No Other Choice (15)

Friday 6th March, 7pm

Running Time: 2hrs 19mins

Director: Park Chan-wook

Starring: Lee Byung-hun, Son Ye-jin, Park Hee-soon, Lee Sung-min

SOUTH KOREA, 2025

Korean with English subtitles

Man-soo has a loving wife and kids, the beautiful woodland house where he grew up, two exceptional dogs. After 25 years at Solar Paper, he’s given the axe. Desperate to win a new position at Moon Paper, he hatches a diabolical scheme to despatch his rivals. Park Chan-wook (Decision to Leave) transplants 1997 crime thriller by Donald E. Westlake, The Ax, to present-day South Korea. A chilling state-of-the-nation story mocks workplace politics and cutthroat status-seeking, mixing wickedly absurd set pieces with a poignant sense of the true awfulness of it all.

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Resurrection (15)

Saturday 7th March, 7pm

Running Time: 2hrs 36mins

Director: Bi Gan

Starring: Jackson Yee, Shu Qi

CHINA/FRANCE, 2025

Chinese with English subtitles

Virtuoso Chinese director Bi Gan (Long Day’s Journey Into Night) returns with a film that heralds the death of cinema while magnificently celebrating it.

Spanning a century, Resurrection divides into six chapters, each taking place in a specific cinematic era and genre, from actualities, through expressionism and noir to the vampire film. In the future, humans have attained immortality – as long as they don’t dream. The dissident or Deliriant (Jackson Yee) shape shifts as he time-travels through an odyssey that keeps pace with Chinese history. Unlike anything else, this striking ode to the power of cinema has sequences that are absolutely breathtaking. It cries out for the big screen; sit back and dare to dream deliriously.

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Nouvelle Vague (12A)

Sunday 8th March, 4.30pm

Running Time: 1hr 46mins

Director: Richard Linklater

Starring: Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch, Aubry Dullin

FRANCE/US, 2025

French, English, Italian with subtitles

Richard Linklater reimagines the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle in a playful, poignant love letter to cinema.

At the dawn of his career, Godard directs Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo as star-crossed lovers, filming with unorthodox spontaneity on the streets of Paris. Working alongside other key players, friends and creative collaborators like Francois Truffaut– who’s shooting Les quatre cents coups – Claude Chabrol, Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Pierre Melville and Jacques Rivette, the pressure to produce a masterpiece is impossible to escape. Beautifully shot in monochrome, this is a homage not just to one single film, but to a transformative period of youthful rebellion and creative tumult that shaped the French New Wave.

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The Last Viking (15)

Friday 13^th March, 7pm

Running Time: 1hr 56mins

Director: Anders Thomas Jensen

Starring: Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Sofie Gråbøl

DENMARK/SWEDEN, 2025

Danish/Swedish with English subtitles

Hidden loot, a deadpan comic turn from Mads Mikkelsen, a creepy house in the woods and some oddball characters come together in this black Danish crime comedy.

Released from a 15-year jail sentence, bank robber Anker must unlock his traumatised brother’s memory in order to recover the spoils from his big heist. The trouble is that Manfred (Mikkelsen with a very bad perm) is suffering from dissociative identity disorder and now thinks he is John Lennon. Known for his blackly comic, absurdly violent tales, director Jensen incorporates flashbacks to the brothers’ difficult childhood, and, throwing in new ingredients at every turn, maintains a fast, furious, often funny pace throughout.

Preview courtesy of Picturehouse Entertainment

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The Stranger (15)

Saturday 14th March, 7pm

Running Time: 2hrs 2mins

Director: François Ozon

Starring: Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder, Pierre Lottin, Swann Arlaud

FRANCE/BELGIUM, 2025

French with English subtitles

Prolific writer-director François Ozon (When Autumn Falls, The Crime is Mine) adapts Albert Camus’ classic existentialist novel.

Algiers, 1938. An unassuming man in his early thirties, Meursault attends his mother’s funeral, at which he does not cry. The next day, he begins a casual affair with Marie and slips back into his daily routine. Then, one blisteringly hot afternoon, an inexplicable, tragic event occurs on a beach; one that will see Meursault’s moral standing brought into question.

Voisin is terrific as the unnervingly disaffected Meursault. Shot in cool black-and-white, the film brings a contemporary slant to Camus’ tale of alienation, capturing a charged society – 1930s French-colonised Algeria – on the boil.

Preview courtesy of Curzon Film

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Hen (15)

Sunday 15^th March, 4.30pm

Running Time: 1hr 36mins

Director: György Pálfi

Starring: Yannis Kokiasmenos,  Maria Diakopanayotou, Argyris Pandazaras

GERMANY/GREECE/HUNGARY, 2025

English/Italian with subtitles

A hen’s-eye view of the world reveals the cut-throat nature of existence and puts human flaws into relief in this tragi comic tale from György Pálfi (Hukkle).

An animal protagonist – as with Jerzy Skolimowski’s donkey in EO (shown at Borderlines in 2023) – can take you places where people cannot penetrate. This is a coming-of-age story – but of a chicken.

Surviving battery farming, a fox, traffic, the dangers of a big city, a dog and being made into soup, the hen ends up taking refuge in a crumbling Greek seaside restaurant where a human tragedy is unfolding. A filmmaking tour-de-force with real animals in real locations and a brilliant score, this is something different.

Preview courtesy of Conic

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