After Yang / Moon
Sun 8/4/2024 • 7PM PDT
Billy Wilder Theater
Admission is free. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.
After Yang
U.S., 2021
Writer-director Kogonada’s highly refined visual sensibility yields here a subtler variant of dystopian science fiction, call it cozy futurism. The cocoon of tasteful design and supportive technology that envelops Jake (Colin Farrell), Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) and their adoptive daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) soothes all but the most mild domestic anxieties until their beloved family android, Yang (Justin H. Min), breaks down and they must deal with the unexpected mess of emotions that follows on their own. From this traumatic glitch, Kagonada draws a layered exploration of grief, memory and the nature of identity in a world that, for all its advances, feels achingly close to our own.
DCP, color, 96 min. Director: Kogonada. Screenwriter: Kogonada. With: Colin Farrell, Jodie Turner-Smith, Justin H. Min.
Moon
U.S., 2009
Sam Rockwell delivers a magnetic performance as Sam Bell, an astronaut coming undone at the end of a long-term solo mission on the Moon in director Duncan Jones’ feature debut. Overseeing a lunar mining operation with only the station’s AI computer to keep him company, Sam looks forward to returning home to his wife and daughter until an accident leads him to confront the nature of his existence. Duncan incorporates a number of familiar contemporary sci-fi elements into his story — corporate greed, environmentalism, the dangers of technology — but it’s Rockwell’s turn — and turn and turn again — as a man struggling to understand himself that is the film’s real center of gravity.
35mm, color, 97 min. Director: Duncan Jones. Screenwriter: Nathan Parker. With: Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey, Dominique McElligott.