The Grand Illusion

April 1st marks our 21st anniversary as a volunteer-operated non-profit! Come celebrate with us at Northwest Film Forum as we screen a brand new restoration of an underseen gem from the ‘90s. A contender for the Grand Jury Prize at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, FEMALE PERVERSIONS marks the feature film debut of director and co-writer Susan Streitfeld as well as the American film debut of Tilda Swinton.

Eve Stephens (Swinton), an ambitious and successful trial lawyer in Los Angeles, is up for appointment as a judge while juggling her proclivity for meaningless sex and her relationship with her kleptomaniac sister Madelyn (Amy Madigan). As she navigates intimate relationships with both male and female partners, including geologist John (Clancy Brown) and psychiatrist Renee (Karen Sillas), Eve finds fantasy and reality converging, leading to a tense climax that will decide her personal and professional fate.

Streitfeld’s film is an inspired amalgamation of erotic drama and psychological thriller set within the cutthroat environs of the Los Angeles justice system and created by a majority-female crew. Newly restored from its original 35mm camera negative!

“Darkly funny… a heady, uncompromising film.” Michele Kort, The Advocate

“One of the most provocative films I’ve seen about the complications of being female in the modern world… This is the kind of movie you can’t stop thinking about.” Roger Ebert

“Female Perversions is the most intelligent, entertaining, provocative, absorbing, and, yes, feminist movie to grace our theatres in quite some time.” Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle

Over 25 years and 10 studio albums—using powerful sonic force mixed with subtlety and grace—Mogwai have defined their own musical genre and built a cult following. IF THE STARS HAD A SOUND takes us on a journey from their very beginnings, in the mid 1990s, to creating their tenth studio album in their hometown of Glasgow in 2020. While at first seemingly impossible to make, they ultimately made history with it.

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!

“Glaswegian cacophonists Mogwai have earned the right to an adulatory documentary – and they get one here, directed by former photographer Antony Crook… it truly soars when capturing them live.” Phil Hoad, The Guardian

“The documentary presents a beautiful picture of community surrounding the band – and isn’t community what music is meant to create?” Jenny Nulf, Austin Chronicle

In remembrance of Gene Hackman. 50th anniversary! Newly restored!

Arthur Penn’s haunting neo-noir reimagines the hard-boiled detective film for the disillusioned, paranoid 1970s. In one of his greatest performances, Gene Hackman oozes world-weary cynicism as a private investigator whose search for an actress’s missing daughter (Melanie Griffith) leads him from the Hollywood Hills to the Florida Keys, where he is pulled into a sordid family drama and a sinister conspiracy he can hardly grasp. Bolstered by Alan Sharp’s genre-scrambling script and Dede Allen’s elliptical editing, the daringly labyrinthine NIGHT MOVES is a defining work of post-Watergate cinema—a silent scream of existential dread and moral decay whose legend has only grown with time.

“One of the best psychological thrillers in a long time… Gene Hackman [is] subtle and riveting.” Roger Ebert

“A truly enigmatic thriller and a key film of the ’70s… Essential viewing.” Time Out

2K digital restorations of six short films by Lynch: "Six Men Getting Sick" (1967), "The Alphabet" (1968), "The Grandmother" (1970), "The Amputee" Version 1 and Version 2 (1974), and "Premonitions Following an Evil Deed" (1995).

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

“This collection shows [Lynch] producing some real gems under massive constraints, both financial and artistic.” David Moats, The Quietus

“Lynch’s shorts provide an insightful look at not only his common narrative themes and motifs, but also his filmmaking and narrative style, as well as the evolution of his artistry.” Peyton Brock, Collider

A rare glimpse into the mind of one of cinema’s most enigmatic visionaries, DAVID LYNCH: THE ART LIFE offers an absorbing portrait of the artist, as well as an intimate encounter with the man himself. From his secluded home and painting studio in the Hollywood Hills, a candid Lynch conjures people and places from his past, from his boyhood to his experiences at art school to the beginnings of his filmmaking career—in stories that unfold like scenes from his movies. This remarkable documentary by Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes, and Olivia Neergaard-Holm travels back to Lynch’s early years as a painter and director drawn to the phantasmagoric, while also illuminating his enduring commitment to what he calls “the art life”: “You drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint, and that’s it.”

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

“This cockeyed, oblique attempt to get closer to the worldview of David Lynch—one of American cinema’s finest oddities—is a compelling slice of cinephile inquiry.” Christina Newland, RogerEbert.com

“Extravagantly surreal as the products of [Lynch’s] imagination may be, they are deeply rooted in personal history and philosophy — and it’s this connection that Jon Nguyen’s disarmingly off-kilter documentary probes to rewarding effect.” Guy Lodge, Variety

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

“A benchmark of underground gay cinema” (The New York Times), newly restored and co-presented by SECS Fest!

A handsome, self-involved, and brooding young sex worker (Bobby Kendall) escapes the realities of his street life through a series of fantasies of incredible beauty. Obsessed with his own perceived perfection, he lives in a dreamworld of captivating colors, magnificent music, elaborate costumes and strikingly attractive males. In a series of eye-popping sequences he imagines himself in a variety of intense roles – from matador to Roman slave to harem leader – with his room as an exquisite jewel-encrusted retreat.

But reality constantly intrudes through the depraved lives of the other street people, the harsh and ugly sounds outside, and visits from his “johns”. Ultimately, his narcissistic enchantment with his own beauty and lifestyle is marred by one great fear – aging and loss of his youth. At once phantasmagoric and kaleidoscopic, the stunning new restoration of this ‘70s underground sensation burns just as bright – if not brighter.

The feature presentation will be preceded by a Best of SECS Fest 2024 short, “Angelo” by Helias Doulis.

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!

“A kind of gay Fantasia, part underground extravaganza, part romantic porn.” The Village Voice

“I love this film… A testament to independent filmmaking.” Gus Van Sant

“As beautiful and timeless as The Wizard of Oz.” John Waters

“One of the greatest films of the 20th century.” Guy Maddin

RIchard Linklater's classic romance, BEFORE SUNRISE, celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. Join us for a double feature of it and the beloved follow-up, BEFORE SUNSET, on June 16th, the date Jesse and Céline first came into each others' lives.

BEFORE SUNRISE opens with a chance encounter between two solitary young strangers. After they hit it off on a train bound for Vienna, the Paris university student Céline (Julie Delpy) and the scrappy American tourist Jesse (Ethan Hawke) impulsively decide to spend a day together before he returns to the U.S. the next morning. As the pair roam the streets of the stately city, Linklater’s tenderly observant gaze captures the uncertainty and intoxication of young love, from the first awkward stirrings of attraction to the hopeful promise that Céline and Jesse make upon their inevitable parting.

In the breathtaking follow-up, Céline tracks down Jesse, now an author, at the tail end of his book tour in Paris, with only a few hours left before he is to board a flight back home to the States. Meeting almost a decade after their short-lived romance in Vienna, the pair find their chemistry rekindled by increasingly candid exchanges about professional setbacks, marital disappointments, and the compromises of adulthood. Impelled by an urgent sense of the transience of human connection, BEFORE SUNSET remains Richard Linklater’s most seductive experiment with time’s inexorable passage and the way love can seem to stop it in its tracks.

“Taken together–which they should be–Before Sunrise and Before Sunset make up one of the supreme movie romances of the post-’80s era, an affair of the film and flesh to make the heart leap and the mind dance.” Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune