Previews

NEBRASKA (15, 115 mins)
Duke Of York’s Picturehouse, Preston Circus, Brighton, Thursday, November 14, 6.30pm

OPENING this year’s festival is the latest from About Schmidt, Sideways and The Descendants director Alexander Payne, who has made a name for himself with his beautifully nuanced small-scale stories.

Bruce Dern stars as a retired curmudgeon living in smalltown America convinced he has won a million dollars, who forces his son to drive him to Lincoln, Nebraska, to collect his prize.

COMPUTER CHESS (15, 92 mins)
Duke Of York’s Picturehouse, Friday, November 15, 9pm

PERHAPS taking inspiration from chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov’s head-to-head with the Deep Blue, Andrew Bujalski’s faux-documentary comedy is set in the computer nerd-era of the 1980s and is shot on an old-school black and white video camera.

ALL IS LOST (12A, 100 mins)
Duke Of York’s Picturehouse, Saturday, November 16, 6.30pm

ROBERT Redford is the sole figure onscreen for this largely silent tale of a lone yachtsman’s battle against the Indian Ocean from Margin Call director J C Chandor.

JEUNE ET JOLIE (18, 94 mins)
Duke Of York’s Picturehouse, Sunday, November 17, 7pm

CHICHESTER International Film Festival dedicated strands of their summer programme to French director Francois Ozon and actress Charlotte Rampling.

Now the pair are together once more for the tale of a 17-year-old’s sexual awakening and movement into prostitution.

BRUNO AND EARLENE GO TO VEGAS (95 mins)
Duke’s@Komedia, Friday, November 22, 9pm

DIRECTOR Simon Savory is set to be the special guest at this screening which forms part of the Eyes Wide Open celebration of queer cinema.

A pair of runaways hook up on the road and drive into the desert meeting fellow escapees from life along the way.

WAKE IN FRIGHT (18, 114 mins)
Duke Of York’s Picturehouse, Friday, November 22, 11.30pm, £7.60/£6.60

DONALD Pleasance and Chips Rafferty star in this long-lost Ozploitation classic from director Ted Kotcheff about a teacher who gets stranded in a rugged outback town while waiting for a flight to Sydney.

The film – whose brutal kangaroo hunt still courts controversy – was restored in 2009, having received its world premiere at Cannes in 1971.

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN (111 mins)
Duke Of York’s Picturehouse, Saturday, November 23, 6pm

DOUBLE Oscar-nominated actor Ralph Fiennes goes behind the camera again, following his bloody take on Shakespeare’s Corialanus.

Inspired by Claire Tomalin’s biography, The Invisible Woman dramatises the love affair between Victorian novelist Charles Dickens, played by Fiennes, and actress Nelly Ternan (Felicity Jones), with a cast that also features Kristen Scott Thomas and Tom Hollander as Wilkie Collins.

ALGORITHMS (PG, 96 mins)
Duke’s@Komedia, Saturday, November 23, 8.30pm

FOLLOWING the screening, director Ian McDonald will be discussing his documentary about Indian blind chess masters, recorded over three years and covering two world championships.

DUMMY JIM
Duke Of York’s Picturehouse, Sunday, November 24, 6.30pm

MATT Hulse’s second feature film was inspired by a self-published account of a deaf cyclist’s 3,000-mile trip to the Arctic Circle in 1951. Hulse and lead actor Samuel Dore will discuss the film after the screening.

THE DOUBLE (93 mins)
Duke Of York’s Picturehouse, Sunday, December 1, 6pm

FOLLOWING his amazing adaptation of Joe Dunthorne’s novel Submarine, IT Crowd star Richard Ayodade’s second feature, based around a Dostoevsky novella, closes CineCity 2013.

Jesse Eisenberg’s timid clerk endures being belittled by his colleagues – only for things to get worse when his exact physical double and psychological opposite arrives at the office.

Look out for further interviews and previews in next week’s edition of The Guide

Tickets for Duke Of York’s Picturehouse/ Duke’s@Komedia £9.60/£8.60 unless otherwise stated

Brighton movies

ROCKSTARS IN MY ATTIC (65 mins)
The Basement, Saturday, November 23, 5.30pm, £5

SUSSEX-BASED filmmaker Mark Atkins’s career as a documentary editor was put on hold after a serious hit-and-run bike accident.

While undergoing recuperation he discovered a stash of video footage in his attic, mixing rock star interviews and concert film. After the screening he’ll talk about putting the videos together and how the process helped his recovery.

FLOOD II
The Basement, Sunday, November 24, 3pm, £5

CURATED by Louise Colbourne, Flood II focuses on the power and beauty of the South East coast, using a combination of archive footage and contemporary contributions.

BRIGHTON SCREENINGS: ARTISTS’ CINEMA AND EXPERIMENTAL
The Basement, Sunday, November 24, 1.30pm, £5

BRIGHTON SCREENINGS: SHORT DOCUMENTARIES, SHORT DRAMAS 1 AND 2
Duke’s@Komedia, Saturday, November 30, to Sunday, December 1, £5 each

THE best of CineCity’s open submissions programme.

The subjects include what goes on behind the curtains of Brighton’s Hollingbury Estate, the true life stories behind Brighton squatters, a document of Lewes bonfire night, Dave Suit’s 50th birthday and a love story between two pensioners taking in sex, drink and drugs.

THE MAN WHOSE MIND EXPLODED (76 mins)
Duke Of York’s Picturehouse, Wednesday, November 27, 9pm

SOMETHING of a Kemp Town legend, the story of tattooed and pierced former Salvador Dali model Drako Zarhazar is told by director and eventual part-time carer Toby Amies. The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with Amies.

The Argus:

International award-winners

A TOUCH OF SIN (133 mins)
Duke’s@Komedia, Friday, November 15, 6.30pm

WINNER of the best screenplay award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Jia Zhangke’s film weaves together four stories from the underbelly of contemporary China.

THE ROCKET (12A, 96 mins)
Duke’s@Komedia, Sunday, November 17, 5.30pm

HAVING scooped audience awards at film festivals in Melbourne and Sydney, and New York’s Tribeca Festival, Australian documentary maker Kim Mordaunt’s first fictional tale follows a ten-year-old’s attempts to support his Laos-based family – having been branded a source of bad luck.

ILOILO (99 mins)
Duke’s@Komedia, Wednesday, November 20, 9pm

THE Best Debut Feature winner at this year’s Cannes is set against the backdrop of the 1997 Asian financial crisis as a Filipino maid tries to look after her employers’ disruptive young son.

FILL THE VOID (90 mins)
Duke’s@Komedia, Thursday, November 21, 6.30pm

THE Israeli entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar earned Hadas Yaron a best actress award at the Venice Film Festival.

She plays the youngest daughter of an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community in Tel Aviv being forced to marry her late sister’s husband.

LEVIATHAN (12A, 87 mins)
Duke’s@Komedia, Sunday, November 24, 2pm

EARNING the Michael Powell Award for Best British Film at the Edinburgh Film Festival, Leviathan documents the reality of life on a hulking commercial fishing vessel off the New England coast.

Special events

LA ANTENA (PG, 99 mins)
Duke Of York’s Picturehouse, Friday, November 15, 11.30pm, £12

BRIGHTON band Esben And The Witch provide a live soundtrack to the Argentinian sci-fi tale, set in a world where an evil media tycoon has stolen a city’s voices.

The Argus:

FIGHT CLUB (18, 139 mins)
Duke Of York’s Picturehouse, Saturday, November 16, 1.30pm, £15

WRITER Chuck Palahniuk is the special guest following a screening of David Fincher’s cult cinematic adaptation of his seminal novel, and will be reading from his latest book Doomed.

IN SEARCH OF BLIND JOE DEATH: THE SAGA OF JOHN FAHEY (58 mins)
The Basement, Sunday, November 24, 8.30pm, £5

BRIGHTON-BASED multi-instrumentalist Robert Stillman will play a new four-movement requiem to US primitive guitar pioneer John Fahey, prior to a new documentary by James Cullingham.

Films about films

JODROWSKI’S DUNE (90 mins)
Duke’s@Komedia, Gardner Street, Brighton, Saturday, November 16, 9pm

DAVID Lynch’s cinematic version of Frank Herbert’s cult sci-fi novel Dune was probably weird enough for most people – but this documentary from Frank Pavich tells of a version that was abandoned after two years.

Conceived by midnight movie legend Alejandro Jodrowsky – creator of the almost incomprehensible El Topo and Holy Mountain – with input from comic book artist Moebius, writer Dan O’Bannon and artist H R Giger, it was set to star Salvador Dali, Orson Welles, Mick Jagger and David Carradine to a soundtrack by Pink Floyd.

INTERIOR: LEATHER BAR and CRUISING
Duke Of York’s Picturehouse, Saturday, November 23, 11.30pm, £7.60/£6.60

CERTAINLY the most controversial film either director William Friedkin or star Al Pacino were ever involved in, Cruising told the story of an undercover cop trying to track down a serial killer on the underground gay S&M scene – based on New York’s real “body bag murders” in the late 1970s.

Interior: Leather Bar is a re-imagining by James Franco and Travis Mathews of 40 minutes of footage, rumoured to have been cut from the finished movie to appease the censors.

A STORY OF CHILDREN AND FILM (PG, 104 mins)
Duke Of York’s Picturehouse, Friday, November 29, 6.30pm

CRITIC Mark Cousins extracts scenes from 53 movies made in 25 countries to talk about what cinema tells us about childhood in a personal essay. Expect clips from ET, The Red Balloon, Frankenstein, and Kes.

Underground cinema at The Basement

JUKEBOX FURY: THE ASSASSINATION OF JFK
The Basement, Kensington Street, Brighton, Friday, November 22, 8pm, £8/£6

FOLLOWING on from last year’s J G Ballard-inspired night, Jukebox Fury marks the 50th anniversary of John F Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, and opens a weekend of Underground Cinema.

On the bill are Bruce Conner’s found-footage movie Report from 1967 and the 1975 re-enactment movie The Eternal Frame, as well as electronic music, super8 film, readings and a puppet recreation of what happened in Dealey Plaza on that fateful day.

THE BLUEBLACK HUSSAR (98 mins)
The Basement, Saturday, November 23, 3.30pm, £5

AS his packed-out shows in Concorde 2 proved last year, Adam Ant is still a firm favourite and pop icon.

Jack Bond’s documentary tells the story of Ant’s long-awaited return and his battle with mental health issues.

BASICALLY, JOHNNY MOPED (70 mins)
The Basement, Saturday, November 23, 9pm, £5

TWO years before The Damned released the first punk single New Rose, Captain Sensible was guitarist with the proto-punk band Johnny Moped.

This documentary from Sensible’s son Fred Burns traces the story of Johnny Moped, and speaks to both former band members, including Chrissie Hynde and Moped himself, as well as uber-fan Shane MacGowan. The screening is followed by a Q&A session with Captain Sensible himself.

Jan Svankmajer

WITH his mind-blowing model creatures currently on show in the Sallis Benney Theatre, in Grand Parade, CineCity offers a chance to watch some of Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmejer’s finest work on the big screen.

SHORTS 1, 2, 3, and 4 (15)
Duke Of York’s Picturehouse, Preston Circus, Brighton, Sunday, November 17, Wednesday, November 20, Sunday, November 24, and Saturday, November 30

RANGING from 1964 to 1992, Svankmejer’s short films are arranged in four chronologically-packaged screenings. Expect duelling puppets, a reimagining of Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches, tributes to Edgar Allen Poe and Freudian satire on human consumption across 26 short films.

ALICE (PG, 85 mins)
Duke Of York’s Picturehouse, Monday, November 18, 6.30pm, £6.10/£5.10

WITH the sets on display in the Sallis Benney Theatre, and blown-up stills in Jubilee Square, a screening of the 1987 reimagining of Lewis Carroll’s seminal surreal story.

LITTLE OTIK (15, 131 mins)
Duke Of York’s Picturehouse, Sunday, November 24, 12.30pm

THE darkside of the Pinocchio story sees a childless couple raising the titular tree stump as a baby substitute, only for it to come to life with a lethal appetite.