Crosstown Arthouse Film Series

If you loved Last Night in Soho, come to the Crosstown Theater to catch Blood and Black Lace! From AGFA: Before Dario Argento’s Deep Red, there was Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace. At the Cristiana Haute Couture fashion house, models and their boyfriends excel at the art of backstabbing, blackmail, and snorting cocaine. That is, until a faceless maniac embarks on a mission of death! After the one-two punch of Black Sunday and Black Sabbath, Mario Bava unleashed Blood and Black Lace — the movie that perfected the ultra-violent sub-genre that would come to be known as “giallo.” With a mood that mashes together the elegance of a quiet rain on a summer night with the luridness of a trashy paperback, it’s no wonder why Martin Scorsese once referred to this movie as “an incredible moment for cinema.”

Sorry for the inconvenience, but this film is being postponed until further notice.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn tells the story of an Irish immigrant family, the Nolans, living out their lives in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn in 1912, about 100 years before Williamsburg got to be the gentrified hell-hole that it currently is. This story takes place when the neighborhood was filled with thousands of first-generation immigrants from all different parts of the world, crammed together in tenements and hustling every day to put food on the table and maybe a little liquor down their gullet! With Dorthy McGuire (Old Yeller, Swiss Family Robinson) as the perpetually pregnant Katie Nolan! Joan Blondell (Glenda in Stay Away, Joe) as sassy Aunt Sissy!! Come out and get in the spirit with us!! A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a CAN’T MISS!!!

Crosstown Arts tried this before back in series 6, but we got pandemic-ed before we could actually screen it, so we are trying again! The legend(s) surrounding Buford Pusser loom large over both Memphis and McNairy County, where he was sheriff from 1964 to 1970.  Buford was a professional wrestler who became a sheriff in an area overrun by the Dixie Mafia. He went to war with and killed Louise Hathcock, the operator of The Shamrock Motel, where the Babushka lady was supposedly seen hanging out a week or so before JFK got popped. 

Buford’s star really started to shine when his friend, country and rockabilly singer Eddie Bond, started singing about him. One story has it that when Buford got ambushed by the Dixie Mafia (and his wife was killed and his face was shot off), he hid out in Memphis at a nightclub on Madison that Eddie Bond owned with "The Fabulous One," Jackie Fargo.  Buford’s legend and story was interesting enough that they made THREE movies about him and the first is Walking Tall. Walking Tall fictionalizes Buford’s journey from bear wrestler to one man crime crusader. The movie stars character actor Jo Don Baker (Joysticks, Fletch) as Buford Pusser and Elizabeth Hartman (A Patch of Blue, The Secret of NIMH) as his wife Pauline. Lief Garrett (Macon Count Line, Walking Tall Part II, Final Chapter: Walking Tall, Tiger Beat Cover Model) and Lief’s real-life sister Dawn Lyn as the Pusser kids!! Walking Tall is BACK ON THE BIG SCREEN IN MEMPHIS FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY!! YOU KNOW YOU HAVE TO SEE IT!!!!

2K Restoration! From Janus: A senses-ravishing odyssey through the halls of time and memory, Andrei Tarkovsky’s sublime reflection on 20th century Russian history is as much a film as it is a poem composed in images, as much a work of cinema as it is a hypnagogic hallucination. In a richly textured collage of varying film stocks and newsreel footage, the recollections of a dying poet flash before our eyes, dreams mingling with scenes of childhood, wartime, and marriage, all imbued with the mystic power of a trance. Largely dismissed by Soviet critics upon its release due to its elusive narrative structure, Mirror has since taken its place as one of the titan director’s most renowned and influential works, a stunning personal statement from an artist transmitting his innermost thoughts and feelings directly from psyche to screen.

If you know, you know! Come see  The Holy Mountain on the Crosstown Theater’s giant screen in deep, full color!!!! From ABKCO: The scandal of the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, writer/director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s flood of sacrilegious imagery and existential symbolism in The Holy Mountain is a spiritual quest for enlightenment pitting illusion against truth. The Alchemist (Jodorowsky) assembles together a group of people from all walks of life to represent the planets in the solar system. The occult adept’s intention is to put his recruits through strange mystical rites and divest them of their worldly baggage before embarking on a trip to Lotus Island. There they ascend the Holy Mountain to displace the immortal gods who secretly rule the universe.

The story of four teenage girls living in LA in 1980, mostly doing what they hell they want, anytime they want, with hardly any supervision or input by any sensible adult. Foxes takes place in a world and a time when being a teenager was fun, free, and DANGEROUS. Directed by Adrian Lyne (Fatal Attraction, Flashdance)!! With a cameo concert by Kiss proteges and fellow Casablanca Records artist Angel (Punky Meadows!!!). Also with Jodie Foster (Taxi Driver, Bugsy Malone, The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane, Freaky Friday - and that was JUST WHAT SHE WAS IN THAT WAS RELEASED IN 1976!!!!!), Cherie Currie (THE RUNAWAYS LEAD SINGER YA’LL!!!), Randy Quaid (Midnight Express, The Long Riders, Independence Day) in an early, super-creepy role and HOT LIPS Sally Kellerman (MASH, A Little Romance), as Jodie Foster’s uptight but distant mother!! 

Restored in 4K from the 35mm original picture negative and 35mm duplicate picture negative! Park Circus in collaboration with Metro Goldwyn Mayer presents The Apartment. From Park Circus: C.C. Baxter is an office clerk who courts favor with the executives in his office by giving them the key to his small apartment for their extramarital flings. Among them is his callous boss, J.D. Sheldrake, who Baxter eventually learns is using his place to sleep with Miss Kubelik, the sweet elevator operator the clerk has loved from afar. When Sheldrake coldly dumps the vulnerable young woman, she tries to commit suicide in Baxter's apartment, giving the clerk the opportunity to save the woman of his dreams but possibly lose his job.

Interweaving lecture, personal anecdotes, interviews, and shocking revelations, in WHO WE ARE: A CHRONICLE OF RACISM IN AMERICA, criminal defense/civil rights lawyer Jeffery Robinson draws a stark timeline of anti-Black racism in the United States, from slavery to the modern myth of a post-racial America.

If He-Man and the Masters of the Universe dropped acid with the Shaw Brothers while knocking out a martial arts horror-fantasy movie, that movie would be THRILLING BLOODY SWORD. This head-spinning slice of Taiwanese psychotronic cinema builds a movie out of SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS, impossible fight scenes, and wild monsters that include a cyclops, a pterodactyl, and Satan himself! A comet impregnates a queen. She gives birth to a fleshy egg. In disgust, the king tosses the egg in the river. Seven little people stumble onto the egg. They stab it with a knife and find a cute baby inside —one who grows up to be a beautiful princess. One day, she runs into a prince, who is fighting a multi-headed dragon. Of course, the two royals fall in love. Unfortunately, a group of dastardly wizards want to keep them apart, and they’ll use every creature at their disposal to do it! Previously only available via VHS bootlegs, Gold Ninja Video is proud to present this hallucinogenic fantasia in a new 2K preservation from the only known 35mm print in existence.

Maya Deren is one of the most important American experimental filmmakers of all time. Along with being a filmmaker, Deren was a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, and photographer, and she brings all of these disciplines together in her dreamlike and ecstatic films. The history of avant-garde film is unthinkable without her. For this presentation Deren’s films will be curated and performed with a live score by Memphis no-wave and Goner Records recording artist OPTIC SINK.