Films at Amherst Cinema

Frances (Greta Gerwig) lives in New York, but she doesn't really have an apartment. Frances is an apprentice for a dance company, but she¹s not really a dancer. Frances has a best friend named Sophie, but they aren't really speaking anymore. Frances throws herself headlong into her dreams, even as their possible reality dwindles. Frances wants so much more than she has but lives her life with unaccountable joy and lightness.

STORIES WE TELL unpeels the complex life of Diane, an aspiring actress and mother, and the shockwaves that a series of impulsive actions unleash on her children, husband and community.  With this groundbreaking new feature that seamlessly blends past and present, the real and imagined, Polley's characteristically unflinching yet compassionate gaze delivers a level of depth and emotion only hinted at by her acclaimed earlier directorial works, AWAY FROM HER and TAKE THIS WALTZ.  Making STORIES WE TELL that much more memorable is the revelation that the mother depicted—and family in question—is Polley's own.

After a pair of expensive historical epics (Gangs of New York, The Aviator) Martin Scorsese returns to the well for this blistering crime thriller about cops and robbers in South Boston. A remake of the Hong Kong hit Infernal Affairs (2002), it stars Jack Nicholson as a ruthless mobster, Martin Sheen as captain of an undercover police unit, and Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio as the young men they send to spy on each other. Neither spy knows the other's identity, and their cover is so deep each runs the risk of being stranded in his new life.

Eighteen-year-old Shira (Hada Yaron) is the youngest daughter of the family and is about to be married off to a very promising young man of the same age. On Purim, her twenty-eight-year-old sister, Esther (Renana Raz), dies during childbirth, leaving her husband to care for the child and postponing Shira's promised match.

The sublime Barbara Sukowa reteams with director Margarethe von Trotta (Vision, Rosa Luxemburg) for her brilliant new biopic of influential German-Jewish philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt.

When it appears as though the end is in sight, the pilots, flight crew, and passengers of a plane heading to Mexico City look to forget the anguish of the moment and face the greatest danger, which we carry within ourselves.

A 1988 adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis's controversial novel. Possibly Martin Scorsese's most ambitious film, it more or less inverts the principles of his religiously informed New York films by being a religious film informed by some of the cadences, intonations, and attitudes of New York. The efforts to plant this story in a contemporary vernacular are not always successful but the performances are uniformly fine in their adherence to the material, and consistently avoid any vulgarity or showboating.

50th Anniversary Restoration!  David Lean's 1962 spectacle about T.E. Lawrence's military career between 1916 and '18, written by Robert Bolt and produced by Sam Spiegel, remains one of the most intelligent, handsome, and influential of all war epics.

This year, all of Norway celebrates the 150th anniversary of the birth of Edvard Munch (1863 - 1944), one of the towering figures of modern art. Munch 150, co-hosted by the National Museum and the Munch Museum (both in Oslo), is already being hailed a "once-in-a-lifetime show". Global interest is huge - not least as a result of one of his four paintings of The Scream having recently set a public art auction record of $120 million.

Martin Scorsese's brutal character study incisively portrays the true rise and fall and redemption of middleweight boxer Jake La Motta, a violent man in and out of the ring who thrives on his ability (and desire) to take a beating.  Despite pressure from the local mobsters, Jake trusts his brother Joey (Joe Pesci) to help him make it to a title bout against Sugar Ray Robinson the honest way; the Mob, however, will not cave in.  Jake gets the title bout, and blonde teenage second wife Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), but success does nothing to exorcise his

The National Gallery, London, is offering a major exhibition on one of the most startling and fascinating artists of all-time Johannes Vermeer, painter of the Girl with a Pearl Earring. Vermeer painted little more than 30 works that still exist, and the National Gallery has chosen to focus on his art in relation to music. Music was one of the most popular themes of Dutch painting and revealed an enormous amount about the sitter and the society.

Acclaimed documentarian Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) takes the reins for this no-holds-barred look at one of the most unusual phenomena of early 21st century media. In 2006, an Iceland-based outfit called The Sunshine Press launched the website WikiLeaks.org.