It’s about time that M. Night Shyamalan is hailed as one of cinema’s most influential voices, and now, thanks to Film at Lincoln Center, the iconic auteur’s most classic films will be presented in conversation with the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Rob Reiner, Jordan Peele, Luis Buñuel, Sidney Lumet, and more.
IndieWire can announce that double feature festival “Night at the Movies: An M. Night Shyamalan Retrospective” will take place at Film at Lincoln Center from August 22 to September 4. The two-week series will celebrate 12 Shyamalan features presented in 2-for-1 double bills with films of his own choosing. The pairings span cult horror to studio thrillers, with many films screened on 35mm. Shyamalan will be in person for Q&As following select screenings.
“For many in my generation, ‘The Sixth Sense’ wasn’t just our introduction to the name M. Night Shyamalan, it was our introduction to the idea that a mainstream American film could bear the unmistakable imprint of a singular, surprising voice,” Tyler Wilson, Senior Programmer at Film at Lincoln Center, said. “In the years since, he has remained exactly that kind of filmmaker: One who smuggles bold, personal, often funny, sometimes deeply spiritual ideas into popular genres, while constantly rethinking how those very forms should look, move, and feel. It’s truly a thrill and honor to present this double-feature twist on his retrospective, with the man himself, at Film at Lincoln Center.”
Shyamalan’s inspirations, ranging from “The Blob” to “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Shadow of a Doubt,” “Cape Fear,” and “Pulp Fiction,” will screen. As FLC states, Shyamalan not only redefined modern horror but also what it means to be considered a B-movie in the 21st century.
“Night at the Movies: An M. Night Shyamalan Retrospective” is organized by FLC programmer Wilson in collaboration with Shyamalan. Tickets will go on sale on Wednesday, July 30 at 2pm, with an early access period for FLC Members starting on Wednesday, July 30 at noon. The 2-for-1 double feature tickets are $17; $14 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $12 for FLC Members, and include both films in each thematic pairing.
Check out the full program, with language provided by Film at Lincoln Center, below.
Seeing Things: The Sixth Sense + The Haunting
A boy in Philadelphia sees the dead. A woman in New England witnesses a house come alive. Mood and mystery take precedence over gore in these classically composed ghost stories made decades apart.
“The Sixth Sense“
M. Night Shyamalan, 1999, U.S., 35mm, 107m
A withdrawn boy (Haley Joel Osment) confides in a child psychologist (Bruce Willis) that he sees the dead… but what begins as a supernatural mystery slowly unravels into a devastating domestic drama no one was prepared for in 1999. The Sixth Sense landed in theaters like an intervention amid Hollywood’s wave of rapid-fire editing and high-concept fatigue. Formally elegant, emotionally restrained, and uncommonly vivid, M. Night Shyamalan’s patient, classically composed ghost story drew its power from the historic locales of his native Philadelphia and performances of rare sensitivity. Osment’s Cole remains one of the greatest child roles in film, and his chemistry with Willis and Toni Collette forms a deeply believable emotional core in a genre that often sidelined nuance. Built on hushed conversations and punctuated by a few sharply timed shocks, the film remains, more than 25 years later, not just terrifically scary, but genuinely moving.
Followed by:
“The Haunting“
Robert Wise, 1963, U.S./U.K., 35mm, 112m
Robert Wise’s suggestive adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House follows Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson), a paranormal anthropologist who invites two women—lonely, high-strung Eleanor (Julie Harris) and the coolly perceptive Theodora (Claire Bloom)—along with a skeptical heir (Russ Tamblyn) to investigate a sinister New England manor. Overstuffed interiors of ornate carvings, patterned wallpaper, mirrors, and Victorian bric-a-brac are warped into something deliriously menacing (and breathing…) through DP Davis Boulton’s chiaroscuro palette and the distortive reach of an ultra-wide anamorphic lens, which captured spatial fields previously unseen in cinema. A master class in atmosphere, and an experiment in pulling the horror out of architecture.
Friday, August 22 at 1:00pm (The Sixth Sense) + 3:15pm (The Haunting)
Monday, August 25 at 6:30pm (The Sixth Sense) + 8:45pm (The Haunting)
Friday, August 29 at 6:45pm (The Sixth Sense) + 9:00pm (The Haunting)
Divine Intervention: Unbreakable + Pulp Fiction
Shyamalan conjures a somber fable from the superhero origin story, while Tarantino spins a nonlinear, self-aware noir from dime-store pulp. Starring Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson in both.
“Unbreakable“
M. Night Shyamalan, 2000, U.S., 35mm, 106m
M. Night Shyamalan’s post-Sixth Sense follow-up (what Quentin Tarantino called “a brilliant retelling of the Superman mythology”) deconstructed the superhero film long before its modern blueprint became ubiquitous. Just outside a quiet Philadelphia suburb, a security guard (Bruce Willis) walks away from a catastrophic train crash without a scratch, which draws the obsessive interest of an enigmatic, flamboyantly disgruntled comic book dealer (Samuel L. Jackson). Framed in stark, panel-like compositions and told with eerie restraint, Unbreakable is a “cape opera” stripped of spectacle that treated questions of faith and identity with unsettling seriousness. In hindsight, one of its most fascinating legacies is how it morphed from a self-contained mystery into the first chapter of a stealth trilogy completed nearly two decades later (see Split and Glass).
Followed by:
“Pulp Fiction“
Quentin Tarantino, 1994, U.S., 35mm, 154m
Few films of the ’90s unfolded with the singular irreverence of Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino’s electrifying, Palme d’Or–winning reinvention of the pulp crime anthology. Anchored by John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson as a pair of philosophical hit men, and Bruce Willis as a washed-up boxer on the run from death (or worse), the film pulses with comic-book legibility and pop-art swagger. Every composition, cut, and needle drop is reverently ripped off yet meticulously dialed in and totally original. Not unlike Unbreakable, which would follow six years later, Pulp Fictiontakes familiar genre material and reimagines it through a stylized, modern lens: Tarantino building a nonlinear, self-aware noir from the dog-eared pages of dimestore paperbacks, just as Shyamalan conjures a somber fable from the superhero origin story. An NYFF32 selection.
Saturday, August 23 at 12:30pm (Unbreakable) + 2:45pm (Pulp Fiction)
Wednesday, August 27 at 1:00pm (Unbreakable) + 3:15pm (Pulp Fiction)
Sunday, August 31 at 5:30pm (Unbreakable) + 8:45pm (Pulp Fiction) – Q&A with M. Night Shyamalan after first film
Out There: Signs + Night of the Living Dead
Two farmhouse-set doomsday thrillers unfold in rural Pennsylvania: one cosmic, one flesh-eating.
“Signs“
M. Night Shyamalan, 2001, U.S., 106m
With Signs, M. Night Shyamalan reworked the alien invasion film to explore something much more unnervingly intimate: a test of faith disguised as the apocalypse. Set almost entirely on a Pennsylvania farm, the story follows a grieving former priest (Mel Gibson), his brother (Joaquin Phoenix), and two children (Abigail Breslin, Rory Culkin) as they confront a series of increasingly uncanny disturbances in their cornfields. A masterful use of sound design, off-screen space, and measured, old-school compositions add up to a quietly suspenseful domestic drama about extraterrestrial (divine?) interventions, grief, and the desire to find meaning amid real-world chaos. For many, this was the film that crystallized Shyamalan’s style as something patient, precise, emotionally sincere, and attuned to the spiritual hidden within the everyday.
Followed by:
“Night of the Living Dead“
George Romero, 1968, U.S., 35mm, 96m
Duane Jones brings quiet authority to his role as a man barricaded in a farmhouse during a flesh-eating outbreak, besieged not only by the undead closing in but by infighting survivors and collapsing institutions. George A. Romero’s trailblazing debut didn’t just define the modern concept of zombies—it fundamentally reshaped the language of horror and seeded a cultural mythology so deeply that it’s easy to forget where it began. Shot on grainy black-and-white film with hand-built sets and improvised intensity (on both sides of the camera), Night of the Living Dead conjured a raw, near-documentary vision of social collapse that struck the perfect, nihilistic nerve in late-’60s America. A stripped-down siege movie driven as much by the monsters outside as by the slow disintegration of civility from within.
New 35mm print struck from the 2016 4K digital restoration by MoMA and The Film Foundation, taken from the original camera negative and overseen by George A. Romero. Print courtesy of Image Ten.
Sunday, August 24 at 1:30pm (Signs) + 3:45pm (Night of the Living Dead)
Saturday, August 30 at 6:30pm (Signs) + 8:45pm (Night of the Living Dead)
Creature Comforts: The Village + Planet of the Apes
Cloistered societies—an isolated hamlet in the woods, and an ape-controlled planet—unravel when one outsider crosses a line in this double-header of belief-shattering allegories.
“The Village“
M. Night Shyamalan, 2003, U.S., 35mm, 106m
Set in an isolated hamlet bordered by forbidding woods, M. Night Shyamalan’s arch 19th-century fable follows a blind young woman (Bryce Dallas Howard) who must decide whether to cross her community’s strict boundaries to save a gravely wounded man (Joaquin Phoenix). Beneath its period artifice, The Village plays like a post-9/11 analogy refracted through the American Gothic tradition—evoking Brockden Brown, Hawthorne, and Irving alongside Bush-era politics in its portrait of invented monsters, fear-inducing color codes, and the high cost of fabricated innocence, secrecy, and self-containment. The result is a melancholic thriller whose emotional directness is matched by its symbolic precision, with every element working in concert: Roger Deakins’s painterly cinematography, James Newton Howard’s haunting score, and a wholly committed ensemble including Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt, and Adrien Brody.
Followed by:
“Planet of the Apes“
Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968, U.S., 35mm, 112m
Charlton Heston stars in this landmark of late-’60s foreboding sci-fi as Taylor, an astronaut who crash-lands on a distant planet ruled by intelligent apes and governed by rigid hierarchies and religious dogma. Mute, primitive humans are used for sport and experimentation until Taylor’s arrival throws their society into chaos. With a screenplay by Rod Serling and Michael Wilson, Planet of the Apes imagines a civilization where fear, mythology, and suppression preserve order, and where its final revelation shatters not just the plot, but the foundations of belief itself. On-the-nose metaphors be damned: to this day it’s a chilling, venturesome meditation on human cruelty, made uncannily real by John Chambers’s groundbreaking ape makeup that rendered the impossible viscerally relatable.
Friday, August 22 at 6:00pm (The Village) + 9:00pm (Planet of the Apes) – Q&A with M. Night Shyamalan after first film
Thursday, September 4 at 1:45pm (The Village) + 4:00pm (Planet of the Apes)
Bedtime Stories: Lady in the Water + The Princess Bride
Fairy-tale logic becomes a shared language of hope, transformation, and connection in these reimagined bedtime stories about oddball communities finding their purpose.
“Lady in the Water“
M. Night Shyamalan, 2006, U.S., 35mm, 110m
Initially conceived as a bedtime story for his daughters, Lady in the Water marked M. Night Shyamalan’s most personal work to date—an unconventional passion project smuggled into a major studio movie that relocated the fairy tale from a distant kingdom to a modest Philadelphia apartment complex. When a withdrawn superintendent (Paul Giamatti) discovers a mysterious young woman (Bryce Dallas Howard) in the building’s pool, he and his neighbors gradually come to understand they are characters in a myth still unfolding. Shot by Christopher Doyle (In the Mood for Love) in soft, muted pastels that tether the fantastic to the mundane, the film blends mythology, absurdity, horror, and self-parody in unexpected rhythms. Shyamalan cast himself (not in a cameo, but in a central role) as a struggling writer destined to shape the future, cementing himself as a filmmaker unafraid to put his distinctive, sincere vision on screen, even at the expense of convention or commercial safety.
Followed by:
“The Princess Bride“
Rob Reiner, 1987, U.S., 35mm, 98m
Crossing swordplay and irreverent satire with unabashed sincerity, Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride delights equally in its own construction and its belief in happily-ever-afters. Adapted by William Goldman from his own novel, the film moves breezily between comedy and adventure as a humble farmboy-turned-swashbuckler (Cary Elwes) faces giants, torture chambers, and a six-fingered nemesis to rescue his true love (Robin Wright). From the outset, it’s a story about storytelling that gathers a band of oddball characters for a collective quest and treats fairy-tale logic as a shared language for hope, transformation, and connection. Featuring Mandy Patinkin, Wallace Shawn, André the Giant, Billy Crystal, and more. “Anybody want a peanut?”
Monday, August 25 at 2:00pm (Lady in the Water) + 4:15pm (The Princess Bride)
Monday, September 1 at 6:00pm (Lady in the Water) + 9:00pm (The Princess Bride) – Q&A with M. Night Shyamalan after first film
Beware!: The Happening + The Blob
A deliberate, R-rated throwback to midcentury B-movie horror meets the classic, all-ages creature feature from the early atomic age.
“The Happening“
M. Night Shyamalan, 2008, U.S., 35mm, 91m
M. Night Shyamalan’s singular eco-thriller is a deliberate throwback to midcentury B-movie horror that blends a cautionary tale of nature’s wrath with the campy genre thrills of the early atomic age. The story follows a married couple—an anxious high school science teacher (Mark Wahlberg) and his wide-eyed, soft-spoken wife (Zooey Deschanel)—as they flee a mysterious environmental event that triggers mass suicides across the Northeast. Casting stars against type and calibrating their performances to the stiff, sincere rhythms of vintage sci-fi, Shyamalan channeled panic through everything we associate with innocence and serenity: sunlit stillness, rustling trees, and the air itself. At once absurd and unsettling, The Happening is a daring tonal experiment about humanity’s gentle extinction.
Followed by:
“The Blob“
Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr., 1958, U.S., 35mm, 82m
Shot in Deluxe color 35mm on location in small-town Pennsylvania, this late-’50s sci-fi oddity turned a scoop of silicone gel into one of cinema’s most memorable monsters. A gelatinous, flesh-consuming alien crashes to Earth, and two teenagers—Steve McQueen (in his first starring role) and Aneta Corsaut—must convince their disbelieving elders that something terrible is spreading through town. With its eerily formless threat, catchy theme song, wholesome teen heroes, and ingeniously practical ooze effects (a dazzling mix of in-camera and optical printing), The Blob straddles atomic-era paranoia and gooey creature-feature fun. Clearly a sly tonal predecessor to the airborne, amorphous terror at the heart of The Happening. Rights courtesy of Worldwide Entertainment Corporation.
Tuesday, August 26 at 6:30pm (The Happening) + 8:30pm (The Blob)
Saturday, August 30 at 2:30pm (The Happening) + 4:30pm (The Blob)
Welcome Home: The Visit + Get Out
The domestic space is twisted into something uncanny, and terror emerges from those who insist they mean well, in a found-footage comeback and a genre-defining debut.
“The Visit“
M. Night Shyamalan, 2015, U.S., 94m
M. Night Shyamalan’s self-financed, low-budget return to independent genre filmmaking doubled as both a reinvention and a formal pivot. Constructed as a documentary shot by two teen siblings visiting their estranged grandparents, The Visit refracts suspense and comedy through a child’s-eye perspective, deviously blurring the boundary between home video and Grimm fairy tale. Shyamalan maintains tightrope control over the film’s deliberately unsteady tone, veering between slapstick shock and genuine terror, while probing the emotional residue of abandonment and the deep-rooted discomfort children feel around aging relatives who suddenly seem like strangers… and maybe they are?
Followed by:
“Get Out“
Jordan Peele, 2017, U.S., 104m, 35mm
When Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young Black photographer from New York, accompanies his white girlfriend (Allison Williams) to her family’s upstate estate, the casual racism and falsely smiling social privilege that imbues her parents’ white suburbia turns from mildly suffocating to downright sinister as the weekend wears on, leading Chris to uncover an unimaginable dark secret about the community. In its elucidation of “The Sunken Place,” Get Out becomes a horror allegory that, like The Visit, twists the American domestic space into something uncanny, and finds terror in being trapped with those who insist they mean well. 35mm print courtesy of Jordan Peele’s personal collection.
Tuesday, August 26 at 2:15pm (The Visit) + 4:15pm (Get Out)
Thursday, September 4 at 6:30pm (The Visit) + 8:30pm (Get Out)
Alter Ego: Split + Cape Fear
Charismatic predators take center stage in this pair of thrillers that boldly twist genre tropes and cinematic universes.
“Split“
M. Night Shyamalan, 2016, U.S., 117m
M. Night Shyamalan made his boldest creative swerve in years with this unnervingly controlled blend of psychological thriller, gallows humor, and pulp horror. Three teenage girls are abducted by Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), a man with dissociative identity disorder whose “Horde” of 23 personalities—including the superhuman Beast—begin to surface. As one captive (Anya Taylor-Joy) plots escape, Kevin’s psychiatrist (Betty Buckley) struggles to understand the danger gathering beneath his fractured mind. What could have played as pure exploitation is elevated by tight pacing, Hitchcockian craft, and McAvoy’s explosively virtuosic performance(s) to channel thorny ideas about trauma and fractured identity. A box-office hit and critical turning point for Shyamalan, Split is both a sly callback to Unbreakable and a bold reframe that “twists” the cinematic universe concept with the director’s characteristic sleight of hand.
Followed by:
“Cape Fear“
Martin Scorsese, 1991, U.S., 35mm, 128m
Martin Scorsese’s feverish remake of the 1962 thriller reimagines a pulp tale of vengeance as a heightened psychological opera of guilt, class, and moral ambiguity. Robert De Niro is ferociously theatrical as Max Cady, a tattooed ex-convict and self-styled Biblical avenger who returns to torment the lawyer Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte) who once buried evidence that might have acquitted him. As Cady methodically dismantles the family’s sense of security, Scorsese leans into Hitchcockian stylization and noir expressionism—storm-lashed skies, unhinged camera angles, and a vicious sense of humor. Closing out this double bill of charismatic predators shaped by deep-seated horrors, Cape Fear probes, with unrelenting energy, the uneasy space between justice and revenge, protector and threat. Its own sly twist casts Robert Mitchum—the original Cady—as the elderly, honorable police lieutenant Elgart, and Gregory Peck, 1962’s Bowden, as Cady’s defense attorney.
Saturday, August 23 at 6:00pm (Split) + 9:00pm (Cape Fear) – Q&A with M. Night Shyamalan after first film
Thursday, August 28 at 1:00pm (Split) + 3:30pm (Cape Fear)
Whack Jobs: Glass + One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Institutional spaces become battlegrounds of belief in these chamber dramas where power, perception, and dissent are pathologized.
“Glass“
M. Night Shyamalan, 2019, U.S., 129m
M. Night Shyamalan’s close to the Eastrail 177 trilogy is a defiantly low-key chamber thriller set almost entirely within the confines of a psychiatric facility. David Dunn (Bruce Willis), Unbreakable’s quiet vigilante; Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), whose “split” personas make up the Horde; and Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), the brittle-boned mastermind known as Mr. Glass, come under the watch of a state-appointed psychiatrist (Sarah Paulson) who insists their powers are delusional. What follows isn’t a clash of titans but a tightly wound psychological standoff over belief, perception, and control. Premiering just months before Avengers: Endgame, Glass deliberately countered the genre’s maximalism with practical effects, in-camera stunts, and formal restraint. The result is a tragic finale that doubles as a meditation on authorship in an era of endless franchises, and the cost of surrendering personal vision.
Followed by:
“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest“
Miloš Forman, 1975, U.S., 135m, New 4K Restoration
Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest remains one of the defining works of New Hollywood cinema, a fiercely acted and unsparingly observed chamber drama set within a psych ward. Jack Nicholson’s McMurphy, a swaggering trickster figure, clashes with the institution’s quiet tyrant, Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), in a battle not just of wills, but of worldviews: chaos versus order, freedom versus conformity. Forman’s film transforms its clinical setting into a crucible of psychological warfare, where belief, identity, and dissent are pathologized. With a devastating final turn and an unforgettable supporting cast (Danny DeVito, Brad Dourif, Christopher Lloyd), it’s a tragic portrait of resistance in the face of institutional control.
Friday, August 29 at 1:30pm (Glass) + 4:00pm (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest)
Wednesday, September 3 at 6:00pm (Glass) + 8:30pm (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest)
Paradise Lost: Old + The Exterminating Angel
Time is both hyper-accelerated and eerily suspended as civility crumbles for two groups trapped in “paradise.”
“Old“
M. Night Shyamalan, 2021, U.S., 108m
A family of four (Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Alex Wolff, and Thomasin McKenzie) joins a group of strangers on a remote, Edenic beach where time accelerates rapidly, aging them decades in a single day. M. Night Shyamalan turns this Twilight Zone-inflected premise (loosely adapted from the graphic novel Sandcastle) into a parable of mortality, medical anxiety, and the quiet terror of nature outrunning our comprehension. Shot on sun-bleached 35mm by Mike Gioulakis, the film uses elliptical editing, wide lenses, and subtle “Texan switch” sleights to convey the film’s uncanny sense of duration without overt visual effects. Released in the summer of 2021, Old resonated with a world still reeling from pandemic stress—a strange, prescient fable about the ethics of medicine and the disorienting sensation of time being both hyper-accelerated and eerily suspended.
Followed by:
“The Exterminating Angel“
Luis Buñuel, 1962, Mexico, 93m, Spanish with English subtitles
Luis Buñuel’s surrealist takedown of the frivolous upper class strands a group of elegant dinner guests in a lavish drawing room, and then refuses to let them leave. Post-supper dawdling gives way to claustrophobic inertia as civility unravels and primal instincts rise to the surface. Shot in Mexico with an ensemble led by Silvia Pinal, The Exterminating Angel remains one of Buñuel’s most masterful and incisive social dissections: a darkly funny, increasingly eerie chamber piece where social codes collapse into inexplicable savagery, or is it inexplicable? To this day a lively, biting, macabre comedy that was controversial in its time (and banned in Franco-era Spain for its anti-elite subtext), yet its core themes still resonate with uncanny oracular power.
Thursday, August 28 at 6:15pm (Old) + 8:30pm (The Exterminating Angel)
Wednesday, September 3 at 1:30pm (Old) + 3:45pm (The Exterminating Angel)
Would You Rather: Knock at the Cabin + 12 Angry Men
Would you sacrifice a loved one to save humanity? Would you stand alone against 11 men to save a stranger from death?
“Knock at the Cabin“
M. Night Shyamalan, 2023, U.S., 108m
M. Night Shyamalan’s chambered morality play distills cosmic stakes into an impossible proposition when a young girl and her parents find their remote vacation interrupted by four strangers who calmly insist that one of them must be willingly sacrificed to prevent the apocalypse. Nearly the entire film unfolds within a single cabin, where Shyamalan leans into spatial and formal constraint, staging violence just out of frame and allowing dread to accumulate in the faces of his actors. Dave Bautista gives a quietly mesmerizing performance as Leonard—a hulking figure whose soft-spoken gentleness only heightens the unease—joined by a scruffily unnerving Rupert Grint and wrenching turns from Ben Aldridge and Jonathan Groff as the parents. A loose adaptation of Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World (2018).
Followed by:
“12 Angry Men“
Sidney Lumet, 1957, U.S., 35mm, 96m
Following closing arguments in a capital murder trial, 12 jurors—all men, all strangers—retreat to a sweltering deliberation room to determine the fate of a teenage boy. A guilty verdict means death. Eleven are ready to convict—until one juror (Henry Fonda, also the film’s producer) raises quiet, persistent doubts. As tempers flare and the clock ticks, the group is forced to reckon not just with the facts of the case, but with their own assumptions, biases, and buried grievances. Adapted from Reginald Rose’s teleplay, Sidney Lumet’s blistering debut feature transforms civic duty into a pressure cooker of ideological tension. It remains, nearly 70 years later, a master class in confined-space suspense and superbly performed drama.
Wednesday, August 27 at 6:30pm (Knock at the Cabin) + 8:45pm (12 Angry Men)
Sunday, August 31 at 1:00pm (Knock at the Cabin) + 3:00pm (12 Angry Men)
Role Models: Trap + Shadow of a Doubt
Wolves in wholesome clothing hide in plain sight amid commonplace Americana—one in an arena packed for a pop concert, the other in a small town during WWII.
“Trap“
M. Night Shyamalan, 2024, U.S., 106m
A father (Josh Hartnett) takes his daughter (Ariel Donoghue) to a pop concert, only to realize the venue has been transformed into an elaborate sting operation… and he may not be who we think he is. On its surface, Trap plays as a cat-and-mouse thriller set against the backdrop of a pop musical and compressed within the sealed-off enormity of a stadium flanked by screaming fangirls and the FBI. But beneath the surface of its full-scale live show—featuring original music by M. Night Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka (as fictional star Lady Raven)—lies one of the director’s most taut and formally playful late-style provocations about spectatorship, guilt, plot twists, and the violence pulsing beneath mass entertainment. Everyone is watching someone, but not necessarily seeing the truth—a preoccupation running through Shyamalan’s work, from the misperceptions at the heart of The Sixth Sense and the fear-based surveillance of The Village to the moral tests of Old and Knock at the Cabin.
Followed by:
“Shadow of a Doubt“
Alfred Hitchcock, 1943, U.S., 35mm, 108m
A California town’s quiet is upended when Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) arrives for a visit, and his favorite niece (Teresa Wright), also named Charlie, begins to suspect he’s not the charming gentleman he seems. Allegedly Hitchcock’s personal favorite among his own films, and his first set in an everyday American small town, Shadow of a Doubt subverts the idealized wartime image of the U.S. with a grinning menace. Who but Cotten, shifting with eerie ease from affable guest to something more serpentine, could deliver the film’s infamous dinner-table monologue? A turning point in Hitchcock’s career, the film essentially pioneered the domestic noir, the trope of the serial killer next door, and marked a bold shift toward the intimate, psychologically driven suspense that would define his later masterpieces.
Sunday, August 24 at 6:00pm (Trap) + 8:15pm (Shadow of a Doubt)
Monday, September 1 at 1:15pm (Trap) +3:30pm (Shadow of a Doubt)
