Crosstown Theater

In one of his most finely tuned performances, Peter Sellers plays the pure-hearted, childlike Chance, a gardener who is forced into the wilds of Washington, D.C., when his wealthy guardian dies. Shocked to discover that the real world doesn’t respond to the click of a remote, Chance stumbles into celebrity after being taken under the wing of a tycoon (Melvyn Douglas, in an Oscar-winning performance), who mistakes his protégé’s horticultural mumblings for sagacious pronouncements on life and politics, and whose wife (Shirley MacLaine) targets Chance as the object of her desire. Adapted from a novel by Jerzy Kosinski, this satire, both deeply melancholy and hilarious, is the culmination of Hal Ashby’s remarkable string of films in the 1970s, and a carefully modulated examination of the ideals, anxieties, and media-fueled delusions that shaped American culture during that decade.

In South Memphis, married artists Bertram Williams and Talibah Safiya transform their creative practices into vehicles for a higher purpose. Enter Mama’s Sundry, a collaborative movement fostering wellness and sustainability through education, service initiatives and a neighborhood garden that produces fresh fruit and vegetables within a community that’s long been designated a food desert. Followed by a panel discussion.

This Powell And Pressburger classic is widely considered to be one of the greatest films ever made and winner of two Oscars. It focuses on Vicky, a young ballerina starring in a ballet The Red Shoes. Like her character in the ballet, she is irresistibly drawn to dancing. Her life becomes split between her simple human passion and artistic devotion to her profession. The film contains ballet sequences of stylistic mastery, and is visually one of the most innovative and beautiful works of cinema ever created.

Martin Scorsese first encountered the films of Powell and Pressburger when he was a child, sitting in front of the family TV. When their famous logo came up on screen, Scorsese says, “You knew you were in for fantasy, wonder, magic - real film magic.” Now, in this documentary, he tells the story of his lifelong love-affair with their movies, including The Life and Death Of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann.

The four films Man Ray directed between 1923 and 1929, Le Retour à la raison, Emak-Bakia, L'Étoile de mer and Les Mystères du Château du Dé represent a high watermark of early European avant-garde cinema, a seminal nexus of experimental technique, surrealist narrative, and playful abstraction as suffused with dark eroticism.

Kelly (Lucinda Dickey) is a classically trained jazz dancer who’s tired of warding off her amorous teacher and hungry for a new outlet. When she befriends street dancers Ozone (Adolfo “Shabba-Doo” Quinones) and Turbo (Michael “Boogaloo Shrimp” Chambers), She’s blown away by their unique and original moves. She soon volunteers to help them defeat a rival group of street dances, learning break-dancing skills along the way and sharing some moves of her own.

One of the most notorious films of the 1980s, this controversial crime noir thriller directed by William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection) stars Al Pacino as Steve Burns, an NYPD officer who goes undercover in Manhattan’s Leather-bar underground in order to track down a serial killer targeting gay men. But as Stevebecomes immersed in club hopping, he begins to identify with the subculture more than he expected. Meanwhile, the police force’s homophobia becomes apparent and the killer remains at large.

Jacques Tati’s gloriously choreographed, nearly wordless comedies about confusion in an age of high technology reached their apotheosis with PlayTime. For this monumental achievement, a nearly three-year-long, bank-breaking production, Tati again thrust the lovably old-fashioned Monsieur Hulot, along with a host of other lost souls, into a baffling modern world, this time Paris. With every inch of its superwide frame crammed with hilarity and inventiveness, PlayTime is a lasting record of a modern era tiptoeing on the edge of oblivion.

John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Little Richard, The Doors, Alice Cooper, and other legendary musicians performed at the 1969 Toronto Rock and Roll Revival music festival. This behind-the-scenes look at “the second most important event in rock and roll history” culminates in John Lennon’s first public performance with The Plastic Ono Band, triggering his decision to leave The Beatles.

An exquisitely understated ode to the thrill of romantic possibility, the inaugural installment of The Before Trilogy opens with a chance encounter between two solitary young strangers. After they hit it off on a train bound for Vienna, the Paris university student Celine and the scrappy American tourist Jesse impulsively decide to spend a day together before he returns to the U.S. the next morning. As the pair roam the streets of the stately city, Richard Linklater’s tenderly observant gaze captures the uncertainty and intoxication of young love.