Fruitvale Station

Watch Trailer Director: Ryan Coogler
Writer(s): Ryan Coogler
Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Melonie Diaz and Octavia Spencer
Awards: Won the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival

Winner of both the Grand Jury Prize for dramatic feature and the Audience Award for U.S. dramatic film at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, director Ryan Coogler’s FRUITVALE STATION follows the true story of Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan), a 22-year-old Bay Area resident who wakes up on the morning of December 31, 2008 and feels something in the air. Not sure what it is, he takes it as a sign to get a head start on his resolutions: being better son to his mother (Octavia Spencer), whose birthday falls on New Year’s Eve, being a better partner to his girlfriend Sophina (Melonie Diaz), who he hasn’t been completely honest with as of late, and being a better father to Tatiana (Ariana Neal), their beautiful four year-old daughter. Crossing paths with friends, family and strangers, Oscar starts out well, as the day goes on, he realizes that changes are not going to come easily. His resolve takes a tragic turn, however, when BART officers shoot him in cold blood at the Fruitvale subway stop on New Year’s Day. Oscar’s life and tragic death would shake the Bay Area – and the entire nation – to its very core.

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Running Time: 85 minutes85 MIN
R Rated

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The Grandmaster

Watch Trailer Director: Kar Wai Wong
Writer(s): Kar Wai Wong, Jingzhi Zou and Haofeng Xu
Cast: Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Ziyi Zhang and Jin Zhang
Awards: Won the Film of Merit award at the Shanghai Film Critics Awards
Language: Mandarin

THE GRANDMASTER begins as the story of Ip Man (Tony Leung), the legendary teacher of Bruce Lee and a master of the Wing Chun school of kungfu. It becomes the portrait of a bygone era and a lost world.

Ip Man was born in Foshan, in the south of China, to a wealthy family. Pursuing a single-minded passion for Wing Chun, Ip Man is often seen at the Gold Pavilion, an elegant brothel that serves as a meeting place for Foshan’s kungfu masters and whose women possess a few martial arts secrets of their own.

In 1936, China is experiencing political turbulence and the threat of division. The Japanese have invaded the northeastern provinces collectively known as Manchuria. Grandmaster Gong Baosen (Wang Qingxiang), whose home is in Japanese-occupied Manchura, and who is the leader of the martial arts world of Northern China, arrives in Foshan. He had been to Foshan previously to initiate exchanges between the martial artists of the North and those of the South but this time he has come at the invitation of the Southern masters to hold a ceremony at the Gold Pavilion to celebrate his impending retirement.

An integral part of the ceremony involves a challenge and display of martial arts skills with a younger man. During a similar ceremony held at home in the Northeast, Gong’s disciple and successor Ma San (Zhang Jin), a Xingyi master, performed this role. Master Gong’s daughter Gong Er (Ziyi Zhang), who is the sole inheritor of her father’s lethal Bagua-style ’64 Hands’ technique, also arrives in Foshan to witness her father step down. It is here where she encounters Ip Man. Who is qualified to take up the Old Master’s challenge? Challenge leads to challenge, and masters contest masters.

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Running Time: 108 minutes108 MIN
PG-13 Rated

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Salinger

Watch Trailer Director: Shane Salerno
Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Edward Norton, Judd Apatow, John Cusack

For more than fifty years, the ever elusive author of The Catcher in the Rye has been the subject of a relentless stream of newspaper and magazine articles as well as several biographies. Yet all of these attempts have been hampered by a fundamental lack of access and by the persistent recycling of inaccurate information. Salinger remains, astonishingly, an enigma. The complex and contradictory human being behind the myth has never been revealed.

SALINGER features interviews with 150 subjects including Salinger’s friends and colleagues who have never spoken on the record before as well as film footage, photographs and other material that has never been seen. The film is the first work to get beyond the Catcher in the Rye author’s meticulously built up wall: his childhood, painstaking work methods, marriages, private world and the secrets he left behind after his death in 2010.

“In its revelations of Salinger’s flaws, the documentary capably strips away the fanaticism associated with his books to create the impression of a human being.” – Eric Kohn, indieWIRE

“Given that this isn’t the extended TV mini-series that the subject deserves, SALINGER does an effective job of making the writer seem alternately more mundane and more mysterious, almost at the same time.” – Chris Willman, The Playlist

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Running Time: 120 minutes120 MIN
PG-13 Rated

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Austenland

Watch Trailer Director: Jerusha Hess
Writer(s): Jerusha Hess and Shannon Hale
Cast: Keri Russell, JJ Feild, Jennifer Coolidge, Bret McKenzie

Jane Hayes is a seemingly normal young New Yorker, but she has a secret. Her obsession with Mr. Darcy, as played by Colin Firth in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, is ruining her love life: no real man can compare. But when a wealthy relative bequeaths her a trip to an English resort catering to Austen-crazed women, Jane’s fantasies of meeting the perfect Regency-era gentleman suddenly become realer than she ever could have imagined.

Decked out in empire-waist gowns, Jane struggles to master Regency etiquette and flirts with gardeners and gentlemen; or maybe even, she suspects, with the actors who are playing them. It’s all a game, Jane knows. And yet the longer she stays, the more her insecurities seem to fall away, and the more she wonders: Is she about to kick the Austen obsession for good, or could all her dreams actually culminate in a Mr. Darcy of her own?

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Running Time: 97 minutes97 MIN
PG-13 Rated

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Ain’t Them Bodies Saints

Watch Trailer Director: David Lowery
Writer(s): David Lowery
Cast: Rooney Mara, Casey Affleck, Ben Foster, Keith Carradine
Awards: Won the Cinematography Award and Indian Paintbrush Producer's Award at Sundance

Brought to life with exquisite detail and rich cinematography by Bradford Young (winner of the US Dramatic Cinematography Award at Sundance), the gritty landscape of 1970s Texas Hill Country is the backdrop for this mood-drenched collision of love and crime. After his pregnant wife (Rooney Mara) makes one false move during a bloody shootout, a bank robber (Casey Affleck) faces a 25-year sentence that destroys his dreams of a family life. Shot through with the yearning and melancholy of a folk ballad, David Lowery’s directorial breakthrough — one of the most acclaimed films at Sundance and a special Critics’ Week selection at Cannes — extends the Bonnie and Clyde tradition with its breathtaking meditation on the fragility and transience of love.

“The feel of the movie is intimate and handmade, as if Lowery were renewing, lovingly and poignantly, the landscape’s ruined landmarks and infusing them with his own memories and dream.”-Richard Brody, New Yorker
“It marks the arrival of an immense talent who will be new to most moviegoers – although Lowery is a well-known figure in the indie-film world – and it’s surely one of the best American films of the year.”-Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com

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Running Time: 96 minutes96 MIN
R Rated

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The Act of Killing

Watch Trailer Director: Joshua Oppenheimer, Anonymous, Christin Cynn
Cast: Haji Anif, Syamsul Arifin, Sakhyan Asmara
Language: Indonesian, English

Anwar Congo and his friends have been dancing their way through musical numbers, twisting arms in film noir gangster scenes, and galloping across prairies as yodelling cowboys. Their foray into filmmaking is being celebrated in the media and debated on television, even though Anwar Congo and his friends are mass murderers. Medan, Indonesia. When the government of Indonesia was overthrown by the military in 1965, Anwar and his friends were promoted from small-time gangsters who sold movie theatre tickets on the black market to death squad leaders. They helped the army kill more than one million alleged communists, ethnic Chinese, and intellectuals in less than a year. As the executioner for the most notorious death squad in his city, Anwar himself killed hundreds of people with his own hands.

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Running Time: 115 Minutes115 MIN
Not Rated

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Blue Jasmine

Watch Trailer Director: Woody Allen
Writer(s): Woody Allen
Cast: Alec Baldwin, Cate Blanchett, Louis C.K., Sally Hawkins, Andrew Dice Clay, Peter Sarsgaard, Bobby Cannavale

After everything in her life falls to pieces, including her marriage to wealthy businessman Hal, elegant New York socialite Jasmine moves into her sister Ginger’s modest apartment in San Francisco to try to pull herself back together again.

“A jaw-dropping work, what we go to the movies hoping to see, and we do. Blanchett is beyond brilliant, beyond analysis. Her performance is one for the books.”-Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

“Richly chronicled characters, sharp dialogue and that stupendous centerpiece performance by Cate Blanchett are contributing factors in the best summer movie of 2013 and one of the most memorable Woody Allen movies ever.”-Rex Reed, New York Observer

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Running Time: 98 Minutes98 MIN
PG-13 Rated

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Blackfish

Watch Trailer Director: Gabriela Cowperthwaite
Writer(s): Gabriela Cowperthwaite, Eli B. Despres
Cast: Samantha Berg, Dave Duffus, Dean Gomersall
Awards: Nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival

While in captivity, Tilikum, a performing killer whale, has been responsible for the deaths of three people, including a top orca trainer. Blackfish shows the sometimes devastating consequences of capturing and confining such intelligent and sentient creatures.

“Through the rueful voices of former trainers and whale experts, a narrative driven by disillusion and regret unfolds as the trainers point to a gap between SeaWorld’s public image and behind-the-scenes reality.”-Jeanette Catsoulis, New York Times

“After watching “Blackfish,” you come away with a sense of orcas’ singular intelligence, to be sure, even their astonishing playfulness, but most of all their glorious power, and the majesty of their existence in their natural habitat.”-Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal

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Running Time: 83 Minutes83 MIN
PG-13 Rated

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Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me

Watch Trailer Director: Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori
Cast: Jon Auer, Alex Chilton, Chris Bell, Jody Stephens, Andy Hummel

Coming to the Athena on Friday, September 6th.

Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me is a feature-length documentary film about the dismal commercial failure, subsequent massive critical acclaim, and enduring legacy of pop music’s greatest cult phenomenon, Big Star.

“The story that writer-director Drew DeNicola and producer-director Olivia Mori reconstruct has the power to move even those who prefer Mozart or Lil Wayne.”-Mark Jenkins, NPR

“A well-sourced account of a perfect, broken dream, Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori’s slightly shaggy documentary captures what it’s like to discover music so good it seems as if it were made just for you.”-Nicolas Rapold, New York Times

 

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Running Time: 113 Minutes113 MIN
PG-13 Rated

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Hell Baby

Watch Trailer Director: Robert Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon
Writer(s): Robert Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon
Cast: Leslie Bibb, Rob Corddry, Thomas Lennon

HELL BABY, a comedy scripted by Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant (Night at The Museum, Reno 911!: Miami) marks their co-directing debut. Jack (Rob Corddry) and Vanessa (Leslie Bibb) are an expectant couple that moves into the most haunted fixer-upper in New Orleans — a house with a deadly demonic curse. Things soon spiral out of control for Jack and Vanessa, as well as their-not-so-helpful neighbor F’Resnel (Keegan-Michael Key), Vanessa’s friendly psychiatrist (Michael Ian Black), Vanessa’s Wiccan sister Marjorie (Riki Lindhome) and the detectives assigned to look into the rising body count (Rob Huebel and Paul Scheer). Only the Vatican’s elite exorcism team (Garant and Lennon) san save them — or can they?

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Running Time: 98 Minutes98 MIN
R Rated

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