Metrograph

The haunting dub masterpiece MILLENNIUM MAMBO plays on 35mm at Metrograph this weekend, don't miss a chance to get lost in melancholic, dreamy visual rhythms in theater or at home for Metrograph Members.

That the word “fire” appears in not less than four titles of films directed by Ringo Lam isn’t merely a matter of branding—it’s indicative of the temperature of Lam’s inflamed, scorchingly impassioned action cinema; if you could somehow put a thermometer to these films, said thermometer would explode.

So forcefully and repeatedly do Lam’s films posit Hong Kong as a hell on earth, a city that devours its young, a place where the only thing worse than the present is the future, that the results, paradoxically, are something like love letters scrawled in blood.

Starts June 5th at Metrograph.

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CITY ON FIRE
PRISON ON FIRE
SCHOOL ON FIRE
CITY ON FIRE
FULL ALERT
FULL CONTACT
UNDECLARED WAR

The progress through a hopelessly shuffled stack of love letters inspires the a-chronological structure of Hong’s Hill of Freedom—Moon So-ri’s second film with Hong—which describes the terse long-distance relationship between a South Korean woman (Seo Young-hwa) and a Japanese man (Ryo Kase) who has built an ardent romantic fantasy around her, only to, on his return to Seoul after some years absence, find himself gravitating towards a friendly coffee shop proprietress (Moon), whose establishment gives the film its title.

Hong Sang-Soo's HILL OF FREEDOM plays this weekend at Metrograph.