The Village + Planet of the Apes

• Friday, August 22 at 6:00pm (The Village) + 9:00pm (Planet of the Apes) – Q&A with M. Night Shyamalan after first film
• Thursday, September 4 at 1:45pm (The Village) + 4:00pm (Planet of the Apes)

The Village
M. Night Shyamalan, 2004, U.S., 35mm, 106m
Set in an isolated hamlet bordered by forbidding woods, M. Night Shyamalan’s arch 19th-century fable follows a blind young woman (Bryce Dallas Howard) who must decide whether to cross her community’s strict boundaries to save a gravely wounded man (Joaquin Phoenix). Beneath its period artifice, The Village plays like a post-9/11 analogy refracted through the American Gothic tradition—evoking Brockden Brown, Hawthorne, and Irving alongside Bush-era politics in its portrait of invented monsters, fear-inducing color codes, and the high cost of fabricated innocence, secrecy, and self-containment. The result is a melancholic thriller whose emotional directness is matched by its symbolic precision, with every element working in concert: Roger Deakins’s painterly cinematography, James Newton Howard’s haunting score, and a wholly committed ensemble including Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt, and Adrien Brody.

Followed by:

Planet of the Apes
Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968, U.S., 35mm, 112m
Charlton Heston stars in this landmark of late-’60s foreboding sci-fi as Taylor, an astronaut who crash-lands on a distant planet ruled by intelligent apes and governed by rigid hierarchies and religious dogma. Mute, primitive humans are used for sport and experimentation until Taylor’s arrival throws their society into chaos. With a screenplay by Rod Serling and Michael Wilson, Planet of the Apes imagines a civilization where fear, mythology, and suppression preserve order, and where its final revelation shatters not just the plot, but the foundations of belief itself. On-the-nose metaphors be damned: to this day it’s a chilling, venturesome meditation on human cruelty, made uncannily real by John Chambers’s groundbreaking ape makeup that rendered the impossible viscerally relatable.