Pleasure at Real Art Ways

“The film fiercely homes in at the moral perversity of an industry at a particular intersection of capitalism, patriarchy, and digital-age spectacle.” – Slant Magazine

“But it’s Kappel, an actress with neither experience in the porn industry nor film, who turns in a star-making performance as Bella. She balances showing not just the insecurity and fear felt by this actress, but the joy too.” – Los Angeles Times

“A portrait of a business in which men use women for their own ends, and then convince those same women that this is how things operate—and, as a result, that they should behave likewise.” – The Daily Beast

“If you’re curious what a feminist take on this world looks like, “Pleasure” might surprise you as much as it did me.” – New York Times

Synopsis:

Ninja Thyberg’s debut feature film Pleasure is a journey into the Los Angeles porn industry through the lens of newcomer Bella Cherry (Sofia Kappel). Strong, self-confident and determined, Bella embarks on a mission to become the best at any cost.

Pleasure is written and directed by Thyberg with a stunning first time performance by Kappel, who anchors an ensemble of adult industry actors.

Safety In Our Cinema:

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“The acting is note perfect across the board: six-year-old Rayan Sarlak is an effervescent explosion of rascally energy, while Madjooni is funny, laconic and pissed-off — often all at once.” – Time Out

“To be a passenger alongside these nervous voyagers, as they clash, tease and cherish each other on the way to this strange and terrible fork in their lives, is to be a very fortunate moviegoer indeed.” – Los Angeles Times

“From the first jokey moments of Hit the Road until its heartbreaking end you will not want to be anywhere else.” – NY Times

“Panahi’s spare, controlled style unites intimate conflicts and vast landscapes in framings as wry as they are rhapsodic.” – The New Yorker

Synopsis:

Panah Panahi, son and collaborator of embattled Iranian master Jafar Panahi, makes a striking feature debut with this charming, sharp-witted, and deeply moving comic drama. Hit the Road takes the tradition of the Iranian road-trip movie and adds unexpected twists and turns. It follows a family of four — two middle-aged parents and their sons, one a taciturn adult, the other an ebullient six-year-old — as they drive across the Iranian countryside. Over the course of the trip, they bond over memories of the past, grapple with fears of the unknown, and fuss over their sick dog. Unspoken tensions arise and the film builds emotional momentum as it slowly reveals the furtive purpose for their journey. The result is a humanist drama that offers an authentic, raw, and deeply sincere observation of an Iranian family preparing to part with one of their own.

“It is largely with the New Iranian Cinema of the post-revolutionary era that Iranian cinema received worldwide critical attention, wining regular awards at prestigious film festivals around the globe. After the 1979 revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic, new guidelines were established by the state apparatus to ensure that films produced in Iran were made according to the logic of an Islamic “system of modesty” (hejab in its broadest sense). Paradoxically, these censorship guidelines forced Iranian filmmakers to develop a new filmic grammar, which in a constant negotiation with state censors, contributed to a new visual and aural film form that is distinctive to Iranian cinema.” – Oxford Bibiographies

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“This movie should be played real loud. And in venues where people can, if they choose, get up and dance.” – Variety

“A rollicking, heartfelt shout-out to (and glorified tourism ad for) a cherished fairground blowout that has long buoyed a routinely troubled city.” – Los Angeles Times

Synopsis:

Live performances and interviews from the 50th anniversary of The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, the signature annual music and cultural event of the city with hundreds of thousands of attendees each year. The N.O. ‘Jazz Fest’ celebrates the music, food, people, arts & crafts, and culture of all of Louisiana since 1970, and is an essential showcase of the rich heritage of the region. The film, shot at the 2019 Fest, features local music heroes joined on 14 stages by some of the biggest names in the music industry, and a wealth of archival documentary footage from the past half century. Among the 50 plus featured performers are Jimmy Buffett, Pitbull, Bruce Springsteen, Katy Perry, Aaron Neville, The Marsalis Family, Earth, Wind & Fire, Irma Thomas, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Samantha Fish, Herbie Hancock, Al Green, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Mardi Gras Indians, Dwayne Dopsie and the Zydeco Hellraisers, Tom Jones, Gary Clark, Jr., and many others.

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As you return to our physical space, your health and safety is our top priority. To learn about all the steps we have taken to prepare and our new procedures visit our Welcoming You Back page.

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Eve, one of France’s greatest artisanal horticulturalists, hires three inexperienced ex-convicts to help rescue her rose business from imminent bankruptcy.

In French with English subtitles.
95% on Rotten Tomatoes.

“A buoyant romp.” – Los Angeles Times

“A reminder that glimpsing beauty is reason enough.” – New York Times

“This soulful film reminds us that there’s a whole lot more to life than just making money – or roses.” – Alliance of Women Film Journalists

“Yes, the movie is a metaphysical multiverse galaxy-brain head trip, but deep down — and also right on the surface — it’s a bittersweet domestic drama, a marital comedy, a story of immigrant striving and a hurt-filled ballad of mother-daughter love.” – NY Times

“Yeoh imbues Evelyn with moving shades of melancholy, regret, resolve and growing curiosity. She’s the kind of woman the world (and Hollywood) routinely overlooks, but Yeoh makes her embrace of lead-character energy positively gripping.” – Vanity Fair

“A rare and dazzling showcase for a megawatt performer [Yeoh] who scowls, gasps, punches, kicks, leaps, flips, soars and finally transcends.”
– Los Angeles Times

Synopsis:

A hilarious and big-hearted sci-fi action adventure about an exhausted Chinese American woman (Michelle Yeoh) who can’t seem to finish her taxes.

Academy Award Wins

Best Picture

Actor in a Supporting Role – Ke Huy Quan

Actress in a Leading Role – Michelle Yeoh

Actress in a Supporting Role – Jamie Lee Curtis

Best Director

Film Editing

Writing (Original Screenplay)

“There is a place for the crowd-pleaser, the tear-jerker, the movie that wants to manipulate your emotions and make you cry – particularly if it manages to bring something new to an old formula.” – NPR

“Pushes our buttons shamelessly, but also with enough sincerity, warmth and finesse to forestall accusations of rank manipulation.” – Washington Post

“You’ll laugh, cry and all steps in between.” – ABC News

2022 Academy Award Winner: Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay

Synopsis:

Seventeen-year-old Ruby (Emilia Jones) is the sole hearing member of a deaf family — a CODA, child of deaf adults. Her life revolves around acting as interpreter for her parents (Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur) and working on the family’s struggling fishing boat every day before school with her father and older brother (Daniel Durant). But when Ruby joins her high school’s choir club, she discovers a gift for singing and soon finds herself drawn to her duet partner Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo). Encouraged by her enthusiastic, tough-love choirmaster (Eugenio Derbez) to apply to a prestigious music school, Ruby finds herself torn between the obligations she feels to her family and the pursuit of her own dreams.

Safety In Our Cinema:

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“Extraordinary. An engrossing and exalting experience.” – The Guardian

“An exquisitely observed drama of gently momentous connection.” – NY Times

“Superb.” – NY Times

“Exquisite.” Los Angeles Times

“A masterpiece.” – Rolling Stone

Oscar nominated: International Feature Film.

Synopsis:

Two years after his wife’s unexpected death, Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a renowned stage actor and director, receives an offer to direct a production of Uncle Vanya at a theater festival in Hiroshima. There, he meets Misaki Watari (Toko Miura), a taciturn young woman assigned by the festival to chauffeur him in his beloved red Saab 900. As the production’s premiere approaches, tensions mount amongst the cast and crew, not least between Yusuke and Koji Takatsuki, a handsome TV star who shares an unwelcome connection to Yusuke’s late wife. Forced to confront painful truths raised from his past, Yusuke begins — with the help of his driver — to face the haunting mysteries his wife left behind. Adapted from Haruki Murakami’s short story, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car is a haunting road movie traveling a path of love, loss, acceptance, and peace. Winner of three prizes at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, including Best Screenplay.

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Real Art Ways Cinema is designated Cinema Safe. Learn more about Cinema Safe HERE

“Jim Broadbent could play a vicious despot and still make you wish he was your uncle.” – Time Out

“The story is charming, the performances are exceptional.” – Wall Street Journal

“One of Michell’s enduring themes was exasperation—an unglamorous emotion, familiar to us all but, unlike rage, seldom given its cinematic due. Hence, perhaps, his interest in autumnal characters; facing and fearing a wintry future, they take stock of what they have done thus far, or frustratingly failed to do.
– The New Yorker

Starring Dame Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent.

Synopsis:

In 1961, Kempton Bunton, a 60-year old taxi driver, stole Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London. It was the first (and remains the only) theft in the Gallery’s history. Kempton sent ransom notes saying that he would return the painting on condition that the government invested more in care for the elderly — he had long campaigned for pensioners to receive free television. What happened next became the stuff of legend. Only 50 years later did the full story emerge — Kempton had spun a web of lies. The only truth was that he was a good man, determined to change the world and save his marriage — how and why he used the Duke to achieve that is a wonderfully uplifting tale.

Safety In Our Cinema:

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“In front of the orchestras he leads, Dudamel is a live wire, his signature curls bouncing with each wave of the wand. And when the music stops, Dudamel turns his passion for his profession toward advocacy, supporting programs that help young Venezuelan musicians develop professionally.” – NY Times

Synopsis:

Conductor Gustavo Dudamel sets the music world afire with his original interpretations of the greatest symphonic works. He is named one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People” and serves as music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Amidst social unrest in his native Venezuela, he devises an innovative concert that celebrates the power of art to renew and unite.

Safety In Our Cinema:

As you return to our physical space, your health and safety is our top priority. To learn about all the steps we have taken to prepare and our new procedures visit our Welcoming You Back page.

Real Art Ways Cinema is designated Cinema Safe. Learn more about Cinema Safe HERE

 

“A charming new documentary is an ode to the grandeur and promise of the eateries…The film imparts some fascinating facts—at one point, 10% of Philadelphians were eating at Horn & Hardart daily—and convinces the viewer that Automats were an important part of the American social fabric. Though long gone, they are evidently not forgotten. In “At The Automat”, a new song Mr Brooks wrote for the film, he pays fond tribute to its famous coffee: “for just a shiny nickel, your tastebuds you could tickle, with that wonderful, magnificent, unbelievable, awesome coffee at the Automat.”
– The Economist

“The delight of “The Automat”… is its blend of social and intellectual history with its anecdotal history—its evocation of the links between intention, practice, and experience; its depiction of a largely lost aesthetic of daily life.” – New Yorker

Synopsis:

Before fast food we had something better. Our grandparents told us stories of gathering around communal tables, sharing their lives, their struggles, and their dreams with strangers at The Automat. In the long awaited Horn & Hardart documentary relive the phenomena of America’s original and most beloved restaurant chain. The one hundred year Automat saga serves up never before-seen archival footage and photographs and a cast including celebrity customers, company executives, historians, and members of the Horn & Hardart families.

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“The film is a fable, to be sure, and one that unfolds at a leisurely pace, not a tough-minded psychological drama. But it’s sharp-witted as well as soulful, reasonably suspenseful and brings news from a little-known area of the world.” – Wall Street Journal

 

Oscar nominated for Best International Feature Film

Synopsis:

An aspiring singer living with his grandmother in the capital of Bhutan dreams of getting a visa to relocate to Australia.

Safety In Our Cinema:

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“A film of immense, swirling complexity, and its elaborateness… comes off as a sort of defiance, of resistance to current modes of easy and consumable viewing.” – The New Yorker

“Both [Haim and Hoffman] inhabit the screen with a sympathetic responsiveness and a rare immediacy. Their incarnation of the ardors and audacities of youth is among the marvels of recent movies, and with them Anderson rediscovers something greater than his own youth—the youth of the cinema itself.” – The New Yorker

“Quite possibly the year’s best film – easily its most delightful surprise.” – NPR

“A shaggy, fitfully brilliant romp.” – NY Times

“If Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza” doesn’t make you happy, the trouble may be that you’re clinically depressed, anhedonic or don’t care for movies in general.” – Wall Street Journal

“In large part thanks to its fresh-faced stars, the charming Hoffman and the wildly charismatic Haim, I’m hard pressed to think of a recent movie whose world I would have liked to stay in longer.” – Slate

 

Synopsis:

Oscar Nominated: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay

“Licorice Pizza” is the story of Alana Kane (Alana Haim) and Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) growing up, running around and falling in love in the San Fernando Valley, 1973. Written and Directed by heralded filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, this potent coming-of-age drama tracks the treacherous navigation of first love. Sean Penn, Bradley Cooper, Tom Waits and Benny Safdi also star.

Safety In Our Cinema:

As you return to our physical space, your health and safety is our top priority. To learn about all the steps we have taken to prepare and our new procedures visit our Welcoming You Back page.

Real Art Ways Cinema is designated Cinema Safe. Learn more about Cinema Safe HERE