NYC Screenings of ‘Boogie Nights,’ ‘Biggie and Tupac’ & ‘Zodiac’ (Among Others) Prior to the New York Film Festival

In a tribute to the directors of this year’s New York Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is screening some of their past films. Included are Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Boogie Nights, Nick Broomfield‘s Biggie and Tupac and David Fincher‘s Zodiac, all screening at Walter Reade Theater.

For the full list, visit the website here.

Boogie Nights
Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 1997, 35mm, 155m
“This is the film I want them to remember me by,” declares pornographer/auteur Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds in a career performance). Though there’s plenty of competition, P.T. Anderson could easily claim this, his sophomore feature, as his bid for posterity. A sprawling mosaic of life in the adult-film industry, Horner’s surrogate “family”—uniquely qualified star Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg), nurturing Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), sweetly pathetic boom operator Scotty J. (a poignant Philip Seymour Hoffman)—rides high in the late ’70s before changing tides and technologies render them has-beens in Reagan’s America. Brilliant acting by Anderson’s stock company and the writer/director’s sensitive approach make Boogie Nights “a big, bright, shining star” in the firmament of American film.
September 21, 7:30pm

Biggie and Tupac
Nick Broomfield, UK, 2002, 35mm, 108m
Nick Broomfield, the “British stalkumentarian and pop culture muckraker” (J. Hoberman), adds to his canon of tabloid investigative journalism (Kurt & Courtney, Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam) by probing the murders of rappers Tupac Shakur and Christopher “the Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace. Broomfield posits that Suge Knight, the then-CEO of Death Row Records, ordered the death of Tupac, who was preparing to jump labels, and then sanctioned the hit on Wallace (Tupac’s East Coast rival) to divert attention from himself. Broomfield further indicts the LAPD for culpability in the cover-up. The eccentric conspiracy-theorist-cum-filmmaker, England’s answer to Columbo, uses tactics that beggar description to procure the damning footage—including a visit to the prison where parole violator Knight was serving time, scoring an impromptu interview!
September 25, 9:00pm

Zodiac
David Fincher, USA, 2007, DCP, 157m
From the establishing aerial shot of Vallejo, CA, and subsequent shooting of two teens parked in lovers’ lane (to the strains of Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man”), David Fincher invokes palpable dread and sustains it for nearly three hours. Refreshingly, he makes his focus not the serial murders of the Zodiac Killer who terrorized San Francisco in the late 1960s but the prolonged investigation, beset with dead ends, blind alleys, and dark nights for hotshot detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), hard-drinking reporter Paul Avery (a standout Robert Downey Jr.), and obsessed San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose book inspired James Vanderbilt’s meticulous screenplay. No procedural has better captured the unnerving limbo of unsolved crimes, or the tolls they take on the lives of dedicated crime fighters.
September 19, 9:00pm