Back in July, "An Experience With Al Pacino (Scarface 40th Anniversary) (MIAMI)" was announced for Saturday, December 9. It is unclear if that event is still happening - clicking on the "get tickets" button leads to a page that says, "This event is currently unavailable."

The Phantom of the Opera has inspired dozens of imitations, riffs, and reimaginings over the decades, but the best is, without question (sorry, Phantom of the Megaplex stans), Brian De Palma’s horror-comedy rock musical about a gifted songwriter forced by a deranged record executive to haunt a concert hall. William Finley is magnificent in the title role, Paul Williams is deliciously evil as Swan, and, of course, don’t forget Gerrit Graham as everyone’s favorite trend-chasing rock star, Beef. Made for the age of glam rock and concept albums, it’s as fun to watch now as it was back then, and you’ll have the songs in your head for days.

In Carrie, Brian De Palma flaunts his virtuosity as a filmmaker (is there a passage in ’70s Hollywood as elegant as Carrie’s long, slow walk to the stage, culminating in the fall of the blood bucket, at which point the somnolent slowness goes from lovely to agonizing?) as much as he displays his bone-aching empathy for the tragic Carrie White (Sissy Spacek). Adapting Stephen King’s debut novel at the advent of King’s reign in the book world and in Hollywood, on his way to becoming the most pervasive presence in pop-culture of the 1980s (it was his endorsement that helped bring Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead success), De Palma creates a harmonious marriage of formal bombast and tender humanity, capturing the panic spread by the unusual and the pain of the daily banalities of being a teenage girl in America.

“Virtuosity” and “humanity” also describe Piper Laurie’s staggering performance as Margaret White, Carrie’s mother, a fervid acolyte of some notion of Christ whose beliefs and implementation of punishment for minute sins are unorthodox, but she believes with all her heart. Her faith remains unwavering. The film’s cast is an eclectic array of characters with quirks and personalities, some modest and “realistic” (Amy Irving’s Sue, afflicted with guilt) and some decidedly villainous (Allen’s queen bitch and her thuggish, beer-swilling, swine-killing boyfriend played by John Travolta) in that distinct, classic way of the pre-slasher horror picture, a genre founded upon fear of the strange (Baudelaire’s affinity for the anomalous is very much relevant here).

Laurie’s God-fearing matriarch is outlandish, realized with some capital-A acting at the apogee of New Hollywood histrionics and opposite Spacek’s very internalized, kind-and-loving performance, emotions conveyed in meek terseness and downward-gazing eyes. With hair the color of sin sticking out all frizzy and unkempt, her makeup-less face wide in divine expression as she spreads the word of God translated into her own sui generis piousness, Laurie’s return to Hollywood after a 15-year absence (following her acclaimed performance in 1961’s The Hustler) is indelible and incendiary. Her presence in the film is exaggerated, a performance with an exclamation point, yet still steeped in humanity, strangled by the trauma of corrupted innocence and the desperation to make sense of one’s life. She had a kid and it ruined hers; you hear such stories all the time, hear the sanctimony of parents telling teens to abstain because the last thing they want is a kid too young.

When Margaret hurls her daughter into the closet for blaspheming, it’s not hatred of her daughter that has her quaking, but hatred of herself for birthing spawn that possesses the power of the Devil.

“The Killer” has a cool and alluring style but with a gritty veneer. It’s as if Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le Samourai” was reimagined by Brian De Palma. The action comes in spurts and often leaves indelible impressions (Fincher shoots one of the best hand-to-hand fight sequences you’ll see). And it’s all accentuated by yet another simmering score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

But perhaps most appealing is how Fincher embraces and subverts genre expectations. From one angle he has delivered a pretty straightforward hitman movie. But as you look closer you see the markings of a filmmaker with more on his mind. They’re markings that go beyond mere craftsmanship and execution (although those things are critical). And ultimately that is what sets this film apart. “The Killer” will show in select theaters on October 27th before streaming on Netflix November 10th.

Just watching Fassbender do push-ups in his black rubber gloves wires up the atmosphere. At one point, the door of the WeWork office opens. And when the killer puts music on his earbuds (the Smiths’ “Well I Wonder”) to get into his groove, it becomes the needle drop as homicidal pop-opera soundtrack. The target arrives, and as we watch him move about the apartment, the film generates the hypnotic tension one remembers from “The Day of the Jackal” or certain moments in Brian De Palma films. We realize that the chemistry of cinema hasn’t just put us in the killer’s shoes — it has put us on his side. We want to see him do the deed.

The posters and ads for “The Killer,” a Netflix movie that’s premiering at the Venice Film festival, feature a terrific tagline: “Execution is everything.” The pun is crystal clear in its cleverness, yet there’s a third layer of meaning to it. For just as the killer’s execution of his job depends on coldly calibrating every moment (no empathy, no mistakes), Fincher has made “The Killer” with more or less the same attitude. The film is based on a French graphic novel, written by Alexis “Matz” Nolent and illustrated by Luc Jacamon, that was published in 12 volumes starting in 1998. And as staged by Fincher, from a meticulous bare-bones script by Andrew Kevin Walker (who wrote Fincher’s “Se7en”), the film is all about its own execution. It’s a minimalist nihilist action opera of procedure.

DRAG ME TO THE MOVIES is an interactive movie-going experience featuring drag artists, movie bingo and prizes. It is hosted by Weird Alice.

THE MUSIC MADE HIM DO IT! Join Weird Alice and special guest Continental Breakfast for the second as they rock and haunt the stage with the second annual special presentation of 1974's PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE! You asked- we are bringing it back because there is no better place to celebrate Brian De Palma's epic horror-fantasy-musical-ultimate masterpiece of cult cinema than Live at the Paradise Theatre!

In this rock opera hybrid of Phantom of the Opera and Faust, fledgling singer-songwriter Winslow Leach finds himself double-crossed by the nefarious music producer Swan, who steals both his music and the girl Leach wants to sing it, Phoenix, for the grand opening of his rock palace, The Paradise. After Swan sends Leach to prison for trespassing, Leach endures a freak accident which leaves him disfigured and plans his revenge on both Swan and the Paradise, thus becoming the PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE.

Friday November 24th, 7 PM/6:30 PM Doors

Early Bird $17.50 | General Admission $20 | Door Entry $25

Giggles have always had their place in the enjoyment of horror, whether tacked onto the end of a prolonged freakout or as a nervous placeholder that acknowledges a silly premise before we fully get owned by terror and blood.

But Stuart Gordon, who died in 2020, believed real laughs belonged in true horror, like a complementary energy source, as his gore-ific cult hits “Re-Animator” and “From Beyond” proved. It’s fitting that he’s the dedicatee at the end of director Joe Lynch’s body-possession lark “Suitable Flesh,” since it’s a mostly amusing throwback to Gordon’s brand of blackly comic grisliness, starting with the fact that it’s also an H.P. Lovecraft adaptation (of his 1937 short story “The Thing on the Doorstep”), written by frequent Gordon collaborator Dennis Paoli, and starring the late director’s mainstay Barbara Crampton (also a producer) in a prime role.

Just as prominent in Lynch’s shout-out sweepstakes, however, are the naughty-peekaboo trappings of Brian de Palma’s violent melodramas, which initially take pride of place here as Heather Graham’s institutionalized, wild-eyed psychiatrist Elizabeth Derby spins a tale from her padded cell to her doctor friend Daniella (Crampton) about a malevolent force trying to get her. (Another connection: We’re in the same Miskatonic med school where “Re-Animator” was set.)

Days prior, an anxious young patient named Asa (Judah Lewis) had come to Elizabeth with a tale of being the target of body possession, complete with an in-session seizure and instant change to a more arrogant, suggestive, darker personality. Later, during sexy time with her horny, ignored husband (Johnathon Schaech), a vision of Asa briefly takes over Elizabeth’s mind. Since Elizabeth wrote the book on mind/body splits (there’s always a cutaway to a thick tome as proof), her way of helping means getting more involved. She visits the creepy house where Asa lives with his father (Bruce Davison), who appears angrily haunted as well, and soon the corporeally hungry, lascivious force takes over Elizabeth too.

In her possession scenes, Graham has great fun dialing down her golden-girl shine and ramping up a smirking, predatory air, a refreshingly parodic twist on years of sexpot-role survival in a male-dominated industry. Too bad the weak body-swapping farce she’s given to play isn’t worthy of her gameness, a missed opportunity to fuse Lovecraft, Blake Edwards and Paul Verhoeven. Lynch does exhibit a winking fondness for the sax-scored signposts of ‘90s cable eroticism, but it’s not always clear what’s intentionally funny about these style tags.

Meanwhile, the De Palma-fication — split screens, camera swivels, composer Steve Moore’s Pino Donaggio-like score — doesn’t really add anything except make one wish to be more authentically inside the premise’s nightmare ride (which De Palma was so expert at) rather than observing a fan’s riff. Much more enjoyable are the parts where Gordon’s influence is prominent, especially the splattery transference-apalooza at the psych ward, where the story catches up to where it all started and we know what we’re laughing and wincing at. Crampton’s genre-burnished authority is particularly disarming here, juggling the preposterous and the believable as memorably as she did in Gordon’s madness-and-mayhem classics.

I first met Margaret White in the pages of Stephen King’s Carrie in elementary school and it was all because of a crush. After the release of Children of the Corn in 1984, I saw the prettiest girl in fifth grade carrying around Night Shift, the short story collection in which its source was anthologized. With no other way to get close to her, I got my parents to buy me the book and fast became obsessed by King and the illicit charge of what I’d read. Finished in a fever, I had gone in search of more King and landed on Carrie, his first book. King describes Margaret White in its first pages as a “holy roller” so obsessed by the notion of sin that she could not conceive she was pregnant until she birthed Carrie on her own on a blood-drenched mattress in an empty home surrounded by neighbors who hate her. The book, these stories and characters, have anchored themselves in me. The image of Margaret White — a person so pugnacious, so broken by experience and yet so resourceful, so driven and unknowable — immediately lodged itself in my imagination. When I finally saw Brian De Palma’s adaptation of Carrie on a VHS tape I wasn’t technically allowed to rent, the moment Piper Laurie appears on screen I knew immediately that this was Margaret White, a more-rounded, more terrifyingly human Margaret White: a volcano in sheep’s clothing.

What Laurie captured so well was not just the monstrousness of a woman who refers to breasts as “dirty pillows,” not the middle-distance gaze, the sense that not all was well with Margaret who had one foot in reality and the other with the cruel angels of her own divining, but the woman who had her own sad stories to tell — but no one to tell them to. King says Margaret believed her pregnancy was a rapidly-spreading “cancer of the womanly parts” and that she was going to die soon. I can see her belief manifested in Laurie’s performance: the fatalism and mortality, the surety that comes with ignorance and unquestioned faith, the beatific arrogance of the saved forged in the fire of ostracization and isolation. Margaret first appears ten minutes into Carrie, a witch from a fairytale all in black with black cloak, her red hair an untamed thicket come to call on a hapless neighbor with a poisoned apple of the Good News promising salvation in a Godless time. She proselytizes with orgasmic bliss to an increasingly unnerved neighbor before being sent away with ten dollars. She experiences the same kind of rapture when she’s beating her daughter, Carrie (Sissy Spacek), and forcing the child to confess to sins she hasn’t committed. She’s transferring the rejection of her evangelism into rage at a daughter whose budding sexuality she can’t stem. Margaret can’t save her. She’s failed as a parent. Margaret’s humiliation is Carrie’s fault, Carrie who is learning how terrible the world is for young women despite all the precautions Margaret’s taken. Margaret wants to protect Carrie from the rejection and humiliation that she, herself, suffers daily. She’s a terrible mother but what makes her indelible in Carrie is how Laurie makes us believe she has good intentions.

A lot of actors would be up to the task of playing unhinged, but few could also do what Laurie does later when Carrie, fresh from a round of punishments and forced isolation, kisses her mother sweetly on the cheek before bed. Laurie underplays the moment. Her Margaret has no shame for her behavior — why should she? just pleasure over how things have returned to her sense of normal. Laurie underplays it but if you look close, her eyes are glassy and ecstatic. Margaret isn’t sliding up and down an emotional scale, she’s burning at the same temperature whatever her outward expression. When she’s not in the midst of an eruption, she’s still vibrating, maniacally, dangerously in place. I think among Laurie’s peers in the Hollywood of the 1950s, where she got her start as a contract player for Universal, only Ida Lupino had the same quality of dangerous, even explosive potential in stillness. I don’t know that even Lupino could have played Margaret White as something other than a camp caricature, some “psycho-biddy” refugee from a Robert Aldrich exploitation film. As played by Laurie, Margaret’s story has the awful weight of history and melancholy: her story becomes a blueprint for suffering for her daughter, of trauma left to metastasize into madness and of mental illness shunned rather than treated.

Carlito Brigante, portrayed with poignant charisma by Al Pacino, is a character coloured with constraints and contradictions - capturing the essence of a man at odds with his own identity. His journey is fraught with emotional tension, and it serves as an allegory for the human struggle against the shackles of one's own history.

The film's central conflict revolves around Carlito's unwavering desire to escape his criminal ties, juxtaposed with the inescapable lure of the life he once led, inevitably leading to an inexorable showdown with his destiny.

Brian De Palma's signature tracking shots, exquisite cinematography, and meticulous attention to detail create a film that is both visually stunning and emotionally resonant. The seductive aura of 1970s New York City, with its gritty allure and corrupt underbelly, is vividly brought to life through De Palma's lens.

It preserves the essence of a bygone era with meticulous attention to period detail. The film's costume design, soundtrack, and setting pay homage to the turbulent 1970s. The result is an immersive experience that transports the viewer to a world where flamboyant fashion and a pulsating soundtrack merge seamlessly with the gritty narrative.

The supporting characters are equally well-crafted, offering a glimpse into the diverse and often treacherous world of organised crime. Sean Penn's performance as David Kleinfeld, a slimy and unpredictable lawyer, mirrors Carlito's descent while showcasing the destructiveness of hubris. Gail, portrayed by Penelope Ann Miller, serves as a symbol of hope and love, albeit tinged with tragedy.

The film's evocative soundtrack, composed by Patrick Doyle, complements the narrative and heightens the emotional impact of the story. The Spanish guitar melodies and Latin rhythms imbue the film with a distinct fervour, enhancing the authenticity of its setting and characters.

Carlito's Way explores themes of loyalty and betrayal. Carlito's unyielding loyalty to those close to him contrasts against the backdrop of a world marred by treachery and deceit highlighting the moral complexity of the criminal underworld. His misguided trust becomes a tragic catalyst, emphasising the treacherous nature of a pursuit for a second chance.

The interplay of these themes provides an intricate introspection of human relationships - displaying the fragility of trust and the inescapable consequences of deception.

It is a tale of seeking salvation in a world filled with moral ambiguity, where the choices made are fraught with consequences. Carlito's attempt to escape his past is an allegory for the human condition itself—a struggle against the heaviness of one's history.

The film is rife with symbolism, from the religious iconography woven throughout the narrative to the omnipresent visual motif of the escalator, symbolizing Carlito's constant struggle to ascend from his criminal past. Every element of the film has been carefully constructed to imbue the story with a deeper layer of meaning, making it a rich and thought-provoking experience.

One of the key elements that makes Carlito's quest for redemption so intriguing is its ambiguity. Carlito is acutely aware of the consequences of his past actions and sincerely wants to change, but his loyalty to his old associations keeps him tethered to a world he's trying to escape. This tension between his desire to do good and his inability to completely sever ties with his criminal past depicts a universal dilemma – whether true redemption is even possible?

The Sensuous Woman is an unfilmed, loose adaptation by De Palma and comedienne Louise Lasser of Terry Garrity's (under the pseudonym "J") groundbreaking guide to female sexuality from a woman's perspective.

A movie of “The Sensuous Woman” by “J” that won't be rated “X”? Independent producer William L. Snyder thinks he can bring it off.

Snyder has owned the screen rights to the best‐selling sex primer for two years and, although he admits it's been a toughie to translate into film terms, he says he's got it. The screenplay is the work of three writers: Louise Lasser, Brian De Palma and Jeannie Sakol. Since Miss Lasser, the former wife of Woody Allen, is well known as an actress in such Allen films as “Bananas” and “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex,” she will naturally star in “The Sensuous Woman.” And since De Palma has achieved some fame as the director of “Greetings” and “Hi, Mom!,” he will direct.

How are they escaping that damning “X”? Snyder explained that “the script is not the kind of instructional thing the book was but a wry comedy about a married woman with two kids who decides to break away to a freer, more sensuous life style.” She will start breaking away in March in Toronto.