Metrograph announces the September/October Week-Long Engagements Calendar

September 1-7 Exclusive One-Week Revival Engagement PRICK UP YOUR EARS 30th Anniversary of Stephen Frears' Landmark Film Featuring Gary Oldman, Alfred Molina, and Vanessa Redgrave A landmark film of queer life in Britain, based on the life and shocking death of playwright Joe Orton (What the Butler Saw, Loot), Stephen Frears’ freewheeling follow-up to his groundbreaking My Beautiful Launderette is back for its thirtieth anniversary. In flashbacks, the volatile relationship between a successful Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell (Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina, never better) grows increasingly desperate, while they also negotiate the mores of 1960s British society as a couple. Prick Up Your Ears has outlaw pluck and humor that’s a sustained rebel yell of passion and tragedy. A Park Circus release.

September 15-21 Exclusive One-Week NY Engagement THE FUTURE PERFECT 2016 Locarno Film Festival: Best First Feature Prize Weaving documentary fragments into a fiction narrative, Nele Wohlatz intimately describes the culture-shock experience of Xiaobin, a seventeen-year-old Chinese girl attempting to make her way in Buenos Aires, finding shelter in a furtive romance with Vijay, a young Indian who she meets in her language class. Winner of the Best First Feature prize at last year’s Locarno Film Festival, Wohlatz’s sui generis debut finds a startling, innovative, fluid form, while announcing a new filmmaking talent. A Mubi release.

September 22-28 Exclusive One-Week NY Engagement HONG KONG TRILOGY: PRESCHOOLED, PREOCCUPIED, PREPOSTEROUS DP Chris Doyle's Portrait of Contemporary Hong Kongers On Eve of Umbrella Movement For years Hong Kong was the beating heart of Chinese pop cinema, but reunification with the Mainland in 1997 upset the delicate balance that had fostered the city’s genius, and it has been a city in transition ever since. Who better to track that transition than Christopher Doyle, longtime resident, Wong Kar-wai’s frequent cinematographer, and a man with a sure-shot eye for the telling detail? In three docufiction segments, Doyle looks at three generations of Hong Kongers: School children, young “Umbrella Movement” activists, and the elderly. Overlaying audio from interview recordings onto loose narrative vignettes, Doyle creates sweet, richly textured, free-flowing portraits of a bevy of unforgettable characters, here just in time for the Umbrella Movement’s anniversary.

October 11-17 Exclusive One-Week Revival Engagement L'ENFANT SECRET First-Ever U.S. Theatrical Run of Philippe Garrel's Masterpiece The transitional film of Garrel’s career, pivoting from his experimental work into narrative, from films with Nico to works imbued with her ghost. Robert Bresson “models,” Anne Wiazemsky (Au hasard Balthazar) and Henri de Maublanc (The Devil, Probably), are a couple who fall in love and then fall to pieces, descending into drug addiction and mutually-enforced self-destruction. The Winner of the Prix Jean Vigo in 1982, this lacerating work of cinematic self-analysis was Garrel’s most traditional film to date, though as quietly revolutionary as any of his previous work, and a testament to an artist’s survival. "The secret child of French cinema, Philippe Garrel has sent us a sign of life. Our answer: we hear you loud and clear” (Serge Daney). This marks the U.S. theatrical premiere run of L'enfant secret in a new restoration. A Film Desk release.

October 13-19 Exclusive One-Week NY Engagement THE DEPARTURE An Empathetic, Artful New Film from Lana Wilson (After Tiller) In her new film, Lana Wilson (After Tiller) takes us deep inside the life of another extreme altruist, Ittetsu Nemoto, a punk-rocker-turned-Buddhist priest who has worked small miracles in suicide prevention in his native Japan. Now facing the new challenge of fatherhood, as well as rapidly escalating health problems of his own, Nemoto must answer a crucial question—can he justify risking his own life to help others carry on with theirs? With astonishing access and artistry, The Departure captures one man’s wrenching decision between self-preservation and selflessness. A Matson Films release.

October 20-26 Exclusive One-Week Revival Engagement MAIGRET SETS A TRAP  Jean Gabin as Simenon's Legendary Detective For fans of French film noir, it’s a match made in heaven: Jean Gabin (La Bête Humaine, French Cancan), in the full stoic splendor of his late 1950s comeback, brings his signature seen-it-all sangfroid to Georges Simenon’s famous fictional detective, Jules Maigret, whose vacation plans are spoiled by a serial killer stalking women in the Fourth Arrondissement. Jean Delannoy, though frequently overlooked, gets across both a pungent feel for lower depths Paris, with supremely elegant camera movements, while crafting a startling policier, surprisingly brutal for it’s time. Maigret Sets a Trap, which has slipped through the cracks of film history, and is extraordinarily deserving of rediscovery. A Kino Lorber release.