The Grand Illusion

🎶 DON’T CHEW FORGET ABOUT ME 🎶 Twelfth encore screening!

Our friends at Central Cinema are generously helping us keep the beavers gnawing away while we search for a new home. 60% of ticket sales go to our relocation fund!

In this 19th century, supernatural winter epic, a drunken applejack salesman must go from zero to hero and become North America’s greatest fur trapper by defeating hundreds of beavers.

Created by Mike Cheslik and Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, the duo behind the modern cult hit LAKE MICHIGAN MONSTER (2018).

Named one of the 10 best movies of 2024 by Ty Burr of The Washington Post and Amy Nicholson of The Los Angeles Times.

“Starts strange, gets stranger, and yet remains resolutely adorable… embraces the defiant glee of art cinema and distills it into something so thoroughly pure and sincere that it is surely hard not to fall in love with it.” Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Alliance of Women Film Journalists

“It’s sure to develop a significant cult following with its unique mix of silent-era slapstick, animation elements, theme-park-style critter costumes, and general air of inspired absurdity.” Dennis Harvey, Variety

“Steroidally swollen with gags and smarts.” Guy Maddin

Join us at the Here-After for a 25th anniversary screening of Kinji Fukasaku’s dystopian masterpiece, BATTLE ROYALE! The majority of the ticket gross will go to our relocation fund.

In the near future, the economy has collapsed, unemployment has soared, and juvenile crime has exploded. Fearful of their nation’s youth, every year the Japanese government sends a 9th grade class to a remote island where they will be locked into exploding neck collars, given a random weapon, and forced to hunt and kill each other until there is only one survivor left.

In Japanese with English subtitles.

Please note: Here-After is a 21 and over establishment. The entrance is via the alley in back of The Crocodile building. Get there early to order tasty beverages from the bar and delicious food from Tat’s Deli!

“One of Japanese cinema’s most daring and influential crowning achievements… it remains one of the finest treasures to ever grace genre cinema.” Kieran Fisher, Dread Central

“It’s a movie that never lets you settle down, zipping between satire and splatter, offering moments that will make the most hardened viewer cringe and snatches of quiet melancholy that will haunt you for a long time.” Kim Newman, Empire

Winner of an Honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement, Charles Burnett remains one of our country’s most celebrated independent filmmakers. In his charming and long-unavailable THE ANNIHILATION OF FISH, Lynn Redgrave plays Poinsettia, a former housewife with an imagined lover in the form of 19th-century composer Giacomo Puccini. She moves into a Los Angeles boarding house with an energetic landlady (Margot Kidder). There she meets a Jamaican widower, Fish (James Earl Jones), who has recently been released from a mental institution despite his continued battles against unseen demons. In the face of personal challenges and differences, the couple grows together and begins to discover new things about themselves and the nuances of love and happiness.

“Charles Burnett is one of the finest filmmakers in this country. His pictures speak in a cinematic voice that is uniquely and completely his own. For much too long, The Annihilation of Fish has been in limbo. It took many years and endless persistence to rescue this beautiful, delicate picture and get the original materials properly restored and preserved. It required the combined efforts of multiple organizations — Milestone Films, UCLA Film & Television Archive, The Film Foundation, and the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation — to see this restoration through, and I’m so happy that it’s finally ready for the world to discover.” Martin Scorsese

4/4 stars! “At every turn, The Annihilation of Fish is wonderfully surprising… this film is the essence of what makes Burnett’s hold on the American mythos peerless and exceptional.” Robert Daniels, RogerEbert.com

Critic’s Pick! “A modest movie modestly told, The Annihilation of Fish sneaks up on you; it’s as stealthy as Fish’s demon and can pack just as powerful a wallop.” Manohla Dargis

45th anniversary! With this poignant second feature, David Lynch brought his atmospheric visual and sonic palette to a notorious true story set in Victorian England. When the London surgeon Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) meets the freak-show performer John Merrick (John Hurt), who has severe skeletal and soft-tissue deformities, he assumes that he must be intellectually disabled as well. As the two men spend more time together, though, Merrick reveals the intelligence, gentle nature, and profound sense of dignity that lie beneath his shocking appearance, and he and Treves develop a friendship. Shot in gorgeous black and white and boasting a stellar supporting cast that includes Anne Bancroft, John Gielgud, and Wendy Hiller, THE ELEPHANT MAN was nominated for eight Academy Awards, cementing Lynch’s reputation as one of American cinema’s most visionary talents.

Part of To Live Is To Dream: A Northwest Tribute to David Lynch.

“I sometimes think that John Hurt’s performance in the title role of David Lynch’s sublime biography of Joseph Merrick (renamed John in the script) is the greatest piece of film acting I’ve ever seen… From the proto–Laura Palmer locket photo of Merrick’s mother that opens the film to its droning sound design and morbidly transcendent ending, [The Elephant Man] is like a template for three decades’ worth of brilliant variations.” Adam Nayman, The Ringer

“The Elephant Man is a very pleasurable surprise.” Pauline Kael

“This is a tale of redemption and transcendence, of the hunchback of London Hospital, of the noble phantom who wanted to go to the opera, of Beauty and the Beast. In Treves’ account, though, the Beast was a Beauty. In Lynch’s hands, so is this film.” Richard Corliss, TIME