Auckland International Film Meetup

Film Club is BACK for November with one of the greatest cult films of the Seventies, one with a firm place in the pantheon of cool - Walter Hill’s THE DRIVER!

Underground action icon Walter Hill is best-known for THE WARRIORS and 48HRS, but many assert THE DRIVER to be his true masterpiece, a lean, mean 90-minutes of vehicular mayhem that collides exquisitely with Euro-arthouse existentialism. Ryan O’Neal (BARRY LYNDON), in a role that preceded Ryan Gosling’s turn in DRIVE, plays a monosyllabic getaway driver, a consummate professional who has never been caught. When a hotshot young detective (Bruce Dern, NEBRASKA) gets on the case, The Driver is drawn into a world of double crossing and set-ups.

Also starring POSSESSION’s Isabelle Adjani, THE DRIVER is a neon-drenched, bare-bones neo-noir that outclasses almost every other ‘driving film’ you could care to name. From DRIVE to BABY DRIVER to THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, the DNA of this film exists in the modern action landscape like few other films. It’s a great introduction to Hill, the genre inverter and B-Picture elevator, mentored by Sam Peckinpah and a key fixture of Seventies and Eighties cinema of all stripes.

Said critic Craig Williams: “The B-movie form begins and ends with Walter Hill’s THE DRIVER (1978). It’s the blueprint genre picture; a year zero for the modern cult canon. When the French Nouvelle Vague repurposed the American genres of the thirties and forties for the intellectual classes of the Parisian sixties, they gave the forms a new lease of life by burdening them with existential malaise and a heavy sense of ennui. While these elements carried over to New Hollywood, Hill brought the grit back to the B-movie. The Driver is a film of types and trends; a cinematic expression of our basest narrative impulses. Directed with remarkable economy, the seasoned Hill keeps everything as tight as possible.”

Don’t miss the chance to catch this cult masterpiece on the big screen, the way it was meant to be seen. At the special time of Thursday 21st of November, 7pm. Tickets $10, as always. See you there!

This is a classic Indian film and our special selection for this month. November is the Month for Diwali and November 19 is the International Day for the Prevention for Abuse against Children.

What better film for this then, than Salaam Bombay? (Bombay is now called Mumbai)

11-year-old Krishna ends up in Bombay's slums as he tries to earn money to pay back a debt to his older brother, (Krishna had destroyed his brother's motorbike in retaliation for being constantly bullied).
The Guardian reviewer wrote "What strikes you is not simply its energy and vitality and its Dickensian storytelling appetite, but its fierce unsentimentality."

The ever-reliable film reviewer Roger Ebert wrote "Nair (The film director Mira) has been able to make a film that has the everyday, unforced reality of documentary, and yet the emotional power of great drama."
Has to be worth a watch. In fact, this is a must see.