Films normally start at 7.30pm in The Guildhall of St George, King Street. Members and their guests can sign in from approx 7pm.
Forthcoming Film Dates for your Diary
▓ Special Events
▓ We are delighted to once again be working in partnership with the King’s Lynn Festival and have arranged these films as part of the Festival. Tickets for these films will be £4 for members and £5 for the public and will be available from the Corn Exchange. Details will be sent to you on how to purchase at the reduced rate.
2019
Thursday 10th January — WONDERSTRUCK
▓ Sunday 27th January — THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY
Thursday 7th February — TULLY
Thursday 14th March — COLD WAR
▓ Friday 29th March 2.30pm — THE SEAGULL
Thursday 11th April — THE WIFE
▓ Thursday 25th April — LUCKY
Thursday 9th May — BLACKKKLANSMAN
Thursday 10thJanuary 7.30pm
WONDERSTRUCK
Drama — (2017) — 113 mins — Cert PG
mild threat
Director: Todd Haynes
Cast includes Millicent Simmonds, Julianne Moore, Cory Michael Smith, James Urbaniak, Damian Young, Patrick Murney
Tells the tale of two children separated by fifty years. In 1927, Rose searches for the actress whose life she chronicles in her scrapbook; in 1977, Ben runs away from home to find his father.
TRIVIA
Newcomer Millicent Simmonds sent a recording of her audition to director Todd Haynes who in turn sent it on to Julianne Moore who instantly approved of the 14-year-old. Millicent, who is deaf in real life, had to communicate on-set primarily through American Sign Language interpreters.
In the book, the story of Rose is told alternatively without text, but with graphics to allow the readers’ to experience Rose’s story in the same way she felt escaping to New York City through her eyes and the silence of her life.
Director Todd Haynes had some of the hearing cast go on a walking tour of New York City with noise canceling headphones to be able to relate to Rose’s story and experience some of their other senses heightened.
1927 is the year often remembered as the point in history where sound was introduced to film with Warner Bros’ “The Jazz Singer.”
Sunday 27thJanuary 3.30pm
THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY
Romance, Drama — (2018) — 121 mins — Cert 12A
moderate bloody images, sex references
Director: Mike Newell
Cast includes Lily James, Jessica Brown Findlay, Michiel Huisman, Matthew Goode, Katherine Parkinson, Glen Powell
A correspondence begins between Juliet Ashton and members of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, with them sharing their experiences of Nazi Occupied Guernsey. When an idea for a book catches Juliet she goes to visit the island, making lifelong friends and taking life changing steps along the way. This book is told by way of letters and as the reader, you become enchanted by the writers of them and the love Juliet comes to feel for each of the Islanders. A beautiful story of love, friendship and the sadness of friends lost.
TRIVIA
Exteriors for Guernsey were filmed at The Charterhouse in London which is also a location used in Downton Abbey (2010)
Jessica Brown Findlay, Matthew Goode, Lily James and Penelope Wilton have all starred in Downton Abbey.
The harbour scenes were shot in Clovelly in North Devon.
Filming took place on Saunton Sands in North Devon, UK on 28th April 2017 with a Dakota landing and taking off. Photos on Saunton Sands page on Facebook.
Thursday 7thFebruary 7.30pm
TULLY
Drama, Comedy — (2018) — 94 mins — Cert 15
strong language, sex references, sex
Director: Jason Reitman
Cast includes Charlize Theron, Mackenzie Davis, Ron Livingston, Mark Duplass, Emily Haine, Crystal Lonneberg
The film is about Marlo, a mother of three, including a newborn. Marlo’s brother gives her a night nanny as a gift. Hesitant with the extravagance at first, Marlo comes to form a unique bond with the thoughtful, surprising, and sometimes challenging young nanny named Tully.
TRIVIA
Charlize Theron gained 50 pounds for the role. She adhered to an excessive diet of junk food, processed foods, Burgers, and milkshakes. Theron would eat macaroni and cheese at 2a.m. to help keep on the weight. Theron said that her youngest child had mistaken her for being pregnant, given the extensive weight gain, and that it took a year and a half for her to shed the weight.
Thursday 14thMarch 7.30pm
COLD WAR
Romance, Drama — (2018) — 88 mins — Cert 15
strong language
Director: Pawel Pawlikowski
Cast includes Joanna Kulig, Tomasz Kot, Borys Szyc, Agata Kulesza, Cédric Kahn, Jeanne Balibar
A passionate love story between two people of different backgrounds and temperaments, who are fatefully mismatched and yet condemned to each other. Set against the background of the Cold War in the 1950s in Poland, Berlin, Yugoslavia and Paris, the film depicts an impossible love story in impossible times.
TRIVIA
Received a standing ovation of 18 minutes at the Cannes Film Festival.
The first Polish-language movie since 1990 to be shown in the Cannes Film Festival competition. Although there were entries from Polish directors Krzysztof Kieslowski and Roman Polanski during that time, they were made in French and English as co-productions.
Pawlikowski has been mulling over ways to tell his parents’ story for almost a decade. Eventually, in order to write the film, he had to make it not about his parents. The shared traits became very general: temperamental incompatibility, not being able to be together, and yearning when you’re apart; the difficulty of life in exile, of staying yourself in a different culture; the difficulty of life under a totalitarian regime, of behaving decently despite the temptations not to.
Friday 29thMarch 2.30pm
THE SEAGULL
Drama — (2018) — 99 mins — Cert 12A
infrequent scenes of violence
Director: Michael Mayer
Cast includes Elisabeth Moss, Saoirse Ronan, Annette Bening, Corey Stoll, Brian Dennehy, Michael Zegen
An aging actress named Irina Arkadina pays summer visits to her brother Pjotr Nikolayevich Sorin and her son Konstantin on a country estate. On one occasion, she brings Trigorin, a successful novelist, with her. Nina, a free and innocent girl on a neighbouring estate, falls in love with Boris Trigorin. As Trigorin lightly consumes and rejects Nina, as the actress all her life has consumed and rejected her son, who loves Nina. The victims are destroyed while the sophisticates continue on their way.
TRIVIA
A film adaption of the classic play The Seagull by Anton Chekhov.
Barbara Tirrell appears here as a cook in Sorin’s house. She previously appeared four decades before in the “Great Performances” rendition of the same play, Great Performances: The Seagull (1975), also as a servant.
Thursday 11thApril 7.30pm
THE WIFE
Drama — (2017) — 100 mins — Cert 15
strong language, sex references
Director: Bjorn Runge
Cast includes Glenn Close, Jonathan Pryce, Alix Wilton Regan, Max Irons, Christian Slater, Elizabeth McGovern
Behind any great man, there’s always a greater woman — and you’re about to meet her. Joan Castleman (Glenn Close): a highly intelligent and still-striking beauty — the perfect devoted wife. Forty years spent sacrificing her own talent, dreams and ambitions to fan the flames of her charismatic husband Joe (Jonathan Pryce) and his skyrocketing literary career. Ignoring his infidelities and excuses because of his “art” with grace and humour. Their fateful pact has built a marriage upon uneven compromises. And Joan’s reached her breaking point. On the eve of Joe’s Nobel Prize for Literature, the crown jewel in a spectacular body of work, Joan’s coup de grace is to confront the biggest sacrifice of her life and secret of his career.
TRIVIA
Annie Starke, who plays the young Joan, is the daughter of Glenn Close.
Close and Pryce rehearsed around a table for a week before shooting began on the film.
Early in the movie, Pryce’s character quotes a sentence from the Don Quixote. Pryce was the “real” Don Quixote in latest Terry Gilliam’s movie ‘The man who killed Don Quixote‘.
The Wife shot scenes in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Arbigland Estate in Dumfries.
Thursday 25thApril 7.30pm
LUCKY
Drama — (2017) — 88 mins — Cert 15
very strong language
Director: John Carroll Lynch
Cast includes Harry Dean Stanton, David Lynch, Ron Livingston, Ed Begley Jr., Tom Skerritt, Barry Shabaka Henley
Lucky is an old US Navy veteran of rigid habits and attitudes in a small town. When his routine is interrupted by a sudden collapse at home, Lucky finds himself realizing that his remarkably healthy old age is going to face an inevitable decline and he has to accept it. In that difficult reassessment, Lucky must face up to what he believes in and how much it compares to his neighbours’ priorities. In doing so, Lucky finds that his life has its positive side as he searches for some meaning that he can accept.
TRIVIA
The film reunites Harry Dean Stanton and Tom Skerritt after 38 years since they appeared in Alien (1979).
Shot in eighteen days.
As with the character in the movie, Stanton actually served as a cook aboard the USS LST-970, a tank landing ship, during the Battle of Okinawa.
Harry Dean Stanton (who played the role of Lucky) did not live long enough to see the official release of the movie in US on 29th September 2017. He died on 15th September 2017 at the age of 91.
David Lynch has directed & starred with Harry Dean Stanton in his own previous projects. Notably Wild at Heart (1990), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1993), Hotel Room (1991), and Inland Empire (2006).
Thursday 9thMay 7.30pm
BLACKKKLANSMAN
Drama, Crime, Comedy — (2018) — 132 mins — Cert 15
racist violence and language, very strong language
Director: Spike Lee
Cast includes John David Washington, Adam Driver, Topher Grace, Corey Hawkins, Laura Harrier, Alec Baldwin, Ryan Eggold
Director Spike Lee’s drama was produced by the team behind Get Out and offers another provocative exploration of American race relations. In the midst of the 1970s civil rights movement, Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) becomes the first black detective on the Colorado Springs Police Department. He sets out to prove his worth by infiltrating the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan and convinces his Jewish colleague (Adam Driver) to go undercover as a white supremacist. Based on actual events.
TRIVIA
Director Spike Lee and his writers moved the story back seven years from when it actually took place in 1979 to 1972. This allowed the film to reference both the then trendy blaxploitation movies and the re-election campaign, supposedly supported by the Klan, of President Richard Nixon.
This film contains clips from D. W. Griffith’s silent movie The Birth of a Nation. While Spike Lee was a student at NYU Film School, he was so outraged that his NYU Film School professors taught The Birth of a Nation (1915) with no mention of its racist message or role in the Klan’s twentieth-century rebirth that he made a student short film titled The Answer (1980) as a response. The film so offended many of his professors that Lee was nearly expelled from NYU. He was ultimately saved by a faculty vote. After Lee’s film industry successes, he became a professor at NYU Film School, serving as the Artistic Director of the Graduate Film Department.
The film featured the late musician Prince singing “Mary, Don’t You Weep” over the end credits. This was a previously unreleased live rehearsal recording.
Director Spike Lee received a six-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival after the premiere of the film.
One of the clips that director Spike Lee uses to open the film with is from Gone with the Wind (1939). This movie is frequently cited as one of the greatest masterpieces of all time, but it is also controversial for its depiction of slave-holding white Americans as sympathetic, Afro-American slaves as servile and dim-witted, and its omission of common treatments of slaves, such as chaining and whipping.
