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.
▓ Friday 29th March 2.30pm — THE SEAGULL
Thursday 11th April — THE WIFE
▓ Thursday 25th April — LUCKY
Thursday 9th May — BLACKKKLANSMAN
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.
