Featuring filmmaker Julian Schnabel, producer Gale Anne Hurd, composer Carter Burwell, cinematographer Sean Price Williams, and photographer James Hamilton in person for introductions and Q&As
Sag Harbor, NY — Sag Harbor Cinema presents a month of exceptional cinema and special guests, featuring artist/filmmaker Julian Schnabel, legendary producer Gale Anne Hurd, Academy Award-nominated composer Carter Burwell, cinematographer Sean Price Williams, and photographer James Hamilton, each appearing in person for introductions and post-screening conversations.
The month opens on August 6 with filmmaker Julian Schnabel (Basquiat, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, At Eternity’s Gate), who will present In the Hand of Dante, his long-awaited and visionary adaptation of Nick Tosches’s cult novel. Starring Oscar Isaac, Gerard Butler, John Malkovich, Franco Nero, Gal Gadot, Martin Scorsese, and Jason Momoa, the film weaves together the lives of Dante Alighieri and a Tosches-like contemporary writer across centuries. The film continues the retrospective Portrait of the Artist: Julian Schnabel and Film that began at the Cinema in 2024. Schnabel will join for a post-screening conversation and Q&A.
On August 10, acclaimed cinematographer Sean Price Williams (Good Time, Her Smell, The Sweet East) will be in attendance to speak about, what he calls one of his favorite films ever, Nicholas Ray’s groundbreaking debut They Live By Night. This very influential crime film, beloved by the Nouvelle Vague, is shown as part of our ‘Summer Noir’ series. In the post-screening conversation, Price Williams will discuss Ray’s film as well as the art of noir cinematography. Bob Rubin, curator of our third floor exhibit Trapped In Shadows: The Worlds of Film Noir, will also join.
On August 21, also as part of the ‘Summer Noir’ program, the Cinema will welcome composer Carter Burwell. A longtime collaborator of the Coen Brothers (No Country for Old Men, Raising Arizona, Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing), his Oscar nominations include Todd Haynes’ Carol and Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri and The Banshees of Inisherin. Burwell will introduce Fargo and talk about his work on the score behind one of the defining neo-noirs of modern American cinema.
Photographer James Hamilton will return to the Cinema during Summer Noir to celebrate one of his lifelong passions: film noir, the genre that first inspired him to become a photographer. Hamilton’s iconic film portraits — originally published in The Village Voice, Crawdaddy, The New York Herald, Harper’s Bazaar, and The New York Observer — were featured in the Cinema’s 2024 exhibition James Hamilton: On Film. On August 24, Hamilton will introduce Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, a racetrack heist that announced the arrival of one of cinema’s greatest directors.
The special screenings continue on August 27 with legendary producer Gale Anne Hurd for a screening of James Cameron’s The Abyss: Special Edition, the director’s expanded cut of his marine science-fiction epic, followed by a conversation about the film’s groundbreaking production and enduring legacy. Hurd, one of Hollywood’s most influential producers, is best known for The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Armageddon, The Incredible Hulk, and as the executive producer of the television series The Walking Dead. She has also produced several documentaries, including three that are focused on Native Americans, in partnership with director Valerie Red-Horse Mohl: True Whispers: The Story of the Navajo Code Talkers, Choctaw Code Talkers, and Mankiller.
Tickets available at the box office or sagharborcinema.org
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ABOUT THE FILMS
IN THE HAND OF DANTE
Directed by Julian Schnabel
USA | 2025 | 153 mins | English
Plays August 6 | Followed by a Q&A with director Julian Schnabel
In the Hand of Dante follows the parallel lives of a New York author (Nick Tosches) in the 21st century who embarks on a violent journey after he is recruited by a mafia don to steal Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy written in the poet’s own hand, and Dante in the 14th century seeking inspiration to write his most important work — each man unknowingly connected through time and their obsessive quest for love, beauty, and the divine.
In the Hand of Dante is presented as part of Portrait of the Artist: Julian Schnabel and Film.
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THEY LIVE BY NIGHT
Directed by Nicholas Ray
USA | 1948 | 95 mins | English
Plays August 10 I Followed by a Q&A with cinematographer Sean Price Williams and curator Bob Rubin
Legendary director Nicholas Ray began his career with this lyrical film noir, the first in a series of existential genre films overflowing with sympathy for America’s outcasts and underdogs. When the wide-eyed fugitive Bowie (Farley Granger), having broken out of prison with some bank robbers, meets the innocent Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell), each recognizes something in the other that no one else ever has. The young lovers envision a new, decent life together, but as they flee the cops and contend with Bowie’s fellow outlaws, who aren’t about to let him go straight, they realize there’s nowhere left to run. Ray brought an outsider’s sensibility honed in the theater to this debut, using revolutionary camera techniques and naturalistic performances to craft a profoundly romantic crime drama that paved the way for decades of lovers-on-the-run thrillers to come.
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FARGO
Directed by Joel & Ethan Coen
USA | 1996 | 98 mins | English
Plays August 21 | Followed by Q&A with composer Carter Burwell
Released in 1996, Fargo cemented Joel and Ethan Coen as two of the most distinctive voices in American cinema. Blending film noir with their signature dark humor, the film transforms an ordinary crime gone wrong into a uniquely American fable. Winner of two Academy Awards—including Best Original Screenplay and Best Actress for Frances McDormand—Fargo remains a defining neo-noir film.
Set in Minnesota in 1987, Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) is a car salesman in Minneapolis who has gotten himself into debt and is so desperate for money that he hires two thugs (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to kidnap his own wife. Jerry will collect the ransom from her wealthy father (Harve Presnell), paying the thugs a small portion and keeping the rest to satisfy his debts. The scheme collapses when the thugs shoot a state trooper.
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THE KILLING
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
USA | 1956 | 84 mins | English
Plays August 24 | With a special presentation by photographer James Hamilton
Stanley Kubrick’s account of an ambitious racetrack robbery is one of Hollywood’s tautest, twistiest noirs. Aided by a radically time-shuffling narrative, razor-sharp dialogue from pulp novelist Jim Thompson, and a phenomenal cast of character actors, including Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, Timothy Carey, Elisha Cook Jr., and Marie Windsor, The Killing is both a jaunty thriller and a cold-blooded punch to the gut. And with its precise tracking shots and gratifying sense of irony, it’s Kubrick to the core.
Career criminal Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) recruits a sharpshooter (Timothy Carey), a crooked police officer (Ted de Corsia), a bartender (Joe Sawyer) and a betting teller named George (Elisha Cook Jr.), among others, for one last job before he goes straight and marries his fiancée, Fay (Coleen Gray). But when George tells his restless wife, Sherry (Marie Windsor), about the scheme to steal millions from the racetrack where he works, she hatches a plot of her own.
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THE ABYSS: SPECIAL EDITION
Directed by James Cameron
USA | 1989 | 171 mins | English
Plays August 27 | Followed by a Q&A with producer Gale Anne Hurd
After a U.S. nuclear submarine mysteriously sinks in the depths of the ocean, a civilian deep-sea drilling crew is recruited to assist a Navy SEAL recovery mission. As tensions mount beneath crushing pressure, estranged petroleum engineers Bud Brigman (Ed Harris) and Lindsey Brigman (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) must confront their fractured relationship while encountering an extraordinary alien aquatic species that challenges humanity’s understanding of the unknown.
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About the Sag Harbor Cinema
As a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) community-based organization, Sag Harbor Cinema is dedicated to presenting the past, present and future of the movies and to preserving and educating about films, filmmaking, and the film-going experience in its three state-of-the-art theaters. The Cinema engages its audiences and the community year-round through dialogue, discovery, and appreciation of the moving image – from blockbusters to student shorts and everything in between. Revitalized and reimagined through unprecedented community efforts to rebuild the iconic Main Street structure after a fire nearly destroyed it in 2016, SHC continues a long historic tradition of entertainment in the heart of Sag Harbor Village.