Next in our venue-specific highlights series is the unique, Grade II listed, ‘cosiest cinema in Leeds’ Hyde Park Picture House.
We’re thrilled to announce we’re bring director Ben Wheatley to Hyde Park Picture House for a Q&A and the screening of his new film Happy New Year, Colin Burstead. Wheatley’s drama of dysfunction, about a man inviting his family to a New Year party in the country, is far removed from his gun-toting exploits from recent years. As its title suggests, Happy New Year is a sardonically-tinged drama; one that crescendos without the help of any champagne corks popping and midnight fireworks. His new feature is a poignant and quintessentially British family drama which many of us will find all too familiar, and this is the chance to catch it on the big screen with the director present before it showcases on television later this year.
The next highlight undoubtedly worth a mention has been coined as Maggie Gyllenhaal's finest performance to date in The Kindergarten Teacher. Described by the actress as a film ‘impossible to categorise’, Maggie stars as kindergarten teacher Lisa who becomes obsessed with one of her students in the latest film brought to us by Sara Colangelo. Despite how dark the film gets, the real fascination is how effectively Gyllenhaal and Colangelo establish Lisa’s isolation and how at odds her behaviour is with normal ways of being.
We see 2018’s rising star Timothée Chalamet star alongside Steve Carell in Beautiful Boy – a heart-breaking look at addiction told through lens of a father and son relationship. Adaptations can be hard to pull off — especially when they are based on the memoirs written by Nic Sheff and his father David Sheff about the reality of Nic’s substance abuse. The film from Felix Van Groeningen moves fluidly between the two narratives with the end result an incredibly relevant lesson and a beacon of hope all in one breath. To its credit, Beautiful Boy doesn't reassure its audience with the false comfort of easy answers but is a film that will leave a powerful, emotional effect long after watching it.
Primarily known as an autobiographical photographer, Richard Billingham is back with his feature-directing debut about his parent’s chaotic home life in Ray & Liz. The film is not the feel-good movie of the year but it is a perfect fictionalised portrait of Billingham’s family, for better or worse. You can’t help but be mesmerised by one domineering character, that of Liz, a beastly woman who does little, but smoke and drink tea made for her by husband Ray; who stands silently by, just as culpable for indulging her. Ray and Liz is a complex film and often brutal to watch providing an insight into a world Billingham so vividly recalls from his childhood.
Our final mention for Hyde Park Picture House is the return of LIFF's legendary Night of the Dead returns kicking off with Nightmare Cinema, a new horror film experience echoing classic anthology series like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. Going on until the early hours of the next morning with a deadly version of Home Alone in Knuckleball and fast-paced, laugh-out-loud, meta-as-possible zombie comedy One Cut of the Dead, this is an event only for the brave.
Keep your eye out for our next venues Highlights about Vue at The Light.
