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Precious (MA15+)
Advance screenings
starts February 4
Director: Lee Daniels (Shadowboxer)
110 mins
website
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Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for best drama at the Sundance Film Festival as well as the Audience Awards of Sundance, Toronto and San Sebastian, Lee Daniels' PRECIOUS is an honest and resoundingly hopeful film about the human capacity to grow and overcome unimaginable hardships. Set in Harlem, Claireece Precious Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) is a sixteen-year-old girl who has endured indescribable hardships during her young life. Poor, angry, illiterate and unloved, a transfer to an alternative school allows Precious to begin a journey that will lead her from darkness. |
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The Room (M)
Exclusive to Cinema Nova!
starts February 6
Director: Tommy Wiseau (Homeless in America, Neighbors)
99 mins
website
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Written, directed and starring Tommy Wiseau, The Room is like no other film you’ve seen. Johnny (Tommy Wiseau) seems to have it all- a beautiful fiancée, Lisa, great friends and a job with a promotion in the works. But Lisa, (Juliette Danielle) isn’t who she seems. Manipulative and restless, Lisa sets her sights on Johnny’s best friend Mark (Greg Sestero) and they start a torrid affair and Johnny’s perfect world starts to crumble. Featured on Adult Swim’s Tim and Eric, Awesome Show, Great Job! and beloved by comic actors such as David Cross and Alec Baldwin, The Room has garnered a massive cult following, selling out sessions across the US, leaving audiences stunned and wondering “how can so bad, be so good?” Don’t miss your chance to see The Room at Cinema Nova.
Read director/writer/star Tommy Wiseau’s letter to his Australian fans.
Download pdf here |
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The Road (MA15+)
starts January 28
Director: John Hillcoat (The Proposition, Ghosts Of The Civil Dead)
119 mins
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From the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Cormac McCarthy (No Country For Old Men), John Hillcoat’s post-apocalyptic epic centres on the journey of a father (Mortensen) and his young son (Smit-McPhee) across an American wasteland destroyed by a mysterious cataclysm. With civilization obliterated and most life turned to a cinder, THE ROAD boldly imagines a future in which men are pushed to the very best and very worst that they are capable of. |
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Invictus (PG)
now showing | session times
Director: Clint Eastwood (Million Dollar Baby, Gran Torino)
133mins
website
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From two-time Best Directing Oscar winner Clint Eastwood comes the inspiring true story of how newly elected South African president Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman, in the role he was born to play) joined forces with the white captain of his country’s rugby team, Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon), to help unite their country. Knowing his nation remains racially and economically divided in the wake of apartheid, Mandela believes he can bring his people together through a shared passion for sport. Together with Pienaar, they rally the team to make an unlikely run for the 1995 World Cup Championship. |
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Based upon on the Tony Award®-winning musical and inspired by Federico Fellini's autobiographical film 8½- NINE is written for the screen by Anthony Minghella (The English Patient) and brought to dazzling heights by an Academy Award® winning cast and the director of the hit Chicago. The film follows the artistic journey of Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis), the suave, sensual, Fellini-esque Italian film director who is universally hailed as the world’s greatest filmmaker—yet suddenly finds himself in a desperate search for inspiration for his next movie. He gets lost in his stormy relationships with a sea of beautiful women-including Penélope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard, Fergie, Kate Hudson, Judi Dench and Sofia Loren—who each seduce and confound him, spark his memories and open up his imagination to new possibilities, pushing him into the dream-like zone where creativity happens. |
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Based on the BBC satire The Thick Of It, the governments of the United States and England each inadvertently lay the groundwork for international war thanks to the nervous utterance of a low-level UK MP (Hollander) during a radio interview. In the world of the modern media, deliberately leaked papers and out of context sound-bites become as powerful as human political players such as the British PM’s Communications Director (Capaldi), the US Secretary for Diplomacy (Mimi Kennedy) and a Veteran Pentagon General (Gandolfini), whose views on war surprise everybody. |
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Up In The Air (M)
now showing | session times
Director: Jason Reitman (Juno, Thank You For Smoking)
109 mins
website |
From one of Hollywood’s hottest new directors, Oscar nominee Jason Reitman, comes a dramatic comedy about a man whose only connections in life are those between flights. George Clooney stars as Ryan Bingham, a downsizing expert who spends most of his life in transit and prides himself on almost having earned his ten-millionth frequent flyer mile. When a young graduate hotshot (Anna Kendrick) proposes a rationalizing move to video conferencing, Bingham sees his lifestyle under threat just as he’s met a like-minded fellow traveller (Farmiga) who he happily keeps running into. Giving a career-best performance as a professional convinced that he has life all worked out, Clooney and UP IN THE AIR are front-runners in the 2009 Oscar Race. |
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Bran Nue Dae (PG)
now showing | session times
Director:Rachel Perkins (Radiance, One Night The Moon)
85 mins
website |
A coming-of-age musical comedy that celebrates the adventure of finding home, Rachel Perkins’ third feature is based on Jimmy Chi’s 1990 landmark Aboriginal stage musical. Set in the summer of 1969, young Willie (newcomer Rocky McKenzie) lives in the idyllic port of Broome, Western Australia. Plucking up the courage to court local girl Rosie (Mauboy), Willie’s romantic intentions are cut-short by his religious mother and the bad tempered Father Benedictus (Geoffrey Rush) who conspire to send him to catholic school. |
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Fantastic Mr Fox (PG)
now showing | session times
Director: Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore)
87 mins
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Based on the beloved book by Roald Dahl, FANTASTIC MR. FOX is visionary director Wes Anderson’s first fully animated film. Utilizing stop motion techniques to bring life to the elaborate world of talking animals and their humanized world, Anderson takes his meticulous aesthetic to imaginative new heights. Mr. and Mrs. Fox (Clooney & Streep) live in an idyllic fox hole home with their son Ash (Jason Schwatzman) and young nephew Kristopherson. But twelve years of countrified existence proves too much for Mr. Fox’s wild-animal instincts, causing him to slip back into his old ways as a sneaky chicken thief. Besides endangering his beloved family as well as the wider wild animal community, Mr. Fox enters into a war of wits against three of the most evil human farmers: Boggis, Bunce and Bean. |
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Bright Star (PG)
now showing | session times
Director: Jane Campion (The Piano, Portrait Of A Lady)
119 mins
website |
Award-winning director Jane Campion, makes a triumphant return with the visually stunning and utterly moving drama about English poet John Keats in BRIGHT STAR. Based on a true story, Campion’s film reveals the relationship between Miss Fannie Brawne (Sommersault’s Abbie Cornish) and English poet Keats (Whishaw). Brawne, a headstrong young woman whose taste for progressive fashions and speaking her mind was at-odds with 19th-centrury English society, becomes interested in Keats as his first book of poetry is published but poorly received. Seeing something special in his writings, Brawne comes to inspire Keats despite the interference of Keats’ fellow writer, the boorish Mr Brown (an outstanding Paul Schneider). |
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Nowhere Boy (M)
now showing | session times
Director: Sam Taylor Wood (debut)
100 mins |
English conceptual artist Sam Taylor Wood makes her feature directorial debut with NOWHERE BOY, a sensitive and sprightly look at John Lennon's formative years.
Liverpool 1955: fifteen-year-old John Lennon (Johnson) is a teenager hungry for experience. Since the age of five he has been brought up by his Aunt Mimi (Scott-Thomas) - the epitome of respectability - but John’s rebellious streak breaks through when he reconnects with his mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff). Introducing her son to the sounds of rock-n-rollers Elvis Presley and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Julia’s musical tastes are a world away from Mimi’s love for Tchaikovsky. Caught between the two sisters as they fight over his future, John escapes into music before starting a band with kindred spirit Paul McCartney (Sangster). |
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Avatar (M)
now showing | session times
Director: James Cameron (The Terminator, Aliens)
mins tbc
website |
Returning to feature films for the first time since creating the biggest film of all time (still!) with 1997’s Oscar winner Titanic, James Cameron takes audiences to a spectacular new world shot with awesome 3D in AVATAR. In the distant future, paraplegic war veteran Jake Sully (Worthington) is brought to the planet of Pandora to participate in a new military program. Inhabited by the tribal humanoid species the Na'vi as well as a plethora of incredible plants and deadly animal species, Pandora is also rich in the galaxy’s most prized mineral. Given the task of infiltrating the Na’vi, Sully soon begins to question whether the precious ore is worth the potential destruction of this alien Eden. |
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Where The Wild Things Are (PG)
now showing | session times
Director: Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation)
101 mins
website |
In his adaptation of Maurice Sendak's beloved picture book director Spike Jonze creates a uniquely magical film that stays true to Sendak’s classic story but expands the world of the Wild Things in ambitious and refreshing ways. Max (Records) is a rambunctious and sensitive young boy. Feeling ignored by his sister and neglected by his Mother (Keener), Max decides to run away and escape to a world where he will at last be understood. Travelling across the sea he soon discovers a strange place inhabited by large scary beasts that seem human at-heart. Quickly embraced by these “Wild Things”, Max is soon crowned their leader before embarking on an ambitious plan of massive creation and even greater destruction. |
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In her adaptation of two bestselling memoirs (Julie Powell’s ‘Julie & Julia’ and Julia Child’s ‘My Life in France’), Nora Ephron’s JULIE & JULIA offers a story of how one woman’s journey became another’s inspiration. Meryl Streep stars as the famed food writer and TV chef Julia Child, and her Doubt co-star Amy Adams plays Julie Powell, the New York secretary who wrote a book about the year she spent preparing all 524 recipes in Julia's 1961 bestseller Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Based on two true stories, JULIE & JULIA intertwines the lives of two women who, though separated by time and space, are both at loose ends until they discover that with the right combination of passion, fearlessness and butter, anything is possible. |
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