Join us for a rare Q&A will Paul Williams, moderated by Jesse Kowalski, Chief Curator, who will speak with Paul Williams alongside clips of his roles in movies, television series, and concerts from the 1960s to today. Film clips include his performances in Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), Phantom of the Paradise (1974), Smokey and the Bandit (1977), The Muppet Movie (1979), and Baby Driver (2017). Williams will also be asked about his guest-starring roles on The Odd Couple (1974), The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteriesand The Brady Bunch Variety Hour (1977), Fantasy Island (1981), Community (2014), and a special appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. In addition, we will show rare clips of the Carpenters, Elvis Presley, the cast of Ishtar (1987), and others singing his memorable songs. The audience is encouraged to take part in the Q&A.

“I’ve always looked to directors over actors for personal style,” says Hagop Kourounian, who operates the popular Instagram account @directorfits, on which he chronicles the fashion highlights of auteurs past and present. Some recent favorites of his include the look Justine Triet wore while accepting the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, “this bulky, double-breasted blazer, and hardly any makeup except for red lipstick. She just looked really elegant, I thought.” And at the Telluride Film Festival, “Wim Wenders had this insane goth ninja look, with this big black fedora on.” Wenders, Kourounian has found, often breaks out pieces like the Adidas Y-3 Qasa, “which is a shoe that was popular maybe eight or nine years ago. It’s kind of weird to see it back now. I’m sure he just pulled it out of a closet somewhere.”

That’s one of the exciting things about following directors’ style: They don’t necessarily opt for the most on-trend, au courant piece. They’re shopping their closets, and their archives run deep. Directors are also dressing for a physical job, so they favor function: for every Sam Raimi in his impeccable suits, you’ll see a Brian De Palma in safari wear, or Tony Scott in a fishing vest crammed with filmmaking gear. (“That vest was originally designed for [storing] bait and tackle. Now, it’s being used in a totally different work setting, but it still is purposeful,” says Kourounian. “That’s a thing of beauty, in my opinion.”)

The account has also tracked the way some directors go method with their on-set fashion, like Stanley Kubrick wearing a Vietnam-era army jacket for Full Metal Jacket. Greta Gerwig favors boiler suits, directing Barbie in the garment, including a bubblegum-pink version from Pistola. For the prom scene in Lady Bird, she wore a prom dress, just like the cast members. “She said she was trying to do a little bit of cosplay to get her actors in the spirit,” Kourounian explains. “She was one of them in that moment.”

The inspiration goes both ways, with directors’ aesthetics spilling over into their characters’ wardrobes at times. Kourounian notes that Bill Murray’s character in The Royal Tenenbaums “is dressed identically to Wes Anderson in that era, down to the John Lennon-style circular glasses,” and that even the animated Fantastic Mr. Fox features a main character in one of Anderson’s signature suits. Sofia Coppola falls into this category, too: “There’s this amazing photo of her and Rashida Jones on the set of On the Rocks: both of them are wearing the same identical green work pants, and they’re hiked up in the same way.”

The visual precision directors bring to every part of their onscreen work is often reflected in their wardrobes as well. “Directors, especially auteurs, are such creative, world-building people who have all-encompassing visions. There’s no way what they’re wearing wasn’t premeditated and meticulously thought-out.” Paul Schrader is a frequently featured fit god on the account. “It’s not like he’s just wearing something just to wear it, or because it’s popular. It’s almost like a costume designer trying to build an outfit for a character. You can understand a lot about who he is through this very buttoned-up uniform he puts on.”

Asked about the directors he thinks are slept-on style-wise, Kourounian cites De Palma, whose aesthetic feels inspired by a previous generation of filmmakers, “like a John Ford, John Huston kind of vibe. I guess even your favorite director has a favorite director.” A more obscure style icon is sexploitation auteur Doris Wishman, who sports what he calls “these very chic, Old Hollywood-ish looks.”

Hi, Mom! (1970), was De Palma’s fourth feature, yet I’d argue it was the first to showcase his shrewd ambivalence toward the construction of politically and culturally charged iconography. Not least among these images is the recognizable visage of the film’s then relatively unknown star: Robert DeNiro.

Hi, Mom! was the third collaboration between filmmaker and actor (17 years would elapse before they reunited for the comparatively slicker prestige picture The Untouchables [1987]). Indeed, De Palma was the first American to direct DeNiro in a movie after two uncredited cameos in a pair of French auteur Marcel Carne’s films. Their second feature (the first to receive a theatrical release), was Greetings (1968), a hangout movie akin to a sleazier version of Fellini’s I Vitelloni (1953), where three friends listlessly wander New York City avoiding conscription into the Vietnam War. This film marked the first appearance of DeNiro’s character Jon Rubin, who he’d reprise in Hi, Mom!. In the earlier film, he works in a bookstore and goads an attractive customer into shooting a short film whose voyeuristic perversion is hardly elided. By the film’s end, we see Rubin tromping through Vietnam, confronting a suspected female Vietcong fighter, and ordering her to remove her clothes in front of a war correspondent’s cameraman.

While too lackadaisical for its own good, Greetings does pack a bitter punch in not only linking popular media with patriarchal imperialism but also ruthlessly identifying how such an ideological incursion is made possible by performativity. Rubin’s sharp commands are those of a soldier and film director, both roles the man can mimic without a shred of conviction beyond his own narcissism. De Niro’s chameleonic assumption of archetypes as armor makes him the protean De Palma protagonist in a corpus riddled with men (and in some cases, women) whose external appearances, and their social roles by proxy, are transformed by choice or force vis-à-vis media apparatuses.

De Palma wisely elevated Rubin to a leading role for the sequel, and Hi, Mom! thrives from De Niro’s deeper entrenchment into performativity, commensurate with the film’s sociopolitical ferocity. Back in the United States, Rubin has settled in a dilapidated apartment whose major draw is the view it provides into apartment windows across the street. He hatches a prurient scheme to initially film his neighbors before opting to woo one of them (Jennifer Salt) into unknowingly participating in a sex reel that he’ll sell to a porno producer (the reliably unsavory Allen Garfield, reprising his part in Greetings).

Rubin’s moral repugnancy is made queasier by DeNiro’s impish buffoonery. The scant pleasure afforded by watching his machinations fall apart is offset by how De Palma foregrounds this anti-hero’s perspective, right from the opening POV tracking shots of Rubin interacting with his apartment’s cantankerous landlord (another character actor giant, Charles Durning). I’d contend Rubin isn’t a surrogate for the audience but for De Palma, who weaponizes his repressed scopophilia into self-incrimination. Yet DeNiro’s presence contrasts with other De Palma-esque cuckolds and patsies, partially due to the foresight of the former’s cinematic legacy. Watching him play a bespectacled “nice guy” over dinner with his neighbor and prey, it’s impossible to neglect other predatory De Niro characters in his work with Martin Scorsese, up to his most recent turn in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) as the avuncular capitalist casually overseeing the systemic slaughter of the Osage community.

There’s a reflexive quality to De Niro’s performances in the Scorsese and De Palma pictures, which is largely lacking in his mostly execrable output in the new millennium. It’s telling, for example, that the most quoted line of De Niro’s career has been spoofed so often that revisiting Travis Bickle’s ad-libbed monologue is genuinely frightening. In an age where the Internet has enabled incels to indulge and promote their misogynist narcissism, Bickle’s corrosive form of self-actualization is only six degrees of separation from Rupert Pupkin. Jon Rubin prefigures those troubled men as a uniquely disquieting fusion of clown and terrorist.

That latter title is horrifically realized after Rubin takes the part of a cop in a radical activist group’s interactive theatrical production, Be Black, Baby!. The kernel of Rubin’s creative process we glean is his rehearsing in front of a mop before he disappears from the film for a surprisingly lengthy period. Meanwhile, we’re thrust into a performance of the play that immerses and subjects its affluent, white audience to mounting shows of degradation and violence. Filmed on a handheld Arriflex, the Be Black, Baby! segment of Hi, Mom! has been justly praised as one of De Palma’s supreme accomplishments for its visceral (and provocatively political) intertwining of reality with artifice. When Rubin reappears, he viciously beats the patrons painted in blackface, his presence an affirmation of systemic brutality turned against its beneficiaries.

The vicious irony of the piece is subsequently lost on the audience as they exit the warehouse, showering the violable pyrotechnics with bourgeois kudos. It isn’t a stretch to link this disengagement with a depoliticized view of a medium subsumed within a label of “content.” De Niro and De Palma realize a precarious dynamic of separating the real from the fictive through to the film’s climax, where Rubin assumes a dual identity as a middle-class husband and covert operative for the organization. The motivation of his final, destructive act bleakly ties into the film’s title, but this salutary punchline is amplified by how its deliverer modifies his message to the medium. It’s a prophetic vision of myopic image-making that anticipates the echo chambers of social media, where everyone can be a star if they know how and when to wield a camera. Who would think that, at the ground zero of our nightmarish cultural present, we’d find standing there Brian De Palma and Robert De Niro?

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.