The Pageant Theatre

ROADMAP TO APARTHEID

Eron Davidson, Ana Nogueira

  • 94 minutes
  • 2014
  • English
  • March 21

    Free screening with post film discussion. Presented by Chico Palestinian Advocacy Network and Chico Jews in Solidarity with Palestine

    With a comparison between apartheid South Africa and the Israel/Palestine conflict, this documentary traces the future of one conflict from the past of another. Weaving the history of apartheid into the complex issues facing Israelis and Palestinians, it highlights the frighteningly similar laws and tools used by Israel and apartheid-era South Africa. It's a dark picture of the present but offers hope based on the peace that South Africa eventually found. Narrated by Alice Walker

    Thursday March 21 --- 6pm

    PLEASE NOTE: FILMS BEGIN AT POSTED SHOWTIMES

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK

Peter Weir

  • 107 minutes
  • 1975
  • English
  • March 22 - 24

    This sensual and striking chronicle of a disappearance and its aftermath put director Peter Weir on the map and helped usher in a new era of Australian cinema. Based on an acclaimed 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK is set at the turn of the twentieth century and concerns a small group of students from an all-female college who vanish, along with a chaperone, while on a St. Valentine’s Day outing. Less a mystery than a journey into the mystic, as well as an inquiry into issues of class and sexual repression in Australian society, Weir’s gorgeous, disquieting film is a work of poetic horror whose secrets haunt viewers to this day.

    Friday March 22 --- 4:30pm

    Saturday March 23 --- 7pm

    Sunday March 24 --- 4:30pm

    PLEASE NOTE: FILMS BEGIN AT POSTED SHOWTIMES

THE ROARING TWENTIES

Raoul Walsh

  • 106 minutes
  • 1939
  • English
  • March 22 - 24

    Ripped from the headlines of the turbulent era between the Great War and the Great Depression, this dynamic, nostalgia-tinged crime drama balances tommy-gun action with epic historical sweep. Legends James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart star as army buddies whose fortunes rise and fall as their fates intersect, first in a foxhole on the front lines of World War I, then in Manhattan’s Prohibition-era underworld. Directed by Hollywood master Raoul Walsh, and based on a story by prolific journalist turned screenwriter and producer Mark Hellinger, THE ROARING TWENTIES brought to a close the celebrated Warner Bros. gangster cycle of the 1930s, and it remains one of the greatest and most influential crime films of all time.

    Friday March 22 --- 7pm

    Saturday March 23 --- 4:30pm

    Sunday March 24 --- 2pm

    PLEASE NOTE: FILMS BEGIN AT POSTED SHOWTIMES

THE PEASANTS

DK Welchman, Hugh Welchman

  • 114 minutes
  • 2023
  • Polish with English subtitles
  • March 24

    Special Event Screening! One Night Only!

    Based on the Nobel Prize winning novel, THE PEASANTS tells the story of Jagna, a young woman determined to forge her own path within the confines of a late 19th century Polish village – a hotbed of gossip and on-going feuds, held together, rich and poor, by pride in their land, adherence to colourful traditions and deep-rooted patriarchy. When Jagna finds herself caught between the conflicting desires of the village’s richest farmer, his eldest son, and other leading men of the community, her resistance puts her on a tragic collision course with the community around her. From the Academy Award nominated filmmakers behind LOVING VINCENT and brought to life by over 100 oil painters, THE PEASANTS is an extraordinarily gorgeous accomplishment.

    Sunday March 24 --- 7pm

    PLEASE NOTE: FILMS BEGIN AT POSTED SHOWTIMES

VERONIKA VOSS

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

  • 104 minutes
  • 1982
  • German with English subtitles
  • March 29 - 31

    A once-beloved Third Reich–era starlet, Veronika Voss (Rosel Zech) lives in obscurity in postwar Munich. Struggling for survival and haunted by past glories, she encounters sportswriter Robert Krohn (Hilmar Thate) in a rain-swept park and intrigues him with her mysterious beauty. As their unlikely relationship develops, Robert comes to discover the dark secrets that brought about the decline of Veronika’s career. Based on the true story of a World War II Ufa star, filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s penultimate film of his legendary career, VERONIKA VOSS is wicked satire disguised as a 1950s melodrama.

    Friday March 29 --- 7pm

    Saturday March 30 --- 5:30pm

    Sunday March 31 --- 1:45pm

    PLEASE NOTE: FILMS BEGIN AT POSTED SHOWTIMES

BLADE RUNNER: Final Cut

Ridley Scott

  • 117 minutes
  • 1982
  • English
  • March 29 - 31

    Visually spectacular, intensely action-packed and powerfully prophetic, Ridley Scott’s definitive Final Cut of his sci-fi classic BLADE RUNNER is one of the most influential and achingly beautiful films of all time. A dazzling fusion of retro-noir and futuristic paranoia, the film is set in a decaying Los Angeles and follows a government-sanctioned killer (Harrison Ford) as he hunts down Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) and his rogue band of genetically engineered replicants and is drawn to a mystery woman whose secrets may undermine his soul. Based on Phillip K Dick’s cult novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

    Friday March 29 --- 4:15pm

    Saturday March 30 --- 8pm

    Sunday March 31 --- 4:15pm

    PLEASE NOTE: FILMS BEGIN AT POSTED SHOWTIMES

THEY SHOT THE PIANO PLAYER

Fernando Trueba, Javier Mariscal

  • 103 minutes
  • 2023
  • English
  • March 31

    Special Event Screening! One Night Only!

    A New York music journalist (voiced by Jeff Goldblum) goes on a quest to uncover the truth behind the mysterious disappearance of young Brazilian piano virtuoso Tenorio Jr. A celebratory origin story of the world-renowned Latino musical movement Bossa Nova, THEY SHOT THE PIANO PLAYER captures a fleeting time bursting with creative freedom at a turning point in Latin American history in the 60s and 70s, just before the continent was engulfed by totalitarian regimes. Animated in visually exuberant playful riot of colors, THEY SHOT THE PIANO PLAYER is a mystery story, history and celebration of a rich musical era, told through the words of some of its leading musicians.

    Sunday March 31 --- 7pm

    PLEASE NOTE: FILMS BEGIN AT POSTED SHOWTIMES

LABELS: Lives Behind the Labels

Chris Smith

  • 40 minutes
  • 2023
  • English
  • April 4

    Special Event All Seats $5

    Recently part of an interactive exhibit at Museum of Northern California Art (MONCA), we present a special viewing of the local documentary by Chris Smith in collaboration with the Labels project. Homelessness has become a present and pressing issue right here in our own community and across the world. Housing costs have outstripped the ability to afford shelter and lives have been shattered by disasters and personal traumas. This thought-provoking film touches on the lives of members of our Chico area community who have or are experiencing homelessness and offers insights that reach across the divide.

    Join us in discussion after the film (film is apx 40 minutes)

    Thursday April 4 --- 6:30pm

    PLEASE NOTE: FILMS BEGIN AT POSTED SHOWTIMES

COME AND SEE

Elem Klimov

  • 142 minutes
  • 1982
  • Russian and German with English subtitles
  • April 5 - 7

    This legendary film from Soviet director Elem Klimov is a senses-shattering plunge into the dehumanizing horrors of war. As Nazi forces encroach on his small village in what is now known as Belarus, teenage Flyora (Alexei Kravchenko, in a searing depiction of anguish) eagerly joins the Soviet resistance. Rather than the adventure and glory he envisioned, what he finds is a waking nightmare of unimaginable carnage and cruelty—rendered with a feverish, otherworldly intensity by Klimov’s subjective camera work and expressionistic sound design. Nearly blocked from being made by Soviet censors, who took seven years to approve its script, COME AND SEE is perhaps the most visceral, impossible-to-forget antiwar film ever made.

    Friday April 5 --- 4pm

    Saturday April 6 --- 7pm

    Sunday April 7 --- 4pm

    PLEASE NOTE: FILMS BEGIN AT POSTED SHOWTIMES

CAT PEOPLE

Jacques Tourneur

  • 73 minutes
  • 1942
  • English
  • April 5 - 7

    Simone Simon stars as a Serbian émigré in Manhattan who believes that, because of an ancient curse, any physical intimacy with the man she loves (Kent Smith) will turn her into a feline predator. Lewton, a consummate producer-auteur who oversaw every aspect of his projects, found an ideal director in Jacques Tourneur, a chiaroscuro stylist adept at keeping viewers off-kilter with startling compositions and psychological innuendo. Together, they eschewed the canned effects of earlier monster movies in favor of shocking with subtle shadows and creative audio cues. The first of the horror films producer Val Lewton made for RKO Pictures redefined the genre by leaving its most frightening terrors to its audience’s imagination. One of the studio’s most successful movies of the 1940s, CAT PEOPLE raised the creature feature to new heights of sophistication and mystery.

    Friday April 5 --- 7pm

    Saturday April 6 --- 5pm

    Sunday April 7 --- 2pm

    PLEASE NOTE: FILMS BEGIN AT POSTED SHOWTIMES

OPENING DATES ARE NOT GUARANTEED. SOMETIMES CIRCUMSTANCES BEYOND OUR CONTROL MAY CAUSE A RELEASE DATE TO BE REVISED.