The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, August 10-16
The Hateful Eight (2015)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
The plot of the latest QT film could be craftily summed up as: “A group of men come together and solve racism by coming together and repeatedly hit a woman in the face.” I’m not here to defend this movie, nor to explain why it was my favorite film of last year, but to advise you to watch it again and try to see beyond the obvious elements that were the subject of the hottest takes of 2015. This western mystery is a play in disguise as a big operatic snowy masterpiece, where every performance is among the best roles that the cast have had in their careers (MVP: Demián Bichir, playing the most honest and least racist Mexican caricature in a major American motion picture in the past couple of decades). The script is masterful not because of the dialogue (that is also really good) but because of how many genres it manages to balance without losing the structure and the fun, moving from horror to action to mystery to a speech that seems derived from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. It’s a film that addresses the state of the world in which we live, maybe in more ways than it initially thought it would. And it’s also playing in 70mm, enhancing the theatrical look, and giving the audience the experience that Tarantino envisioned. Jaime Grijalba (August 12, 14, 7pm; August 20, 3pm, 7pm at the Museum of the Moving Image’s “See It Big! The 70mm Show”)