Exciting news, fans of film and/or China: we’ll be showing a Chinese documentary film every Monday in August, many of which are rare and controversial, covering a range of issues such as prostitution, fortune telling, disability, art, filmmaking, and so many more. This Monday we begin with There’s a Strong Wind in Beijing (北京的风很大), in which a Ju Anqi-led gonzo camera crew randomly ask people on the street, “Do you think Beijing’s wind is strong?” The answers are at turn surprising, funny, insightful, and pointed. (more…)

You may be familiar with Hayao Miyazaki and his modern classics — Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, etc. — but Japanese animation doesn’t stop with him. To wrap up Animation Month at The Bookworm, we’ll be showing the brilliant, bizarre, perspective-altering Millennium Actress, from the late, great master of anime, Satoshi Kon. (more…)

Our Chinese Monday Movie series resumes tonight with Black Coal, Thin Ice — winner of the Golden Bear at last year’s Berlin film festival — which follows an ex-cop chasing a serial killer in northern China. The movie is in Chinese, with English subtitles. Be sure to say for the twist ending…
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Can nine ragdolls save the world? Find out this Friday when we show 9, the Tim Burton-produced animated claymation about a postapocalyptic, human-less world in which nine stitched-up dolls must journey through a barren wasteland to find vestiges of our soul.  (more…)

Our film this Friday is Persepolis, based off Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel by the same name. It tells the coming-of-age story of a young woman during the Iranian Revolution, and features Bruce Lee, Michael Jackson, the Shah of Iran, God, and Karl Marx… (more…)

Filmmaker Nicholas Verso began his career directing Super 8 music videos for musicians such as Wendy Rule, Kerri Simpson, Beki & The Bullets and The Cat Empire. His first feature film — MAX: A Cautionary Tale — which he wrote and directed, premiered in 2003 at festivals around Australia, the US (screening at Walt Disney World and winning Best New Director at the New York Independent Film & Video Festival) and Europe. (more…)

Film Friday returns tonight with an animated classic, the French oddball comedy The Triplets of Belleville. (more…)

Dr. Ying Zhu, a leading scholar on Chinese cinema, will be at The Bookworm this Wednesday for the screening of the documentary film China: From Cartier to Confucius, which she co-produced. A Q-and-A will follow. (more…)

This coming Monday, June 22, we’ll be screening one of the most acclaimed Chinese films of recent memory, Liu Jiayin’s mesmerizing Oxhide, which portrays the filmmaker’s working-class family inside a cramped Beijing apartment. It won awards at the 2005 Berlin International Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, and the Vancouver International Film Festival.

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What do you get when you combine the directorial vision of the Coen Brothers with Cormac McCarthy’s stark, poetic, mannered prose? No Country for Old Men, of course, which won four Oscars, including Best Picture. Adhering fairly closely to the novel, the movie follows a sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) chasing a serial killer (Javier Bardem) chasing an antelope hunter (Josh Brolin) who happens upon a briefcase of money on the Mexican-American border at the site of a drug deal gone bad.  

Please note: screening will be cancelled in case of rain; no rain is forecast the moment.

Friday, June 19, 8 pm
FREE