Sunday Night Film Club – Boston

Private investigator Matthew Scudder is hired by a drug kingpin to find out who kidnapped and murdered his wife.

As children, Maggie and Milo Dean seemed inseparable. But tragedy hit their family as teenagers when their father died, sending them on different paths, and ultimately leading to a decade-long estrangement.

Now in their thirties, another set of near-tragedies brings them together. Melancholic Milo (Bill Hader), a frustrated actor with no prospects, decides to accept his sisters offer to return to their hometown in bucolic upstate New York. However, hes unaware that Maggie (Kristen Wiig) herself is barely holding it together, secretly unhappy despite her loving husband Lance (Luke Wilson).

Bob Saginowski finds himself at the center of a robbery gone awry and entwined in an investigation that digs deep into the neighborhood’s past where friends, families, and foes all work together to make a living – no matter the cost.

An aging, out-of-work actress accepts one last job, though the consequences of her decision affect her in ways she didn’t consider.

Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!

Acclaimed Irish director Lenny Abrahamson creates a wildly quirky comedy about a naive young wannabe musician, Jon (Domhnall Gleeson, About Time), who finds himself out of his depth when he joins an avant-garde rock band led by the mysterious Frank (Michael Fassbender, conquering the ultimate acting challenge), an unstable but charismatic musical savant who wears a large, round fake head with crudely painted-on features all the timelike Daniel Johnston hidden behind a cartoon smile. Frank’s closest musical collaborator is the forbidding Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Donnie Darko); part caretaker, part jailer, Clara is the antithesis of all things mainstream. For Jon, this is the break he’s been waiting for, his chance to climb through the looking glass and into the world of artistic collaboration, real music-making, and rock ‘n’ roll adventure that he’s always dreamed of. But does he have the talent to make it? Written by Jon Ronson (The Men Who Stare at Goats) and Peter Straughan (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), based on the memoir by Ronson.

“I’m going to kill you, Father.” In Calvary, an inventive mystery-drama with a pitch-black comic heart, Father James (Brendan Gleeson, In Bruges) is a good priest who is threatened in the confessional by a mysterious member of his parish. Although he continues to comfort his own fragile daughter Fiona (Kelly Reilly) and reach out to help members of his church with their various scurrilous moraland often comicproblems, he feels sinister and troubling forces closing in, and begins to wonder if he will have the courage to face his own personal Calvary. Also starring Chris O’Dowd. From John Michael McDonagh, the acclaimed writer and director of The Guard.

William Friedkins white-knuckle, high-octane remake of one of the tensest films ever made, Clouzots The Wages of Fear, features Roy Scheider as a down-on-his-luck American ex-pat in South America who joins a desperate group of men transporting dangerous explosives across treacherous territory in order to stop an oil refinery fire. SORCERER ups the ante on its predecessor by throwing even more obstacles at its protagonists. For instance, where Clouzot had cliffside, switchback mountain passes, Friedkin adds a crumbling rope bridge across a gorge. And the natural obstructions are just the obvious problems soon, the emotional toll of the work and the outright cravenness of the team conspire to create some of the most sensational scenes of sustained tension in cinema history. Initially positioned as a summer tentpole, SORCERER was effectively obliterated by the release of Star Wars a month earlier.

Now viewable in a gorgeous digital restoration heartily endorsed by Friedkin, the film is being seen in a new light and causing film fans to consider an alternate history where SORCERER and not Star Wars became the blueprint for the blockbusters to come.

Based on the incredible life story of the Godfather of Soul, the film will give a fearless look inside the music, moves and moods of James Brown, taking audiences on the journey from his impoverished childhood to his evolution into one of the most influential figures of the 20th century.

When a half-Chechen, half-Russian, brutally tortured immigrant turns up in Hamburg’s Islamic community, laying claim to his father’s ill gotten fortune, both German and US security agencies take a close interest.

As the clock ticks down, the stakes rise, and the race is on to establish this most wanted man’s true identity – oppressed victim or destruction-bent extremist? Based on John le Carre’s novel, A Most Wanted Man is a contemporary, cerebral tale of intrigue, love, rivalry, and politics that prickles with tension right through to its last heart-stopping scene.