The Prince Charles Cinema

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Purple Noon [Plein soleil]
1960 118mins France, Italy (12) Crime / Thriller
Directed by René Clément Starring Alain Delon, Maurice Ronet, Marie Laforêt

Tom Ripley (Alain Delon) travels to Italy to visit his playboy friend Phillippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet) and Phillippe's new fiancée, Marge Duval (Marie Laforêt). What Phillippe doesn't know is that his father has paid Tom to convince his son to abandon Europe and return to his family responsibilities in San Francisco. But when Phillippe's family cuts off their funding of Tom's extravagant lifestyle during his covert mission, he discovers another way to maintain his newfound standard of living.

Lust, Caution
2007 158mins China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, USA (18) Romance
Directed by Ang Lee Starring Tony Leung, Tang Wei, Joan Chen

During World War II era, a young woman, Wang Jiazhi, gets swept up in a dangerous game of emotional intrigue with a powerful political figure, Mr. Yee.

Dancer in the Dark
2000 135mins Denmark (15) Musical / Drama
Directed by Lars von Trier Starring Catherine Deneuve, Björk, David Morse

Lars von Trier's Palme d'Or-winning musical masterpiece stars Björk as Selma, a Czech immigrant on the verge of blindness. She struggles to make ends meet for herself and her son, who has inherited the same genetic disorder and will suffer the same fate without an expensive operation. When life gets too difficult, Selma learns to cope through her love of musicals, dreaming up little numbers to the rhythmic beats of her surroundings.

The Spirit of the Beehive
1973 99mins Spain (PG) Drama
Directed by Víctor Erice Starring Fernando Fernán Gómez, Teresa Gimpera, Ana Torrent

In a small Castilian village in 1940, in the wake of Spain's devastating civil war, six-year-old Ana attends a traveling movie show of Frankenstein and becomes possessed by the memory of it. Produced as Franco's long regime was nearing its end and widely regarded as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s, The Spirit of the Beehive is a bewitching portrait of a child's haunted inner life and one of the most visually arresting movies ever made.

Close-Up
98mins (U) Documentary
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami Starring Hossain Sabzian, Monoochehr Ahankhah, Mahrokh Ahankhah

This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves.

Daughters of the Dust
1991 113mins UK, USA (12A) Film
Directed by Julie Dash Starring Cora Lee Day, Alva Rogers, Barbarao

Julie Dash’s 1991 masterpiece was her first feature, and the first American feature directed by an African American woman to receive a general theatrical release. It announced a formidable talent, and in the grandeur and intricacy of its formal construction and themes, powerfully emblematized its director’s purposeful commitment to cinema.

Abounding with surprise, the film transports us to a little-known setting to unfold a universal tale. The year is 1902, in the home of an extended family off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia where they maintain strong connections to African linguistic and cultural traditions. Here, many members of the Peazant family are on the verge of a planned migration to the U.S. mainland, where American modernity seems, vaguely, to offer a better life.

However, family members clash over the meaning of this move. Viola, who has lived up North and returned as a Christian convert, views the crossing as a step out of bankrupt African superstitions into a kind of light. Scandal-tinged “Yellow Mary,” returning to the family from a long self-exile, still asserts her independence but fears losing the touchstone of home. Nana Peazant, the aged matriarch, refuses to migrate and frets over the possibility of broken family ties and lost traditions. Eulah, young and with child, fears that the family’s plan represents a futile flight from intractable legacies of pain.

A brilliant cast enacts these negotiations with exceeding depth, befitting the weight of the decision the Peazants face: to embrace the land that other Africans once fled. Dash constructs their home as a rarefied world, possibly soon a “paradise lost,” through a masterful interplay of mise-en-scène, symbolic markers and magical realist gestures. All of this is graced by the luminous cinematography of A. Jaffa Fielder and John Barnes’ stunningly original score. Named to the National Film Registry in 2004 by the Library of Congress, Daughters of the Dust eloquently frames concerns that have preoccupied many independent filmmakers of Dash’s generation: the place of family and tradition in ameliorating historical wrongs, the hope of spiritual escape from a history of trauma, and the elusive possibility of finding deliverance together. —Shannon Kelley

Rocco and His Brothers
1960 178mins France, Italy (15) Drama
Directed by Luchino Visconti Starring Alain Delon, Renato Salvatori, Annie Girardot

Rosaria Parondi (Katina Paxinou), an impoverished Italian mother, moves to Milan with her close-knit family of five sons to find opportunity in the big city. A heated rivalry begins when two of Rosaria's boys -- Rocco (Alain Delon) and Simone (Renato Salvatori) -- fall for Nadia (Annie Girardot), a beautiful prostitute with whom each has an affair. As soft-spoken Rocco and brutal Simone both pursue Nadia in their own way, tension between them threatens to tear the family apart.

www.RachelOrmont.com
2024 80mins USA (18) Sci-Fi / Drama
Directed by Peter Vack Starring Betsey Brown, Chloe Cherry, Dasha Nekrasova

Rachel doesn't realize she has grown up in captivity working for an advertising agency where her job is to assess Mommy 6.0, her favorite pop star in the whole entire world.

Romy and Michele's High School Reunion
1997 92mins USA (15) Comedy
Directed by David Mirkin Starring Mira Sorvino, Lisa Kudrow, Janeane Garofalo

Ten years after their high school graduation, Romy (Mira Sorvino) and Michele (Lisa Kudrow) haven't exactly accomplished everything that they set out to do. Despite their strong friendship, their personal and professional lives are still lacking. When they hear of their upcoming high school reunion, they take it as an opportunity to show their classmates how much they've changed -- first by trying to reform themselves, then by creating a lie that eventually spins out of control.

Dead Lover
2025 95mins Canada (18) Horror / Comedy
Directed by Grace Glowicki Starring Grace Glowicki, Ben Petrie, Leah Doz

A lonely gravedigger, who stinks of corpses, finally meets her dream man – but their romance is cut short when he tragically drowns at sea. Grief-stricken, the gravedigger goes to morbid lengths to resurrect him through madcap scientific experiments, resulting in grave consequences and unlikely love.
 
Presented in Stink-o-vision; scratch and sniff cards will be available for all shows.

Gloria
1980 122mins USA (15) Crime / Thriller
Directed by John Cassavetes Starring Gena Rowlands, Buck Henry, Julie Carmen

When a young boy's family is killed by the mob, their tough neighbor Gloria becomes his reluctant guardian. In possession of a book that the gangsters want, the pair go on the run in New York.

Mouchette
1967 81mins France (15) Drama
Directed by Robert Bresson Starring Nadine Nortier, Jean-Claude Guilbert, Marie Cardinal

Robert Bresson plumbs great reservoirs of feeling with Mouchette, one of the most searing portraits of human desperation ever put on film. With a dying mother, an absent, alcoholic father, and a baby brother in need of care, the teenage Mouchette seeks solace and respite from her circumstances in the nature of the French countryside and daily routine. Bresson deploys his trademark minimalist style to heartbreaking effect in this essential work of French filmmaking, a hugely empathetic drama that elevates its trapped protagonist into one of the cinema's most memorable tragic figures.

The Human Condition - Part 1 - No Greater Love
1959 208mins Japan (15) Drama
Directed by Masaki Kobayashi Starring Michiyo Aratama, Tatsuya Nakadai

First of a trilogy of films. During the Second World War, a Japanese conscientious objector named Kaji works as a supervisor in a Manchurian prison camp. He hopes to avoid duty as a soldier, but he also hopes to be helpful to the welfare of his prisoners. An escape attempt by Chinese prisoners results in Kaji's arrest for collusion. He faces the possibility of transferral to combat--or worse.

The Ascent [Voskhozhdenie]
1977 111mins Soviet Union (12) War
Directed by Larisa Shepitko Starring Boris Plotnikov, Vladimir Gostyukhin, Sergey Yakovlev

The crowning triumph of a career cut tragically short, the final film from Larisa Shepitko won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival and went on to be hailed as one of the finest works of late Soviet cinema. In the darkest days of World War II, two partisans set out for supplies to sustain their beleaguered outfit, braving the blizzard-swept landscape of Nazi-occupied Belorussia. When they fall into the hands of German forces and come face-to-face with death, each must choose between martyrdom and betrayal, in a spiritual ordeal that lifts the film's earthy drama to the plane of religious allegory. With stark, visceral cinematography that pits blinding white snow against pitch-black despair, THE ASCENT finds poetry and transcendence in the harrowing trials of war.