Spectacle Theater

Programming Highlights:​

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Hate Unchained: Lucía Seles’ Tennis Tetralogy.

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"Sui generis works of avant-garde comedy, Lucía Seles’ tennis tetralogy, HATE UNCHAINED, are a sight to behold. Filmed over a few days on prosumer cameras working from improvised scripts, the films operate in a language uniquely their own. Seles incorporates on-screen text-based poetry, verbal slapstick, a documentarian’s eye, compelling characters, stray camera mistakes, love triangles, and more into an DIY screwball stew that lands somewhere between The Office, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, the work of El Pampero Cine, and Samuel Beckett. These are films that obey their own logic of dramatic storytelling, film aesthetics, and poetry to an often disorienting degree."

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Season of Lav​

 

"As the weather warms up and the days get longer, what better way to spend an afternoon (and more) than in the company of a Lav Diaz movie? Rarely seen in U.S. theaters since the breakthrough success of NORTE: THE END OF HISTORY and THE WOMAN WHO RAN, the films of Lav Diaz are often more heard about than watched. This spring we’ll be rectifying this situation by presenting a few of Lav Diaz’s most recent films that have yet to find their way in front of a New York audience."

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Por El Dinero: The Films of Alejo Moguillansky

 

"Wedding narratives stolen from classical fantasy stories (Treasure Island, Swan Lake, Hans Christian Andersen) to documentary-based portraits of artists struggling both creatively and financially, the films of Alejo Moguillansky can be equal parts Marxist and childish. Thriving on a playful dialectical struggle between truth and fiction, reality and fantasy, comedy and tragedy, content and form, aural and visual space – Moguillansky’s films are in a state of constant exploration. From THE PARROT AND THE SWAN – wherein the main character is also the film’s boom operator and the idea of cinematic subjectivity is taken comically new heights – to FOR THE MONEY, where Moguillansky’s real-life entry into a Colombian theater competition is imagined as the harbinger of insatiable greed and, ultimately, his own death – the very process of filmmaking is often the jumping off point for the film itself, leaving the movie to discover and construct its own aesthetic terrain as it unfolds."

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WAZAK! These Are Not Some Films by Khavn

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​"With 52 features and 150+ shorts to his name, some of which were shot in a single day, the work of poet/musician/filmmaker Khavn De La Cruz is so voluminous and eclectic as to defy classification. From families that eat soil to kids that smoke cigarettes and fuck geese to innocent orphans caught up in historical massacres, the only guarantee that comes when you watch a movie by Khavn is that you’re going to get your senses rocked and your world turned upside down. These are films that embrace their own abrasive edges, delighting in imperfection as a symbol of artistic freedom and an iconoclastic struggle against the stifling order of things. More than characters or plots, Khavn builds his films on music, color, and grotesque non sequiturs, taking any and every opportunity to deviate from the expected and indulge in whatever odd detail or sequence strikes his fancy. With the Mad Max production design of ALIPATO and the aggressive transgressiveness of his lo-fi digital cinematography, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that his films have often been labeled as punk. Yet there’s a sensitivity and patience in these films, a contemplative openness to portraying the world in all its documentary messiness, that goes beyond any labels."

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Made for the Dream: Six Films Starring Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez

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"For fans of 21st century Mexican cinema, Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez (or Gabino, as he was colloquially known throughout most of his career) holds a special and unique place. His credits as a leading man may make for a short list heavy on Nicolás Pereda films, but he has also been there at the margins of the frame in some of this century’s most important Mexican films, stealing scenes as a supporting player with his distinct physical presence. In his work with Pereda he is something else, a brusque and enigmatic face grounding Pereda’s bewildering structural experiments with a quiver of the lip or tilt of the head that lends an ordinary immediacy to what is otherwise a typical atmosphere of ambiguity. In addition to those films, this retrospective also encompasses work Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez did with international filmmakers working in Mexico. Showcasing different sides of his screen persona – LA ULTIMA PELICULA demonstrates a distinct, improv-heavy casualness, while LUCIFER takes the gestural elements of his art to the extreme, bringing him closer to the subject of a Flemish painting – these two films capture something of his range and ability."

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David Easteal's The Plains​

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“In Easteal’s first feature, the Australian director adopts a durational model of filmmaking that arguably hit its peak around the turn of the 2010s, but he parlays the conceptual framework into a casually engrossing work free of slow cinema’s more trying aspects (e.g., long passages of silence; quasi-symbolic characters on seemingly endless quests toward enlightenment). Running 180 minutes and set almost entirely inside a car, The Plains depicts the daily commute of a middle-aged businessman from the parking lot of a Melbourne law office to his home in the city’s outer suburbs. Every day, at just after 5 p.m., Andrew (Andrew Rakowski) gets into his Hyundai, calls his wife, and checks in with his ailing mother, before listening to talk radio for the remainder of the hour-long drive. Occasionally, he offers a lift to a coworker, David (played by Easteal), who’s going through a breakup and is generally dissatisfied with his personal and professional life. Over the course of the film— told recursively, beginning at the same time and location each day—Andrew and David reveal themselves in casual, offhand conversations (apparently scripted but delivered so naturally as to evoke the feel of a documentary) that accumulate into an acute portrait of modern life—one in which otherwise unarticulated beliefs, regrets, and anxieties bring to light a shared humanity too often lost in the commotion of the world.”
—Jordan Cronk, Film Comment