Part of Music City Mondays
Mon, Aug 18 at 8:00pm: Introduction from Belcourt staff member Coley Hinson | BUY TICKETS
Luke Skywalker begins a journey that will change the galaxy in STARS WARS EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE. Nineteen years after the formation of the Empire, Luke is thrust into the struggle of the Rebel Alliance when he meets Obi-Wan Kenobi, who has lived for years in seclusion on the desert planet of Tatooine. Obi-Wan begins Luke’s Jedi training as Luke joins him on a daring mission to rescue the beautiful Rebel leader Princess Leia from the clutches of Darth Vader and the evil Empire. STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE plays alongside a new restoration of Akira Kurosawa’s THE HIDDEN FORTRESS (Fri, Aug 15, Mon, Aug 18), a key influence of George Lucas in the development of his largest creation. Lucas would go on to repay the favor by co-producing Kurosawa’s late-era DREAMS (Sun, Aug 24, Tue, Aug 26)
Programmer’s Note: On Mon, Aug 18, see back-to-back screenings of THE HIDDEN FORTRESS (5:05pm) and STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE (2:30pm, 8:00pm)
“STAR WARS, set ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,’ is the most exciting picture to be released this year — exciting as theater and exciting as cinema. It is the most visually awesome such work to appear since 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, yet is intriguingly human in its scope and boundaries.” —John Wasserman, San Francisco Chronicle (May 1977) “A new classic in a rousing movie tradition: a space swashbuckler…. Lucas, the young American filmmaker who rose to prominence with AMERICAN GRAFFITI, spent four years writing, preparing, directing and editing STAR WARS. He has achieved a witty and exhilarating synthesis of themes and cliches from the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers comics and serials, plus such related but less expected sources as the western, the pirate melodrama, the aerial combat melodrama and the samurai epic.” —Gary Arnold, Washington Post (May 25, 1977) “If I were asked to say with certainty which movies will still be widely-known a century or two from now, I would list 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and THE WIZARD OF OZ and Keaton and Chaplin, and Astaire and Rogers, and probably CASABLANCA. . . and STAR WARS, for sure.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (Jun 28, 1999)
