2040
22 August — G, General Release
Award-winning director Damon Gameau (That Sugar Film) embarks on a journey to explore what the future could look like by the year 2040 if we simply embraced the best solutions already available to us to improve our planet and shifted them into the mainstream. Structured as a visual letter to his four-year-old daughter, Gameau blends traditional documentary with dramatised sequences and high-end visual effects to create a vision board of how these solutions could regenerate the world for future generations.
Escape From New York
23 August — R16, Academy Cinema
This is a part of the special series of John Carpenter Cult Classics at the Academy. In 1997, a major war between the United States and the Soviet Union is concluding, and the entire island of Manhattan has been converted into a giant maximum security prison. When Air Force One is hijacked and crashes into the island, the president (Donald Pleasence) is taken hostage by a group of inmates. Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell, pictured above), a former special forces soldier turned criminal, is recruited to retrieve the president in exchange for his own freedom. For more information please visit academycinema.co.nz
Iris: A Space Opera By Justice
26 August — TBC, Event Cinema, Queen Street
The band Justice has created a unique live performance filmed especially for cinemas. Adapted from the live show Woman Worldwide, widely considered to be one of the greatest electro concerts ever produced, Iris: A Space Opera by Justice is a totally immersive visual and auditory experience. The concert film is preceded by a documentary that goes behind the scenes of this extraordinary show. Director André Chemetoff, Armand Beraud. Cast: Gaspard Augé, Xavier de Rosnay. For more information please visit eventcinemas.co.nz
Apollo 11
29 August — G, General Release
A cinematic event fifty years in the making. Crafted from a newly discovered trove of 65mm footage, and more than 11,000 hours of uncatalogued audio recordings, Apollo 11 takes us straight to the heart of NASA’s most celebrated mission—the one that first put men on the moon and made Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (pictured left) into household names. Immersed in the perspectives of the astronauts, the team of Mission Control, and the millions of spectators on the ground, we vividly experience those momentous days and hours in 1969 when humankind took a giant leap into the future.
