Plymouth Arts Centre Blog
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Plymouth Arts Centre Blog
3w ago
YOUR FAT FRIEND
Just say “fat”. As an opening gambit, Jeanie Finlay’s documentary isn’t shy about throwing around the F word. Your Fat Friend doesn’t tiptoe around the issue of fatness, but approaches it unapologetically. A film that documents both individual and collective experience, Your Fat Friend is a fearless exploration (and explanation) of what it’s like living in a world not designed for you.
The film’s focus is author and podcast presenter, Aubrey Gordon. Finlay follows Gordon over a six-year period as she negotiates her way through a publishing deal all the way to a post-pand ..read more
Plymouth Arts Centre Blog
1M ago
Anyone who visits the cinema regularly will know that finding a film that stays with you, long after the credits have rolled, is an increasingly rare experience. In Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest, the mark left on the audience is indelible.
Loosely based on the Martin Amis novel, The Zone of Interest details the life of Commandant Rudolf Hoss, who oversees the running of the Auschwitz concentration camp. In a series of astonishing reveals, we learn that his spacious family home backs directly onto the camp itself; only a wall divides them. Rudolf (played by Christ ..read more
Plymouth Arts Centre Blog
1M ago
On Saturday 20th January, Fotonow ran a guided photography walk exploring Plymouth in the afternoon, with the theme Document Your Community.
Emma Booth from Fotonow gave an introduction to the film Tish and talk about Fotonow’s socially engaged approach to photography.
“It was fantastic to be able to programme and collaborate on an event with Plymouth Arts Cinema, I was thrilled to see that they were showing a screening of Tish and designed the FOTOWALK event to revolve around social documentary photography in line with her work. It’s clear that Tish Murtha’s legacy goes far beyond the images ..read more
Plymouth Arts Centre Blog
1M ago
A fantasy that blends science fiction with High Victoriana, Poor Things – a 1992 novel from Glaswegian author Alasdair Gray – seems a project tailor-made for director Yorgos Lanthimos.
The story is mired in Gothic horror. A young Victorian woman – wealthy, well-dressed – stands on a bridge, contemplating the water below. She jumps to her death. A pioneering doctor, Godwin Baxter (played by Willem Dafoe), rescues the body from the river, and in a gleeful homage to classic cinema, we see the woman hooked up to electrodes and crudely (but successfully) resurrected. She is named Bella Baxter ..read more
Plymouth Arts Centre Blog
2M ago
Those fed up with the bleak midwinter will find more than a cup of Christmas cheer still left in The Holdovers, the latest from Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways, Nebraska). In fact the callback to yuletide a month after it’s finished seems more than a little apt for a film that itself feels quite the throwback.
The sense of warm familiarity starts to kindle right from the opening credits, as we sweep through the walnut halls of Barton Academy, a prestigious New England all-boys boarding school, at the turn of 1971. The “holdovers” in question are a handful of students who are kept back ..read more
Plymouth Arts Centre Blog
2M ago
A documentary that reframes the perception of the “working-class experience”, Tish is the story of Tyneside documentary photographer, Tish Murtha. Directed by Paul Sng, and featuring Tish’s daughter, Ella, this haunting documentary charts the span of the photographer’s life.
Tish is screening at Plymouth Arts Cinema from Saturday 20th – Wednesday 24th January. On Saturday 20th January, Emma Booth from Fotonow will give an introduction to the film and talk about Fotonow’s socially engaged approach to photography. Book tickets here.
Fotonow will also run a guided photography walk exploring Plymo ..read more
Plymouth Arts Centre Blog
3M ago
It’s that time of the year when we all look back at the highs and lows and it’s fair to say, 2023 has been quite the rollercoaster for us at PAC!
Tell us your top 3 films of 2023!
Small independent cinemas are always going to struggle against the bigger players and this year has been no different as we all try to work out what kind of fall-out we are still experiencing from the pandemic. Audiences are definitely returning to cinemas but we are still a way off pre-Covid attendance figures even in the year that delivered Barbie and Oppenheimer slap bang in the middle of summer.
There have been d ..read more
Plymouth Arts Centre Blog
3M ago
The centrepiece of a UK-wide celebration, Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell + Pressburger, the 1948 film The Red Shoes, returns to the big screen. The event, which hopes to introduce the bold, transgressive film-making of directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger to a new audience, leans into the extraordinary ‘high style’ of The Red Shoes. This is no gentle introduction: the film represents Powell and Pressburger at their most vibrant: The Red Shoes immerses the viewer in a world of colour, dance and art.
The screening on Saturday 9th December featured a special dance ..read more
Plymouth Arts Centre Blog
4M ago
Balanced somewhere between a “gothic love story” and horror, according to its director, Saltburn is a film with serious pedigree.
Loosely based on the family featured in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, this later-generation story begins in 2006, and owes as much to cinematic references as Waugh’s examination of Britain’s class structure: think Kubrick’s chancing hero Barry Lyndon meets The Talented Mr Ripley.
Director Emerald Fennell uses her own experiences to depict life at an Oxford college. A scholarship boy, Oliver Quick (played by Barry Keoghan), arrives at the university, very much ..read more
Plymouth Arts Centre Blog
4M ago
We need your help to make our cinema a sustainable and affordable venue for our whole community.We are raising £10,000 because we want our cinema to help face some of the biggest challenges of our time:
1) the cost-of-living crisis, by keeping cinema-going affordable to all. Cinema is one of the most easily accessible artforms. It allows windows into other worlds and new perspectives on a world we think we are familiar with. A truly independent cinema should show films which comfort us, challenge us, delight and surprise us.
More than this though, cinema should be accessible to all, no matter ..read more