MOUNTAINSIDE is a clever, witty comedic drama, following hopeful filmmaker Felix, who experiences a “second coming of age”. After all but having given up on his passionate pursuit of filmmaking, he meets Stella, a down-to-Earth, chain-smoking cinephile, whose unexpected friendship inspires him to start writing again — but complications and distractions arise when Felix finds himself accidentally falling in love with his new best friend. Never hesitating to take steps outside of reality through the use of movies within movies, found footage and action sequences, MOUNTAINSIDE is also a love letter to film itself.

Our Farewell to 1403 series kicks off with this beautifully shot and wonderfully acted movie, filmed in various locations throughout Seattle, including Scarecrow Video and the Grand Illusion Cinema itself! – plus a particularly memorable sequence shot inside the Seattle Aquarium.

Winner of Best Northwest Feature at the 2023 Spokane International Film Festival!

Writer/director (and long-time Grand Illusion projectionist) Mikiech Nichols will be present for an intro and a post-show Q&A.

Cellist Lori Goldston performs an original live score for Carl Dreyer’s 1932 uncanny masterpiece, presented on 16mm film.

One of cinema’s most poetic nightmares, VAMPYR is a waking dream of hauntingly beautiful and unsettling imagery. A drifter arrives at a small village inn, discovering a family beset by mysterious forces, living shadows, and a malevolent old woman. Reality and nightmare blur as vampiric dread stalks the village, the family, and the drifter himself.

A critical and box office failure that derailed Dreyer’s career for a decade, today it is hailed as a unique and influential treasure, beloved by directors like Del Toro, Tarkovsky, and Polansky.

Classically trained and rigorously de-trained, semi-feral spirit Lori Goldston is a cellist, composer, improvisor, producer, writer, and teacher. Her voice as a cellist is full, textured, committed, and original. A relentless inquirer, her work drifts freely across borders that separate genre, discipline, time, and geography.

Second show added by popular demand! Mon. January 13 at 7:30 PM

Co-presented by The Sprocket Society. Part of our Farewell to 1403 series.

“Vampyr is as close as you get to poetry in film. It’s truly a meditation on life and death and the beyond.” Guillermo del Toro

“A triumph of the irrational, Dreyer’s eerie memento mori never allows either protagonist or viewer fully to wake up from its surreal nightmare.” Anton Bitel, Channel 4 (UK)

“This horror classic is an original experimental masterpiece… Some of the most expressive horror films can be traced back to Dreyer’s oneiric chiller.” Glenn Erickson, TrailersFromHell.com

“A genius of a both diabolical and mysterious kind bursts forth in these muted, oppressive images — as the juice seeps from an overripe fruit.” Marcel Carné

Join us for a very special, hard-hitting trio of kung fu flicks, all presented via rare 35mm film prints! The triple feature kicks off with a 1980s cult classic from a studio synonymous with the era, known for making ridiculously entertaining movies that are especially fun to watch with an audience. This is followed by a one-two punch of all-timers from a legendary company famous for producing some of the finest martial arts movies, including one of the indisputably greatest examples of the genre, which will serve as the grand finale to this whole shebang. Over five hours of martial arts manna for only $25!

Part of our Farewell to 1403 series.

Please note: This event is exempt from our masked matinee policy. Though still encouraged, masks are not required for this event.

Rock Hudson is a revelation in this sinister, science-fiction-inflected dispatch from the fractured 1960s. SECONDS, directed by John Frankenheimer, concerns a middle-aged banker who, dissatisfied with his suburban existence, elects to undergo a strange and elaborate procedure that will grant him a new life. Starting over in America, however, is not as easy as it sounds. This paranoiac symphony of canted camera angles (courtesy of famed cinematographer James Wong Howe), fragmented editing, and layered sound design is a remarkably risk-taking Hollywood film that ranks high on the list of its legendary director’s achievements.

Please note: This is the original US theatrical version from 1966, which is seven minutes shorter than the modern version widely available in digital formats. Despite the shorter runtime, we ultimately decided that seeing the movie projected via a rare 16mm print would make for a more unique viewing experience, and we believe this format serves to enhance Howe’s dreamlike black-and-white photography.

Co-presented by The Sprocket Society. Part of our Farewell to 1403 series.

“At its best, it is brilliant and combines sophisticated horror with intellectual excitement and all kinds of speculations about the American cult of success and pursuit of happiness.” Alexander Walker, London Evening Standard

“John Frankenheimer’s Seconds will linger a lot longer than the title suggests in the mind of anyone who chooses to watch it. In fact, it might be one of the most haunting American films to come out of the 1960s, or any decade for that matter.” Wael Khairy, RogerEbert.com

In the early 2010s, Grand Illusion volunteers Brian Alter and Spenser Hoyt ogled hours of vintage videotape from Scarecrow Video’s Sexploitation room to create three legendary, stream-of-consciousness montages of the juiciest bits. They featured an arousing mix of raunch, sleaze, filth, sexual hysteria, pervs, peeping toms, nymphos, go-go dancers, full frontal nudity and full posterior nudity. We collected our favorite awkward adult situations, humorous humping and weird sexual interludes into THE BEST OF VHSEX! Poster art by Marc Palm. Adults only!

Hosted by Brian Alter and Spenser Hoyt. Part of our Farewell to 1403 series.

We asked our volunteers to pick films to show this month and this is one of them!

Loosely based on Bram Stoker’s novel of the same name, Ken Russell’s frenetic fright-fest about a Scottish archaeologist (Peter Capaldi) uncovering the remains of a massive serpent in the Derbyshire countryside—and the odd events that follow this excavation, including the appearance of Hugh Grant as the self-proclaimed heir of a knight of ancient lore—is a riot of dark humor, pagan eroticism, and flamboyantly camp horror that ranks alongside the director’s finest.

Part of our Farewell to 1403 series.

“Russell’s compositions are gorgeous to look at, though it’s the deliciousness with which the story unravels that made Lair of the White Worm Russell’s most enjoyable film since his masterpiece Crimes of Passion.” Ed Gonzalez, Slant

“What’s so wonderful about Russell’s quintessential female villain is that she embodies a sense that evil has no gender. It has no feelings. It simply is, and it’s quite fun to get to know it.” April Wolfe, Film Comment

25th anniversary of Tarsem’s devisive, yet undeniably stunning psychological horror/thriller.

Before THE FALL, visionary director Tarsem made THE CELL, in which Jennifer Lopez stars as psychotherapist Catherine Deane, who has developed a technique to enter the unconscious mind of another. Now, in a desperate attempt to save an innocent life, she enters the mind of a comatose serial killer (Vincent D’Onofrio) to find his latest victim – a young woman whom the maniac has kidnapped and imprisoned in a torture chamber. But once inside the killer’s subconscious, can Deane return with her life – and her mind – intact?

Part of our Farewell to 1403 series.

“An original and stylish vision of insanity.” Michael O’Sullivan, Washington Post

“This is one beautifully surreal and unsettling thriller, with astounding visuals that will lurk in the crawlspaces of your brain after you’ve left the theater.” Mark Rahner, Seattle Times

“The Cell is a bizarre mixture of science fiction and serial murders, mind games and pop psychology, wild images and haunting special effects… I know people who hate it, finding it pretentious or unrestrained; I think it’s one of the best films of the year.” Roger Ebert

Join us for this special fundraiser screening of Peter Bogdanovich’s THE LAST PICTURE SHOW. The proceeds from your $25 ticket will go towards our relocation, plus you’ll get to see a beautiful restoration of an American classic.

One of the key films of the American seventies cinema renaissance, THE LAST PICTURE SHOW is set in the early fifties, in the loneliest Texas nowheresville to ever dust up a movie screen. This aching portrait of a dying West, adapted from Larry McMurtry’s novel, focuses on the daily shuffles of three futureless teens—enigmatic Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), wayward jock Duane (Jeff Bridges), and desperate-to-be-adored rich girl Jacy (Cybill Shepherd)—and the aging lost souls who bump up against them in the night like drifting tumbleweeds. Featuring evocative black-and-white imagery and profoundly felt performances, this hushed depiction of crumbling American values remains the pivotal work in the career of invaluable film historian and director Peter Bogdanovich.

This screening is generously sponsored by longtime Grand Illusion patron Michelle Byrd in loving memory of Bill Kennedy. Part of our Farewell to 1403 series.

For all of our fundraiser screenings, if you see a “Sold Out” message on the ticketing page it means we sold all of our 68 seats. We’ll start a wait list for door sales, but no guarantees we’ll have extra tickets.

“The movie gets to you quietly. You are likely to succumb to its melancholy spell without knowing quite why. But you realize, with absolute certainty, that you are watching something extraordinary in the way of filmmaking.” William B. Collins, The Philadelphia Inquirer

“The Last Picture Show is a masterpiece… the most impressive work by a young American director since Citizen Kane.” Paul D. Zimmerman, Newsweek

We asked our volunteers to pick films to show this month and this is one of them!

With the idiosyncratic American fable HAROLD AND MAUDE, countercultural director Hal Ashby fashioned what would become the cult classic of its era. Working from a script by Colin Higgins, Ashby tells the story of the emotional and romantic bond between a death-obsessed young man (Bud Cort) from a wealthy family and a devil-may-care, bohemian octogenarian (Ruth Gordon). Equal parts gallows humor and romantic innocence, HAROLD AND MAUDE dissolves the line between darkness and light along with the ones that separate people by class, gender, and age, and it features indelible performances and a remarkable soundtrack by Cat Stevens.

Part of our Farewell to 1403 series.

“Harold and Maude is the kind of cinema that draws you in for the storyline and keeps you there for the beating heart. It’s a film unapologetically of its time – the wardrobe, cinematography and Cat Stevens soundtrack place it firmly in the 70s – but its themes of joy and redemption resonate now more than ever.” Elizabeth Quinn, The Guardian

“Harold and Maude continues to resonate with viewers of all ages who feel a natural kinship with misfits and oddballs, and many claim it has changed their lives forever.” Pat Saperstein, Variety

We asked our volunteers to pick films to show this month and this is one of them! 40th anniversary!

Desperate to escape his mind-numbing routine, uptown Manhattan office worker Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) ventures downtown for a hookup with a mystery woman (Rosanna Arquette). So begins the wildest night of his life, as bizarre occurrences—involving underground-art punks, a distressed waitress, a crazed Mister Softee truck driver, and a bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweight—pile up with anxiety-inducing relentlessness and thwart his attempts to get home. With this Kafkaesque cult classic, Martin Scorsese—abetted by Michael Ballhaus’s kinetic cinematography and scene-stealing supporting turns by Linda Fiorentino, Teri Garr, Catherine O’Hara, and John Heard—directed a darkly comic tale of mistaken identity, turning the desolate night world of 1980s SoHo into a bohemian wonderland of surreal menace.

Part of our Farewell to 1403 series.

“Martin Scorsese’s After Hours mines urban anxiety to unsettling yet often hilarious effect.” Budd Wilkins, Slant Magazine

“Scorsese’s orchestration of thematic development, narrative structure, and visual style is stunning in its detail and fullness.” Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

“It’s not that they don’t make comedies like After Hours anymore. The fact is there’s never been a comedy quite like this one.” Peter Travers, People Magazine

Join us for this special fundraiser screening of Howard Hawks’s classic screwball comedy, BRINGING UP BABY. The proceeds from your $25 ticket will go towards our relocation, plus you’ll get to see one of the funniest movies ever made with an audience.

Screwball sparks fly when Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn let loose in one of the fastest and funniest films of all time—a high-wire act of invention that took American screen comedy to new heights of absurdity. Hoping to procure a million-dollar endowment from a wealthy society matron for his museum, a hapless paleontologist (Grant) finds himself entangled with a dizzy heiress (Hepburn) as the manic misadventures pile up—a missing dinosaur bone, a leopard on the loose, and plenty of gender-bending mayhem among them. BRINGING UP BABY’s sophisticated dialogue, spontaneous performances, and giddy innuendo come together in a whirlwind of comic chaos captured with lightning-in-a-bottle brio by director Howard Hawks.

Part of our Farewell to 1403 series.

For all of our fundraiser screenings, if you see a “Sold Out” message on the ticketing page it means we sold all of our 68 seats. We’ll start a wait list for door sales, but no guarantees we’ll have extra tickets.

“If you catch me on the right day and ask what I think the best comedy of all time is, it’s very likely I’ll say it’s 1938’s screwball classic Bringing Up Baby.” Sara Michelle Fetters, MovieFreak.com

“Hawks [keeps] his performers busy with a torrent of one-liners and physical comedy moves that only the extremely talented could even hope to grapple with. It’s perfect.” Phelim O’Neill, The Guardian

“Countless films have imitated Bringing Up Baby, but it is futile to look for its equal.” Angie Errigo, Empire Magazine

30th anniversary!

2029: A female cybernetic government agent, Major Motoko Kusanagi, and the Internal Bureau of Investigations are hot on the trail of “The Puppet Master,” a mysterious and threatening computer virus capable of infiltrating human hosts. Together with her fellow agents from Section 9, Kusanagi embarks on a high-tech race against time to capture the omnipresent entity. Director Mamoru Oshii’s award-winning cyber-tech thriller, based on the manga by Shirow Masamune, is lauded as one of the greatest and most influential anime movies of all time.

In Japanese with English subtitles.

Part of our Farewell to 1403 series.

“Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell will always strike a chord with those directly affected by bodily displacement. By being brave enough to confront its themes of identity, Ghost in the Shell stands tall as one of the very best films ever made about being an alien in your own skin.” Willow Maclay, Rogerebert.com

“This is a work of profound and melancholic beauty; every bit as essential in the 21st century as it was in the 20th.” Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph

20th anniversary!

Two young men are haunted by similar events from their past, though the effects manifest themselves in very different ways, in this powerful drama from director Gregg Araki. Neil is a rebellious teenager who engages in risky behavior. Brian is a socially awkward young man who suffers from blackouts and is convinced that he was abducted by aliens. As their paths converge, the painful truth about their shared past gradually comes to light.

Featuring unforgettable performances by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet (director of THE BRUTALIST), MYSTERIOUS SKIN is a poignant, sensitive, and deeply moving story about sexual abuse and its long aftermath.

Part of our Farewell to 1403 series.

“A complex and challenging emotional experience.” Roger Ebert

“Mysterious Skin is infused with remarkable tenderness and beauty.” A.O. Scott, The New York Times

“The movie sugarcoats nothing, but it doesn’t revel in its own darkness either. It sheds a clear, compassionate, illuminating light.” David Ansen, Newsweek

Join us for a special screening of the film that inspired our cinema’s name—Jean Renoir’s humanist masterpiece, THE GRAND ILLUSION! For $25 you get to see one of the all-time greatest films ever made and help us relocate.

A group of French soldiers, including the patrician Captain de Boeldieu and the working-class Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin), grapple with their own class differences after being captured and held in a World War I German prison camp. When the men are transferred to a high-security fortress, they must concoct a plan to escape beneath the watchful eye of aristocratic German officer von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim), who has formed an unexpected bond with de Boeldieu. In French, German, Russian with English subtitles.

Part of our Farewell to 1403 series.

For all of our fundraiser screenings, if you see a “Sold Out” message on the ticketing page it means we sold all of our 68 seats. We’ll start a wait list for door sales, but no guarantees we’ll have extra tickets.

“One of the true masterpieces of the screen!” Pauline Kael

“If I had only one film in the world to save, it would be Grand Illusion.” Orson Welles

“All the democracies of the world must see this film.” Franklin D. Roosevelt

We asked YOU to pick a film for us to show this month and this is what won!

Maybe the New Wave’s most anarchic entry, Vera Chytilová’s absurdist farce follows the misadventures of two hedonistic young women, both name Marie (Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová). Believing the world to be “spoiled,” they embark on a gleefully debauched odyssey of gluttony, giddy destruction, and antipatriarchal resistance, in which nothing is safe from their nihilistic pursuit of pleasure. Matching her anarchic message with an equally radical aesthetic, director Chytilová and cinematographer Jaroslav Kucera unleash an optical storm of fluctuating film stocks, kaleidoscopic montages, cartoonish stop-motion cutouts, and surreal costumes. DAISIES is the most defiant provocation of the Czechoslovak New Wave, an exuberant call to rebellion aimed squarely at those who uphold authoritarian oppression in any form.

In Czech with English subtitles.

Part of our Farewell to 1403 series.

“A feminist triumph, Chytilová’s film satirizes the bourgeoisie, authoritarianism, and the patriarchy, all while being unabashedly girly.” Marya E. Gates, Cool People Have Feelings, Too

“One of the great outpourings of cinematic invention in an age of over-all artistic liberation.” Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“As subversive as it is hilarious.” Kate Muir, The Times (UK)

85th anniversary!

Romance becomes psychodrama in the elegantly crafted REBECCA, Alfred Hitchcock’s first foray into Hollywood filmmaking. A dreamlike adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel, the film stars the enchanting Joan Fontaine as a young woman who believes she has found her heart’s desire when she marries the dashing aristocratic widower Maxim de Winter (played with cunning vulnerability by Laurence Olivier). But upon moving to Manderley—her groom’s baroque ancestral mansion—she soon learns that his deceased wife haunts not only the estate but the temperamental, brooding Maxim as well. The start of Hitchcock’s legendary collaboration with producer David O. Selznick, this elegiac gothic vision, captured in stunning black and white by George Barnes, took home the Academy Awards for best picture and best cinematography.

Part of our Farewell to 1403 series.

“A gorgeous treat from one of cinema’s masters. Not to be missed.” Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“An altogether brilliant film, haunting, suspenseful, handsome and handsomely played.” Frank S. Nugent, The New York Times

“Tense, engrossing and deliciously deceitful.” David Parkinson, Empire

40th anniversary!

H.P. Lovecraft and Lucio Fulci did not team up to make the most amazing gore-sex grotesquerie of 1985. But thanks to RE-ANIMATOR, they didn’t have to. Feeling like an amalgam of FRANKENSTEIN, THE BEYOND, and REVENGE OF THE NERDS, RE-ANIMATOR is where science meets chaos to produce an hyperactive overdose of gruesome insanity.

Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) is a new student at Miskatonic University. He also moonlights as a mad scientist, intent on perfecting a serum that “re-animates” corpses. Soon, everyone wants a piece of the action, including an evil professor and his army of slime-covered deadites. With berserker direction from Stuart Gordon, career-defining roles from horror icons Barbara Crampton and Jeffrey Combs, and a scene of two adults chasing an undead cat in a basement, RE-ANIMATOR isn’t just a masterpiece of the horror genre — it’s a masterpiece of life.

Part of our Farewell to 1403 series.

“Re-Animator is splatter heaven. Based on the sci-fi novel by H.P. Lovecraft, Re-Animator’s gore is exceeded only by its wit.” Paul Attanasio, The Washington Post

“It’s simply the best, funniest Grand Guignol horror picture to come along in ages.” Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

Join us for this special fundraiser screening of Giuseppe Tornatore’s CINEMA PARADISO. The proceeds from your $25 ticket will go towards our relocation, plus you’ll get to see one of the most beloved films ever made.

Funny, moving and unabashedly sentimental, CINEMA PARADISO swept the world’s major film awards, reinvigorated Italian cinema, and has become a true classic.

Young Salvatore Di Vita discovers the perfect escape from life in his war-torn Sicilian village: the Cinema Paradiso movie house, where projectionist Alfredo instills in the boy a deep love of films. When Salvatore grows up, falls in love with a beautiful local girl and takes over as the theater’s projectionist, Alfredo must convince Salvatore to leave his small town and pursue his passion for filmmaking.

Told in flashback, with a gorgeous score by maestro Ennio Morricone and a legendary ending montage, CINEMA PARADISO is a love letter to the movies, community, and the power of art to give meaning to our lives.

Note: We are screening the 124 minute award-winning 1990 international release version.

Part of our Farewell to 1403 series.

For all of our fundraiser screenings, if you see a “Sold Out” message on the ticketing page it means we sold all of our 68 seats. We’ll start a wait list for door sales, but no guarantees we’ll have extra tickets.

“An alluring blend of postmodern self-referentiality and old-fashioned sentimental nostalgia, [it] plays like a parable or a fable, a paean to the inspirational power of the moving image.” Mark Kermode, BFI Player

“This is one of the finest films about innocence ever made.” Camilla Long, Sunday Times (UK)

“Both emotional and sentimental, Cinema Paradiso shows nostalgia for the mythical magic of collective movie-going in the past, before the age of television, when movies were the main source of entertainment.” Emanuel Levy