucky enough to have orchestra seats close enough to see the actors expressions.

This is a timeless adaptation that is both bloody and bleak. Macbeth's ambivalent ambition is fully voiced through Quinn Kelsey's resonant baritone. Do you feel sympathy for this devil? Even in his full descent to hell, he remains sympathetic.

The witches herky unnatural movements gives the entire production a deep sense of dread. Its phenomenal. This is an opera that envelops you and fills you with the emptiness of Macbeth learning of the death of his wife, and his ambition.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Flawed as she is, Scarlett O’Hara remains the single greatest heroine in all of cinema. Gone With The Wind is an obviously flawed masterpiece (does anyone believe during the siege of Atlanta that Big Sam wouldn’t take his shovel and turn it on his enslavers at any moment?) but the filmmaking is impeccable, and the performances iconic.

Is it an apologia for the South when every character faces some sort of moral reckoning? Or that Rhett is able to show humanity to Mammie?

But aside from all the politics, the film is just a damn good time at the movies. Seeing this on the big screen - fully restored in 4K was a revelation.

For as long as people watch movies they will watch Gone With The Wind. Movies!!!

Old or new, men never change. An oft overlooked masterpiece from Ozu, Early Spring is the story of an affair - but broadens its aperture to look at all of the many issues plaguing the Japanese salaryman.

Ozu lets us live with this couple and their community until you feel the weight of their decisions. By the devastating last scene - it’s as if you’ve known them forever.

In many ways this film is as beautiful to look at as Tokyo Story and for contemporary audiences might be more relevant and compelling. The fragile male ego never goes out of style.

Amazing stuff!

I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats! The rent is due (but maybe check if the invoices in the mail)! A hilarious tribute to art, friendship and the healing power of method acting. Just give Julianne Moore the Oscar now. She is powerful and funny and sings like an angel and curses like a janitor. I am in awe.

Jesse Eisenberg is a true talent. This could not be more tonally different from A Real Pain but manages to elicit a similar emotional response.

Amazing performers across the board, with performances to match. A triumph!

NY Film Festival 64, Film 7. NY Premiere. Intro and Q&A with Jessie Eisenberg, Julianne Moore, Paul Giamatti, Emma Stone, Halle Berry.

Technicolor Gypsy madness and desire! They really do not make them like this anymore. Just a glorious film to behold, with saturated colors that at times tip in to pre-psychedelia. The plot is thin and fairly basic — girl caught between two men, one moral and orderly the other sexual and beastly — but it works given the lush cinematography.

This is a film filled with themes and subtext about the feminine attributes of nature and the confusing nature of desire. For 1950 it’s practically radical.

Pretty solid performances, but the set design, costumes and colors will stick with you.

NYFF 64 - Film 6. US premiere of 4K restoration. Q&A with Martin Scorsese and Martha Schoonmaker.

A glorious tribute to music in film, music as connection and our need for family and legacy. This might be my favorite Pedro Pascal performance. The film turns on his intensity and passions (and dispassions) and he’s always compelling.

There’s a strong theme of family and legacy that pervades many of the best films I’ve seen this year and Behemoth! is no different. These material achievements of success, or money or romantic conquests are continually shown to be empty when compared to family and music.

A great return to feature filmmaking from Tony Gilroy!

NYFF 64 - Film 5. Walter Reade Theater. Intro with Tony Gilroy and Pedro Pascal

Only the world’s greatest living filmmaker could make a 3.5 hour meditation on coincidence, capitalism, friendship, aging, workplace politics and our inherent human dignity into one of the most compelling films of the year.

Why are we so exhausted and disconnected? Why do we feel so atomized and spread thin? All of a Sudden is a film that attempts to answer these questions and somehow succeeds. 

Not since My Dinner with Andre has an onscreen conversation been so captivating. The performances of Virginie Efrie and Tao Okamoto as Marie and Mari are virtuoso feats of acting. Seamlessly interchanging between Japanese and French in moment after moment of emotional and intellectual dialogue.

This is a film rooted in the divine power of human friendship. It deeply understands the eternal truth that if we bind up each other’s souls and treat each other as we would like to be treated - then there will always be hope.

I left the cinema elated, drained and hopeful in a way I often feel during the high holidays. Hamaguchi has put a prayer for connection into the world. I hope people will see it and respond accordingly.

A masterpiece! Movies!!!

NYFF Screening 4. US Premiere at Alice Tully Hall. Intro and Q&A with Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Virginie Efira