Unbreakable + Pulp Fiction

• Saturday, August 23 at 12:30pm (Unbreakable) + 2:45pm (Pulp Fiction)
• Wednesday, August 27 at 1:00pm (Unbreakable) + 3:15pm (Pulp Fiction)
• Sunday, August 31 at 5:30pm (Unbreakable) + 8:45pm (Pulp Fiction) – Q&A with M. Night Shyamalan after first film

Unbreakable
M. Night Shyamalan, 2000, U.S., 35mm, 106m
M. Night Shyamalan’s post-Sixth Sense follow-up (what Quentin Tarantino called “a brilliant retelling of the Superman mythology”) deconstructed the superhero film long before its modern blueprint became ubiquitous. Just outside a quiet Philadelphia suburb, a security guard (Bruce Willis) walks away from a catastrophic train crash without a scratch, which draws the obsessive interest of an enigmatic, flamboyantly disgruntled comic book dealer (Samuel L. Jackson). Framed in stark, panel-like compositions and told with eerie restraint, Unbreakable is a “cape opera” stripped of spectacle that treated questions of faith and identity with unsettling seriousness. In hindsight, one of its most fascinating legacies is how it morphed from a self-contained mystery into the first chapter of a stealth trilogy completed nearly two decades later (see Split and Glass).

Followed by:

Pulp Fiction
Quentin Tarantino, 1994, U.S., 35mm, 154m
Few films of the ’90s unfolded with the singular irreverence of Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino’s electrifying, Palme d’Or–winning reinvention of the pulp crime anthology. Anchored by John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson as a pair of philosophical hit men, and Bruce Willis as a washed-up boxer on the run from death (or worse), the film pulses with comic-book legibility and pop-art swagger. Every composition, cut, and needle drop is reverently ripped off yet meticulously dialed in and totally original. Not unlike Unbreakable, which would follow six years later, Pulp Fiction takes familiar genre material and reimagines it through a stylized, modern lens: Tarantino building a nonlinear, self-aware noir from the dog-eared pages of dimestore paperbacks, just as Shyamalan conjures a somber fable from the superhero origin story. An NYFF32 selection.