30th Anniversary of Bottle Rocket with Wes Anderson

In person: Sofia Coppola

In person: Turner Classic Movies host Dave Karger and actor Jason Bateman

North American premiere of the 3D version

In person: writer/director Guillermo del Toro

A tribute to Sam Neill

In person: director Taika Waititi

4K restoration world premiere

In person: Ellen Burstyn

In October 1995, group of African American men board a bus for a cross-country trip to Washington D.C. They have different backgrounds and hold varying beliefs, but they’re all on the way to the same march. Among them are a father and a teenage son forced together by court order; a gay couple on the verge of a breakup; an aspiring actor who’s homophobic and loud about it; and a man whose father, a police officer, was killed, he says, “by a brother.” Most of the film takes place in or around the moving bus as the conversations grow more personal, and emotions roil to the surface.

Spike Lee’s Get on the Bus, which was shot in three weeks, was financed by a small group of men including Danny Glover, Wesley Snipes, Will Smith, and Johnnie Cochran. Inspired by the Million Man March of 1995, Lee's film delves into the racism that has influenced Black communities for generations, creating space for genuine, and difficult, discourse about the community’s inner and outward-facing conflicts.

A hapless young backpacker (voiced by Andy Samberg) stumbles upon an Eastern European resort and falls for the owner’s daughter (Selena Gomez), unaware that he’s discovered a hotel for monsters and that his prospective father-in-law is Dracula himself. Adam Sandler leads the stellar comedic voice cast as the Count, with Kevin James as Frankenstein’s monster, Fran Drescher as his bride, Steve Buscemi as a werewolf, and David Spade as the Invisible Man. Director Genndy Tartakovsky’s inventive visuals are an ideal match for the script’s winning mixture of humor and sentiment. The film would spawn three sequels and a TV series.

A vampire hunter known as Blade (Wesley Snipes) uses his superhuman abilities to protect humanity from neck-biting undead under the guidance of mentor Abraham Whistler (Kris Kristofferson). The half-undead, half-human daywalker also seeks revenge for his mother’s murder at the hands of a vampire during her pregnancy. Based on the comic book series of the same name, Blade was the first film produced by Marvel Studios. An unexpected box-office success, the film helped pave the way for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Snipes’s undeniable charisma as the leather-clad slayer and his decades of training in martial arts helped cement the character’s place in pop culture.

US 4K restoration premiere

In person: cartoonist Nathan Gelgud and critic A. S. Hamrah

In person: actors Robin Tunney and Rachel True

The haunting tale of a scholar, tempted by the Devil to sign away his soul in exchange for universal knowledge, has been a resonant cultural motif across five centuries. If the essential literary text for the Faustian myth is Johan Wolfgang von Goethe’s 19th century poetic drama, its cinematic equivalent is F. W. Murnau’s visionary 1926 silent adaptation, a masterpiece of haunting visual design that explores rich themes of morality and materialism.

Starring Oscar-winning actor Emil Jannings as the terrifying trickster Mephisto, Murnau’s tale emerges from the disturbing underworld into the dreams of lost innocence for one of the most remarkable films from the German Expressionist milieu. A century later, scores of international filmmakers, including Guillermo del Toro, Jennifer Kent, and Robert Eggers, continue to be influenced by this masterwork. The Academy Museum is thrilled to present this film with live accompaniment on the occasion of its centennial and of MUBI’s newest publication, The Faust Bible: The Making of F. W. Murnau’s Masterpiece, which will be available for purchase in the Academy Museum Store.

Programmed and note by K.J. Relth-Miller.

In person: Sissy Spacek