TIM Burton’s favourite film at Cannes 2010, the dreamlike Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (12A), will be shown at City Screen, York, on Tuesday at 6.15pm.

Winner of the French festival’s premier prize, the Palme d’Or, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Thai tale of reincarnation revolves around a man dying with kidney failure returning to the forest of his childhood to spend his last days.

There he recalls his own past lives and those of others, such as his dead wife and lost son, who reappears as a forest monkey spirit.

The film is not only director Weerasethakul’s tribute to the myths he learnt when growing up in Thailand’s north east but also a parable of Thai cinema, which he considers to be “dying or dead”.

“Watching it is an unusual, sometimes challenging, but ultimately rewarding experience,” promises the City Screen brochure. “It won’t be like many films you will have seen before.” For tickets, phone 0871 902 5726 or book online at picturehouses.co.uk


I Am Love meets Meet The Parents in Ferzan Özpetek’s bittersweet family comedy-drama Loose Cannons (12A) in the Sunday Special at City Screen on January 2 at 8pm.

No other nationality respects food and family gatherings with the fervour and zest of the Italians, but when it comes to the Cantone family, some things are better left well away from the dinner table and in the closet.

Tommaso (Riccardo Scamarcio) is the youngest child in this large, eccentric family, the owners of a pasta factory in Puglia. His mother Stefania (Lunetta Savino) is loving but suffocated by bourgeois conventions; his father Vincenzo (Ennio Fantastichini) has unrealistically high expectations of his children; his aunt Luciana (Elena Sofia Ricci) is an eccentric with a soft spot for liqueur.

Sister Elena (Bianca Nappi) is a frustrated housewife; brother Antonio (Alessandro Preziosi) pines for a forbidden romance; and then there is his rebellious grandmother (Ilaria Occhini), the Loose Cannon of the title, trapped in the memory of an impossible love.

When the Cantones gather for a dinner to welcome Tommaso’s return and to discuss the business’s future, a secret is revealed that throws the family into turmoil as the gay brothers inadvertently wind up competing over who will be the first to come out.

The strong familial ties that bind them together are put to the test with explosive results in Ozpetek’s satire, especially as neither brother is prepared to accept the post of head of the pasta business.


MARC Dugain’s French psychological drama An Ordinary Execution (12A) will be shown for one night only at City Screen on January 4, at 6.15pm.

Based on his own novel, Dugain’s directorial debut imaginatively recalls the last days of Stalin’s dictatorship, delving into the lives of people caught up in the maelstrom of his infamous Doctors’ Plot.

Anna, a gifted young doctor, is secretly summoned to the Kremlin to treat the ailing dictator, who rambles and reminisces affably but with a constant hint of menace, leading her to fear she could be killed or exiled to a Gulag at any moment.

For tickets, phone 0871 902 5726 or book online at picturehouses.co.uk