Jane Austen’s beloved comedy about finding your equal and earning your happy ending, is reimagined in this delicious new film adaptation of EMMA, starring Anya Taylor-Joy in the titular role.
The Maltese Falcon
A great film (noir anyone?) directed by a great director (John Huston’s first credit as director after writing for Warners for years) starring an iconic actor (Humphrey Bogart) based on a great writer’s (Dashiell Hammett) work.
The Secret Garden
This summer, you can read the book, watch the film, and see a live performance of The Secret Garden! The live production is currently running at the Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck (click here for details). And on Sunday, July 14th at 12:30pm, Upstate Films and Oblong Books will co-present a special screening of the 1993 film adaptation starring Maggie Smith, followed by an informal book group discussion. Click here to purchase film screening tickets in advance. Click here to purchase the book online through Oblong Books.
Following a silent film version in 1919 and a dramatic rendition in 1949, Agnieszka Holland’s The Secret Garden became the third, and to date the most definitive, adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel for the big screen. Both a critical and a commercial success at the time of its release, Maggie Smith received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role in the film, and the British Film Institute today includes it in their list of the 50 films you should see by the age of 14.
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Coraline
Sold Out… Sunday, May 5th at 12:30 in Rhinebeck, join Upstate Films and Oblong Books for a special screening and discussion with author Neil Gaiman. Tickets $18 Adults / $15 Seniors and Students / $12 Members and Kids under 16.
When Coraline moves to a new home in this stop-motion animated tale, she feels neglected by her stressed-out parents but soon finds a magic portal leading to a parallel world where everything seems perfect.
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Great Expectations
March 31st at noon, Upstate Films and Oblong Books are featuring the Dickens classic Great Expectations with the 1946 Academy Award-winning film directed by David Lean, starring John Mills, Jean Simmons, Valerie Hobson and Sir Alec Guinness. Read the book, then see the film!
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If Beale Street Could Talk
Academy Award Nominee – Regina King (Best Supporting Actress), Best Original Score, Best Adapted Screenplay
Golden Globe Nominee – Best Motion Picture Drama, Best Screenplay, & Golden Globe Winner – Regina King (Best Actress)
From Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, If Beale Street Could Talk brings a colorful, romantic eye to James Baldwin’s novel about a young couple tragically separated by a false arrest.
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The Exorcist
Online ticket sales ended this morning, but tickets are available day-of at the box office (cash and check only)
Happy Halloween from Upstate Films and Oblong Books! Inspired by the last known Catholic-sanctioned exorcism in the United States, William Peter Blatty’s best-selling book and William Friedkin’s award-winning film follow the demonic possession of a 12 year-old girl and her mother’s attempts to win her back.
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Matilda
Read the book & watch the movie! Presented in collaboration with Oblong Books, this screening will be followed by an optional post-screening discussion led by Oblong’s Nicole Brinkley. Matilda may contain the stuff of traditional children’s stories — a wicked step-aunt, a true friend with a pure heart, and more than a little magic — but “traditional” isn’t a word that comes to mind when describing this film. Before 1996, Danny DeVito’s directorial credits included Throw Momma From the Train, War of the Roses, and Hoffa. With a taste for exaggerated characters and extraordinary situations, his sense of quirk is a fine match here for Roald Dahl’s novel about neglectful parents, cruel teachers, and the revenge of a brave little girl.
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Upstate Films and Oblong Books Present: Witness for the Prosecution
Read the story, then watch the movie! Upstate Films and Oblong Books co-present this screening, followed by a book group discussion — Sunday, November 12th at 1pm in Rhinebeck. To purchase tickets to the screening online in advance, click here.
Based on a short story and play by Agatha Christie, Billy Wilder’s WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION stars Charles Laughton as a British lawyer who gets caught up in a couple’s tangled affairs when he defends the husband for murder.
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A Room With a View
Read the book, then watch the movie! Sunday August 20th at 1pm, Upstate Films Theater and Oblong Books & Music – Rhinebeck co-present this screening, followed by a book discussion.
Adapted from the 1908 novel by E.M. Forster, James Ivory’s film about a young woman in Edwardian England is full of grace and passion for its characters.
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The Princess Bride
Read the book, then watch the movie! Sunday July 30th at 1pm, Upstate Films and Oblong Books co-present this screening, followed by a book discussion.
Adapted by William Goldman from his novel of the same name, it’s not difficult to see why The Princess Bride has become a classic in the years since its 1987 release. Heroic fantasies, we often feel, should be lighter than air, hot as dragon fire, and fast as a sword in the sunlight. And that’s what we get from this epic delight — along with an ample supply of humor and foolery.
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The Zookeeper’s Wife
Niki (WHALE RIDER) Caro’s latest film, based on Diane Ackerman’s best-selling non-fiction book, is the real-life story of a wife and mother who became a hero to hundreds during World War II.
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1984
This winter, George Orwell’s 1984 once again made the best sellers list, 68 years after its initial publication. On April 9th, Upstate will partner with Oblong Books to present the film followed by a book group discussion. The screening will also include a recorded introduction and post-screening discussion with director Michael Radford.
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Our Man in Havana
Alec Guinness, Burl Ives, Maureen O’Hara, and Noël Coward star in this humorous film about a vacuum cleaner salesman who winds up becoming an agent in the British Secret Service.
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London National Theatre: The Threepenny Opera
“Rory Kinnear is Mack the Knife in a new version of this landmark twentieth-century musical, broadcast live from the stage of the National Theatre. Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s classic musical theatre piece is adapted by Simon Stephens (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) and directed by Rufus Norris (Everyman, London Road).”
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The Haunting
Have you ever wanted to discuss the differences between a book and its movie rendition? Here’s your chance! Upstate Films and Oblong Books are partnering to bring you ADAPTATIONS — a series of combined book groups and screenings of select adapted works.
To kick off the series this Halloween, and to celebrate Shirley Jackson’s centennial, Oblong is organizing a book group around her 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House. And Upstate will host a screening & discussion of its equally mesmerizing 1963 film adaptation on October 30th at 2pm in Rhinebeck. The screening is open to all. But if you’d like to join the book group, simply read the book, or check out Shirley Jackson’s new biography, click here.
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Howard’s End
One of Merchant Ivory’s undisputed masterpieces, this adaptation of E.M. Forster’s classic 1910 novel is a saga of class relations and changing times in Edwardian England.
The Dressmaker
If dressing gorgeously is the best revenge, then talented fashion designer Tilly Dunnage (Kate Winslet) is all set when she returns home to Dungatar, a dusty town in the Australian outback.
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Love and Friendship – with director Whit Stillman
In Person: Writer-director Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Last Days of Disco, Barcelona, Damsels in Distress). Friday June 22nd at 5:45 in Rhinebeck. This show will be followed by a q&a. Tickets on sale now at the Rhinebeck box office.
Stillman brings a unique sense and sensibility to his adaptation of an unpublished Jane Austen novel that stars Kate Beckinsale as a sassy social climber in the 1790s who’s blissfully unaware of her own self-absorption, and who doesn’t let the truth get in the way of a good story, after all “facts are horrid things”.
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Our Kind of Traitor
This adaptation of a John LeCarre has us on holiday in Marrakech with an English couple, Perry and Gail, who befriend Dima, a flamboyant and charismatic Russian, who unbeknownst to them is a kingpin money launderer for the Russian mafia.
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Room
Brie Larson won an Oscar as Best Actress this year; so in case you missed it, here’s another chance. Based on the Booker-shortlisted best-seller by Emma Donaghue, ROOM is a tale of survival and endurance that is by turns harrowing, suspenseful, and wondrous. Recounting the story of a mother and child escaping from the captivity in which they have been held for several years, this visionary drama explores the trauma of being stolen from the world — and the marvel of discovering it for the first time.
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Carol
Todd Haynes’ remarkable filmmaking career has ranged from the experimental – KAREN CARPENTER: SUPERSTAR – to risky and risque homages – I’M NOT THERE… VELVET GOLDMINE – to re-imagining 1950s melodrama – FAR FROM HEAVEN, to the dystopian SAFE. Now he revisits the socially constricted 1950s in his latest beautifully realized film, an adaptation of a novel written under a pseudonym by Patricia Highsmith (best known for Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley) that stars the resplendent Cate Blanchett as the titular Carol, a wealthy suburban wife and mother, and Rooney Mara as an aspiring photographer who catches her eye.
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Anomalisa
Written and co-directed by Charlie Kaufman (the writer behind BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, ADAPTATION, and SYNECHDOCHE, NEW YORK), this singularly stunning stop-motion animation tells the tale of a lonely business man who finds a moment of connection with an “anomalous” woman named Lisa.
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Testament of Youth
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| A powerful story of love, war, and remembrance, Vera Brittain’s classic testimony of war from a woman’s point of view is exquisitely realized in this moving and timely adaptation. | |||||||||||||
| Intelligent and free-spirited, Vera overcomes the narrow-mindedness of her conservative parents and wins a scholarship to Oxford. Entranced by her brother’s dashing friend Roland, who shares her literary aspirations, she plunges into an intoxicating romance. In love and on the cusp of fulfilling her ambitions, Vera’s dreams are brutally shattered by the onset of war. When Roland and her brother ship out to the front, she abandons the cloistered environs of university life and volunteers as a nurse. Immediately confronted with the reality of the war’s victims, her life is irrevocably changed as she loses, one-by-one, the young men she held so dear. Mingling innocent charm with dogged persistence, Alicia Vikander (A Royal Affair) is marvelous as the sharply perceptive Vera. A searing journey from youthful hopes and dreams to the edge of despair and back again, it’s a film about young love, the futility of war, and how to make sense of the darkest times. | |||||||||||||
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Gemma Bovery
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| Director Anne (COCO BEFORE CHANEL) Fontaine’s clever adaptation of Posy Simmonds’ graphic novel is at once a cheeky literary mash-up, a sensuous romance, a witty feminist commentary and a heady celebration of French provincial life. | |||||||||||||
| In this vibrant re-imagining of Madame Bovary, life imitates art in uncanny ways when earthy British beauty Gemma Bovery (Gemma Arterton) and her husband Charles (Jason Flemyng) move to a charming ramshackle old farmhouse in the very same Norman village where the novel was written a century earlier. Their welcoming neighbor, Martin Joubert (Fabrice Luchini), becomes entranced with Gemma and sets out to guide her through her new surroundings. It doesn’t take long before he is drawing parallels between the literary and real life woman, while he insinuates himself into her life. As reality sets in on the fantasy of rural French domesticity, the Boverys’ marriage begins to fray and Gemma finds herself at loose ends. She soon catches the eye of a handsome young playboy and when her magnetic ex suddenly reappears, she finds herself at a crossroads and seems to be fulfilling Joubert’s worst fears that her destiny is linked to that of Flaubert’s doomed heroine. In French and English with subtitles. | |||||||||||||
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The Saragossa Manuscript
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| A favorite film of Jerry Garcia and Luis Buñuel, The Saragossa Manuscript is a brilliant adaptation of one of the greatest works of world literature. | |||||||||||||
| It is a Chinese box tale — a travel story about the supernatural and mystical opposed to the humanist materialism. It is 1739 as Alphonse van Worden crosses the wild range of the Sierra Morena, a land said to be inhabited only by demons — evil spirits and invisible hands that push travellers into chasms. Although he refuses to listen to those tales, his journey will be a sequence of supernatural and frightful events. But maybe they’re only illusions. 1971 Cinema Writers Circle Awards, Spain – Special Award – winner. 1965 IFF Edinburg – special mention. 1965 IFF San Sebastian – CIDALC prize, Award of the International Journalist’s Club. | |||||||||||||
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Anna Karenina
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| With a script by Academy Award-winning writer Tom Stoppard and a provocative performance by Keira Knightley, director Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina is both a faithful rendering of Leo Tolstoy’s novel and an intelligent, ornate piece of showmanship. | |||||||||||||
| Anna is an exemplary wife and mother who breaks the rules of propriety by abandoning her husband Alexei Karenin (Jude Law) in favor of the young Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Shunned by society, disowned by her family, barred from seeing her child, and tortured by the fear that Vronsky will abandon her for a younger woman, Anna begins to unravel as she realizes the full ramifications of her choice. Magnifying the story’s drama, director Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, Hannah) sets his film almost entirely within the confines of an old, majestic theater. The result is a feeling that life is a show, complete with sumptuous costumes, ecstatic choreography, intriguing set changes, and fateful plot twists. Literally closing the walls in on its characters, Wright’s Anna Karenina becomes a rendition to get lost in as it accesses the deep, overwhelming emotions that lurk beneath civil society. | |||||||||||||
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NOSFERATU
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| F.W.’s Murnau’s German expressionist horror film, shot in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania during the early days of film, with Max Schreck as the grotesque Count Orlock, is revered as one of the scariest Dracula adaptations ever made. | |||||||||||||
| LIVE MUSIC BY THE 5 piece ANDREW ALDEN ENSEMBLE brings an exciting new score to this iconic film. | |||||||||||||
| The new score by the Andrew Alden Ensemble compliments the horror of the film and the classic story of Dracula, with the sensibilities of classical chamber music and the distinct edge of rock. The music – featuring piano, strings, synthesizers, percussion and electric guitars – will be performed in person during the showing of the film, giving us a new experience of this memorable classic. | |||||||||||||
| View Trailer | Read Reviews | ||||||||||||
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
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| An unlikely premise – bringing salmon fly-fishing to the arid wadis of Yemen to create a spiritual connection between people and nature – is beautifully realized and acted in this adaptation of a best-selling novel by prize winning screenwriter Simon (Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours) Beaufoy and director Lasse (Chocolate, My Life as a Dog) Hallstrom. | |||||||||||||
| Fred Jones (Ewan McGregor), a dour and nearly loveless married British fisheries scientist finds himself forced to take seriously the idea of introducing salmon fishing to the Highlands of Yemen. Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt), represents a wealthy and benevolent sheikh (Amr Waked), who makes frequent trips to his estate in the rugged Scottish highlands to pursue his love of fishing. The sheik believes that bringing the sport to his country would benefit the people. Fred (McGregor) tries to laugh this off, but once the British prime minister’s spokesperson, Bridget Maxwell (Kristin Scott Thomas), decides to use the sheikh’s dream to promote a heartfelt story of British goodwill in the Middle East, he must take it seriously. Fred’s skepticism is matched only by the sheikh’s boundless optimism, and trumped by Harriet’s charm. Hallström’s delightful adventure, one in which theories and doubts are swept aside by a belief in the unattainable, is an extremely pleasing adventure. | |||||||||||||
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
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| In this new adaptation of John le Carré’s bestselling novel, beautifully directed by Tomas (LET THE RIGHT ONE IN) Alfredson, George Smiley is pulled in from the cold to ferret out a Soviet mole within M16, the Brit’s secret service. | |||||||||||||
| Gary Oldman (long ago the screen incarnation of Sid Vicious) plays the rather sad, unassuming spy who seems quite comfortable operating in an atmosphere of mistrust. Shot in a subdued palette that mimes le Carré’s world of muted treachery, Smiley is haunted by his decades-earlier interaction with a shadowy Russian spy master. In trying to identify the mole, he sees betrayal as “an aesthetic choice as much as a moral one.” The stellar cast includes John Hurt, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Simon McBurney, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hardy. | |||||||||||||
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The Girl Who Played With Fire
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| The follow-up to THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is the second film adaptation based on the best-selling Millennium trilogy written by the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson. | ||||||
| Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the petite, damaged but genius computer hacker and tattoed tough girl, is back as is journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Mikael Nyqvist). He and his colleagues have decided to publish an exposé about a sex trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden. They know that it will rock their country as it implicates well-known and poweful members of Swedish society. On the eve of publication, the two investigating reporters, a young couple, are brutally murdered. When the fingerprints on the murder weapon are Lisbeth Salander’s, only spurned lover Blomkvist believes in her innocence. As he follows Lisbeth, to find her before something horrible happens, he learns much about her tortured past and much about the nastiness of some of his fellow countrymen. In Swedish with English subtitles. | ||||||
| R / 129 mins. | ||||||
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The City Of Your Final Destination
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| James (Remains of the Day, Howard’s End, A Room with a View) Ivory’s latest film is an adaptation by long-time collaborator Ruth Prawer Jhabvala of Peter Cameron’s 2002 novel. | ||||||
| It’s a gently witty tale of a young Iranian-American doctoral student who’s determined to write the authorized biography of Jules Gund, a dead Uruguayan novelist. Both Omar (Omar Metwally) and his girlfriend Deirdre (Alexandra Maria Lara) are academics. Omar has won a grant to write the author’s biography, but when the novelist’s family turns down Omar’s request, his teaching job is in jeopardy. Desperate, Omar travels to the family’s crumbling estate, Ocho Rios, to petition the author’s three executors in person: Gund’s widow Caroline (Laura Linney); his much younger mistress, the waiflike recluse Arden (Charlotte Gainsbourg); and his brother Adam (Anthony Hopkins), a gentleman of leisure who lives on the estate with his much younger lover Pete (Hiroyuki Sanada). Omar is welcomed into the home, but he’s made no promises, and his arrival sets in motion a series of events that upsets the precarious financial and emotional equilibria. | ||||||
| PG-13 / 117 mins. | ||||||
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Synecdoche, New York
Starts Nov 21: Check for showtimes
(US, 2008 wr/dir by Charlie Kaufman)
Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie (BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, ADAPTATION, ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND) Kaufman makes his directorial debut with this ambitious film starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Hope Davis, and Michelle Williams.
Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a theater director living in Schenectady, NY, is undergoing a major physical and personal crisis. He has begun to suffer from a litany of gross physical maladies, as well as coming to the realization that directing others’ plays doesn’t allow much room for his own artistic expression. When his wife Adele (Catherine Keener) uninvites him from attending her gallery opening in Berlin, Caden is left with his deteriorating body and the cadre of other women in his life. Arguably the most ambitious, multi-layered, and serious of Kaufman’s scripts, this bizarre post-modern, fractured, self-conscious, and self-reflexive feature demonstrates his commitment to meta-narrative and personal expression. R. 124 mins.
“To say that Charlie Kaufman’s SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK is one of the best films of the year is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now.” -Manohla Dargis, the New York Times
