Lee Daniels’ THE BUTLER tells the story of a White House butler who served seven American presidents over three decades. The film traces the dramatic changes that swept American society during this time, from the civil rights movement to Vietnam and beyond, and how those changes affected this man’s life and family. Forest Whitaker stars as the butler with Robin Williams as Dwight Eisenhower, James Marsden as John F. Kennedy, Liev Schreiber as Lyndon B. Johnson, John Cusack as Richard Nixon, Alan Rickman as Ronald Reagan, and many more.

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132 MIN

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85 MIN

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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108 MIN

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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120 MIN

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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97 MIN

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.

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96 MIN

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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115 MIN

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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98 MIN

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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83 MIN

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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113 MIN