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Set in the 1980s, this Palme d’Or-nominated Italian film from director Alice Rohrwacher is a revelatory cinematic achievement. In anyone else’s hands, a movie about a band of misfit gravediggers in search of love and treasure could end up as genre kibble; however, Alice Rohrwacher meets her characters where they are, and doesn’t deprive them of interiority or a shot at romance. When we meet our protagonist, Arthur, he’s a former archaeologist fresh from jail. He has nowhere to go except straight to his mother – an opera maestra played with fraught regality by screen legend Isabelli Rosselina. Back home, Arthur soon gets sucked back into the baser uses of his archaeological knowledge and joins a roving pack of “tombaroli” – the Italian word for tomb raiders. As their looting of millenia-old artifacts pays off, Arthur’s uncanny knack for dowsing rods drags him into mystical depths that seem to hold clues to lost love, though budding romance blooms around him. RogerEbert.com likens LA CHIMERA to an arthouse take on Indiana Jones or Lara Croft. Named one of the Top 5 International Films of 2023 by the National Board of Review.

Tuesday, July 1st
1pm and 7pm