Nuart celebrates its facelift with a festival

Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.

Nuart renovation and festival. The Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood celebrated its 100th anniversary this week, but sadly remains closed as it undergoes a renovation from its new owners at Netflix. However, the Nuart Theatre, on Santa Monica Boulevard just west of the 405, is celebrating the completion of its own renovation with the launch of a 10-day festival.

The single-screen theater opened in 1930, and has long been a linchpin of L.A.’s art-house scene. It is said to have been the site of Andy Kaufman’s final public appearance and the first theater in the city to show work by filmmakers as varied as John Waters and John Woo, and running for the first time in Los Angeles movies such as David Lynch’s “Eraserhead,” Gus Van Sant’s “Drugstore Cowboy,” Jane Campion’s “Sweetie,” Mira Nair’s “Salaam Bombay!” and Larry Clark’s “Kids.”

With new seats in the theater and a redo to the lobby, concession stand and its famous neon marquee, the theater looks to continue its role as a vital home for local movie fans. (Yes, it is somewhat equally inconvenient to get to no matter where you live.)

The 10-day festival starts tonight with an advance screening of Sam Mendes’ “Empire of Light,” itself a tribute to a historic independent movie theater in an English seaside town in the 1980s. Other events include John Waters’ “Pink Flamingos” with drag bingo before the movie and an appearance by performer Mink Stole. Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon” and Lynch’s “Eraserhead” will both screen.

Albert Brooks’ 1979 debut feature, “Real Life,” will have a Q&A with acclaimed screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who have been going to the Nuart since their college days in the 1980s. A screening of Penelope Spheeris’ 1998 documentary “The Decline of Western Civilization Part III,” a portrait of gutter punk teenagers, will have a Q&A with Spheeris and appearances by some of the subjects of the film.

“The Rocky Horror Picture Show” first showed at the Nuart in 1976, with regular Saturday night screenings beginning in 1986 and continuing to this day. The current shadow cast of Sins o’ the Flesh, a group celebrating its 35th anniversary, will perform alongside a late show of the film.

“Landmark’s inaugural Nuart Fest is a celebration of the theatre’s historical significance as a rite of passage for Los Angeles moviegoers and creatives,” said Landmark Theatres President Kevin Holloway in a statement. “The theatre’s renovation is a testament to its ongoing importance as a pillar within the community.”

Joan Didion and the movies. The UCLA Film and Television Archive is launching a series, “Can’t Get That Monster Out of My Mind: Joan Didion and Cinema,” to go along with the Hammer Museum’s new exhibition “Joan Didion: What She Means” as an exploration of the life and work of the Sacramento-born author. The series opens with “Play It as It Lays” and “Panic in Needle Park,” two films Didion wrote with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, before shifting into movies that influenced Didion, including “The Third Man” and “Night of the Iguana,” and ending with two programs of films drawing from the same cultural currents as her work. The series runs from Oct. 25 to Dec. 17.

‘Aftersun’

The feature debut from Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells, “Aftersun” includes Adele Romanski and Barry Jenkins among its producers and won a jury prize when it premiered at Cannes earlier this year, launching a strong festival run including Telluride, Toronto and New York. The film’s story is rooted in a summer holiday Wells took with her own father, as Calum (Paul Mescal) takes his daughter Sophie (young discovery Frankie Corio) on a trip to Turkey, told as memories of adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall). The film is in theaters now.

For The Times, Justin Chang called it “one of the year’s great debut films” and “beautifully sculpted and quietly shattering.” He added, “As Wells has noted, ‘Aftersun’ isn’t exactly her story, and glancing personal associations aside, it isn’t yours or mine either. And yet in these moments, for reasons as tough to articulate as they are to shake off, it feels ineffably, unmistakably ours.”

Carlos Aguilar spoke to Wells, Mescal, Corio, Romanski and Jenkins for a story that will be publishing soon. Wells spoke of what inspired her to explore this aspect of her own coming-of-age experience: “I needed to make this, and I used it as a reason to step back into a period that I hadn’t thought about for a long time.”

For the New York Times, A.O. Scott wrote, “It’s hard to find a critical language to account for the delicacy and intimacy of this movie. This is partly because Wells, with the unaffected precision of a lyric poet, is very nearly reinventing the language of film, unlocking the medium’s often dormant potential to disclose inner worlds of consciousness and feeling.”

For Vanity Fair, Richard Lawson wrote, “It’s deeply felt, a warm embodiment of a liminal time in life when our conceptions of ourselves and our loved ones come pinging into focus while also, somehow, drifting into new confusion. … In that sense, ‘Aftersun’ is a depiction of the active practice of love, the accumulation of allowances and readjustments that becomes a life-long project. Thus the importance of this vacation, maybe the last dance that Sophie had with her dad, or maybe the beginning of a bitter goodbye. There, at least, were a few days when father and daughter could experience something together. When they could find, or re-establish, a constant amid all their impermanence, far away from home, in a place almost unmoved by time.”

For the AP, Lindsey Bahr wrote, “Memory, of course, is imperfect — especially when colored with the trauma of loss. Wells, in her first feature, embraces the inherent messiness of it all perfectly. This is a collage of emotion pieced together from photographs, a souvenir rug, shaky home videos in which someone is inevitably sulking or protesting the video, the mind, of course, and the horrible/wonderful songs of that summer, like Bran Van 3000’s ‘Drinking in L.A.’ or the Macarena. And though it will make your heart ache, for Sophie and Calum, for the times you were casually cruel to a loved one, for the days and moments you strain to remember now, it is one of those cinematic experiences that you won’t soon forget.”

Frankie Corio and Paul Mescal in “Aftersun.”

(TIFF)

‘The Banshees of Inisherin’

Written and directed by Martin McDonagh, “The Banshees of Inisherin” reunites the playwright and filmmaker with actors Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, who starred in his first feature, 2008’s “In Bruges.” In the new film, set in a remote Irish village in 1923, Colm (Gleeson) decides he no longer wants to be friends with Pádraic (Farrell), which proves more difficult than it may sound. The film is now in theaters.

For The Times, Justin Chang wrote, “Colm’s rejection of Pádraic is also, in its way, a rejection of the tyranny of niceness, and an assertion that greatness — whether in the form of a Mozart symphony or, God willing, the humbler violin piece he’s trying to compose — is of far greater value. All of which opens up a rich, thorny dialogue concerning McDonagh himself, who likes to blur the lines between humanism and nihilism, and who in ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ comes perhaps as close to greatness as he’s ever gotten. One measure of the movie’s skill, and its generosity, is that it embraces the wisdom of both its protagonists. You’ll share Colm’s exasperation and defend his right to pursue an unimpeded life of music and the mind, but you’ll also concede Pádraic’s point that kindness and camaraderie leave behind their own indelible if often invisible legacies.”

Josh Rottenberg spoke to Farrell, Gleeson and McDonagh about reuniting. As Farrell said, “Martin’s writing really is the tastiest stuff. It’s so funny, but ultimately it’s so moving and emotionally connected to all the things we struggle with as human beings: the need for love, our loneliness, our inescapable leaning into violence at times and the consequences of that violence. And it’s so sneaky — you think you’re watching something that’s irreverent and macabre with this gallows humor, but at its core, there’s a tenderness and a longing and a deep inquisition into what it is to be a human being, how fallible and frail we ultimately are and how much we need each other.”

For the New York Times, A.O. Scott wrote, “This is a place, governed by the playful and perverse sensibility of the dramatist and filmmaker Martin McDonagh, where the picturesque and the profane intermingle, where jaunty humor keeps company with gruesome violence. … ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ might feel a little thin if you hold it to conventional standards of comedy or drama. It’s better thought of as a piece of village gossip, given a bit of literary polish and a handsome pastoral finish. Inisherin may not be a real place, but its eccentric characters, rugged vistas and vivid local legends make it an attractive tourist destination all the same.”

For Time, Stephanie Zacharek wrote, “This is Farrell’s movie: he gives what is surely one of the best performances of the year. After he listens, stunned, to Colm’s pub speech about the uselessness of niceness, a bonfire of earnestness flares up in his exhausted brown eyes as he makes the case in defense of it. (He pronounces Beethoven Borrovan.) When he’s feeling down, he goes for a walk with [a miniature donkey named] Jenny at his side: the fur tufts along her neck stand straight up, an echo of the hair on his own head — a visual signal that they’re spiritual twins, linked by a sweet nature and an appreciation for grassy walks and good, clear air.”

Colin Farrell in “The Banshees of Inisherin.”

(Jonathan Hession / Searchlight Pictures)

‘Descendant’

Directed by Margaret Brown, the documentary “Descendant” won a special jury prize when it premiered at Sundance. The film finds Brown returning to her hometown of Mobile, Ala., to explore the history of the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to arrive in the United States. The discovery in 2019 of the sunken remains of the ship also brings to the surface many questions among the local descendant community. The film is in theaters and streaming on Netflix now.

For The Times, Robert Abele wrote, “With ‘Descendant,’ Brown wisely chooses to be respectfully, poetically alert instead of imposing, as her use of archival footage shot by [Zora Neale] Hurston suggests: She’s adding to a pioneering Black filmmaker’s anthropological empathy, updating the conversation, witnessing the witnessers. Brown knows this is not her history to tell but rather an unfolding story about storytelling she can diligently observe in meetings, get-togethers and intimate interviews. From there, the necessary questions about legacy and amends have space to become truly vivid and emotional, articulated as they are by the descendants themselves.”

For the New York Times, Lisa Kennedy wrote, “If you’ve ever wondered what ‘holding space’ looks like in practice, the director Margaret Brown’s deeply attentive documentary ‘Descendant’ provides moving examples. … Brown, who was born and raised in Mobile and is white, prioritizes the stories not only of the Black people who live in Africatown but also other stewards of a fuller American history that is still being brought to light, like the Smithsonian’s [Kamau] Sadiki and the curator Mary Elliott. She gently reminds a couple of descendants that even with the physical evidence of the schooner, the community must keep passing along their stories, must keep making an oral history.”

For IndieWire, Robert Daniels wrote, “For Brown, however, the pressing mystery isn’t where the ship is hidden. Not only is the vessel discovered halfway through the film, but the director never shows the search effort led by National Geographic. Instead she captures their town hall style news conferences with the descendants. The decision rightly places the descendants in control of their ancestors’ stories. Besides, for Brown, the questions of why and how supersede the where. Brown captures the many links to the past dotted around Africatown: Street names whose origins trace back to Clotilda survivors and plantation owners, the local graveyard (its own kind of museum), and the land itself.”

Joycelyn Davis in “Descendant.”

(Participant / Netflix)