The Adamant is a unique day care centre: it is a floating structure on the Seine in the heart of Paris, half Mississippi riverboat, half art studio. It welcomes adults suffering from mental illness, offering them counselling and art therapy.
The team running the facility are forward-thinking and progressive, while acknowledging the role of conventional treatment in making their approach possible. This compassionate, warm and sympathetic documentary gives us privileged access to The Adamant and its endlessly fascinating cast of staff and patients.
Monica, a transgender woman, returns home to the Midwest to care for her ailing mother, Eugenia, who disowned her twenty years ago. Eugenia, fearing death is near, is abrupt and abrasive, but finds comfort from the arrival of her daughter, whose identity she is not told, and young grandchildren.
Monica still resents how she was once treated but cannot help but feel tenderness for her ill mother. As Eugenia slowly works out who Monica is, the two women begin to repair their broken relationship in a moving, moody and stylish drama.
In modern-day Helsinki, two lonely souls meet by chance in a local karaoke bar. Seeing an opportunity to find love, they each try to turn their initial spark into something more meaningful. However, the pair’s path to happiness is beset by numerous obstacles, from lost phone numbers and incorrectly noted addresses to alcoholism, via a charming stray dog.
A quietly witty script and perfectly deadpan performances from the leads ensure that this slender, unmelodramatic film is ultimately a compassionate, moving and funny tale that epitomises everything that make Kaurismäki’s films so special.
Eileen is a peculiar young woman, aloof and unfazed by the gloomy nature of her job at the local youth prison. But something in her changes the day that a new counsellor, Rebecca arrives. She is instantly captivated by Rebecca’s glamorous, enigmatic presence. As the two women grow closer, Eileen is inspired to explore new facets of her own personality and desires. But her metamorphosis turns on a more sinister path when Rebecca reveals a dark secret. A captivating, twisty, strangely beautiful thriller.
Starring Anne Hathaway, Thomasin McKenzie
Dir William Oldroyd | 2023 | USA / UK | 97 min | 15 | English language
Twenty years after their notorious tabloid romance gripped the nation, Gracie and her husband Joe (twenty-three years her junior) brace themselves for their twins to graduate from high school. When a Hollywood actress comes to spend time with the family to better understand Gracie, who she will be playing in a film, family dynamics unravel under the pressure of the outside gaze. Based on a true story, this is an exploration of truth, storytelling, and the difficulties of fully understanding another person.
Starring Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton.
Dir Todd Haynes | 2023 | USA | 117 min | 15 | English language
Social documentary photographer and trailblazer Tish Murtha dedicated her life to documenting the north-east working-class communities of the 1970s and 1980s in which she lived. Her work showed the reality of unemployment and deprivation in communities that Westminster was happy to sacrifice on the altar of free market capitalism, but also the humour, optimism and refusal to be cowed of her subjects. Murtha’s daughter Ella presents this superb, humane tribute to a great artist whose career never benefited from the advantages of her middle class contemporaries.
The film will be followed by a live question and answer period with narrator and Tish’s daughter Ella Murtha and film’s producer Jen Corcoran. Thank you to Modern Films for arranging their attendance!
The film is followed by a Q&A.
Na Young and Hae Sung are constant childhood companions and deeply connected friends until Na Young’s parents emigrate to Canada. Over the years they keep in contact as they grow up and start careers, Hae Sung as an engineer, Na Young as a successful playwright in New York, where she has changed her name to Nora. Then Hae Sung spontaneously decides to visit Nora, and their sudden reunion forces them to confront notions of memory, destiny, love, and the choices that make a life, in this heartrending modern romance.
Starring Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro
Dir Celine Song | 2023 | USA / South Korea | 105 min | 12A | Korean, English, Mandarin with English subtitles
Julie, a filmmaker, takes her elderly mother Rosalind on a weekend break in a seemingly deserted country house hotel. The building was once a family home, and their time together becomes haunted by a mysterious presence as memories of Rosalind’s unhappy childhood as a wartime evacuee are uncovered.
Featuring a towering, deeply moving performance by Tilda Swinton, acclaimed filmmaker Joanna Hogg’s beguiling latest film is a brilliant and captivating exploration of parental relationships and the things we leave behind.
Movie Nights every Sunday from 6pm until the film ends!
Free entry. Popcorn and sweets provided!
At a glittering party in 18th-century Paris, the poet Andréa Chenier delivers an impassioned denunciation of Louis XVI. Five years later, the Revolution has given way to the Terror, transforming the power balance between Chénier, his beloved Maddalena, and Gérard, the man who could destroy him…
Jonas Kaufmann headlines David McVicar’s spectacular staging, under the baton of long-time collaborator Antonio Pappano – who conducts Giordano’s epic historical drama of revolution and forbidden love in his last production as Music Director of The Royal Opera.
Co-production with China National Centre for Performing Arts, Beijing and San Francisco Opera.
King Leontes of Sicilia is crippled with an all-consuming jealousy when his friend, King Polixenes of Bohemia, stays with him and his wife Hermione. What follows is a tale where a marriage is destroyed, a child is abandoned and all hope is seemingly lost for two lovers.
Celebrating its tenth anniversary, The Winter’s Tale is an award-winning modern ballet classic, packed with emotional turmoil heightened by Joby Talbot’s compelling score and Bob Crowley’s atmospheric designs.
A co-production between The Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada.
Damiano Michieletto’s sizzling new production evokes all the passion and heat of Bizet’s score, which features Carmen’s sultry Habanera and the rousing Toreador song.
Antonello Manacorda conducts an exciting international cast, with Aigul Akhmetshina performing the title role.
Co-production with Teatro Real, Madrid and La Scala, Milan.
Out hunting, Prince Siegfried chances upon a flock of swans. One among them transforms into the beautiful human Odette and he is immediately enamoured. But Odette is bound by a spell which keeps her captive as a swan during the day. Can Siegfried free her?
Tchaikovsky’s sensational score combines with the evocative imagination of choreographer Liam Scarlett and designer John Macfarlane to heighten the dramatic pathos of Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov’s quintessential ballet classic.
Swan Lake remains to this day one of the best-loved works in the classical ballet canon.
When the young geisha, Cio-Cio-San, marries American Naval Officer Pinkerton, she believes she is entering a real, binding marriage for life.
Forsaking her religion and community, she learns all too late that for Pinkerton, their marriage is merely an illusion – with tragic consequences.
Northern Silents presents Fritz Lang’s 1927 futuristic fantasy on the big screen with live piano accompaniment.
It is 2026. In the high-tech city of the future, the rich enjoy a life of luxury while the poor are enslaved underground, in the city’s mechanical underbelly. Tensions build between the subterranean workers and pampered surface-dwellers when the prophet-like Maria, with her subversive message of universal brotherhood, ignites the spark of revolution among the workers. The city’s mastermind, Freder, creates an android version of Maria to re-establish control. But his creation, the robot Maria, cannot be controlled…
Buddy (Will Ferrell) was accidentally transported to the North Pole as a toddler and raised to adulthood among Santa’s elves. Unable to shake the feeling that he doesn’t fit in, the adult Buddy travels to New York, in full elf uniform, in search of his real father. As it happens, this is Walter Hobbs (James Caan), a cynical businessman. After a DNA test proves this, Walter reluctantly attempts to start a relationship with the childlike Buddy with increasingly chaotic results.
