Programmed June 2024

Directed by Paul Schrader

In anticipation of his latest opus, Oh, Canada , we’re revisiting the films of one of American cinema’s most provocative moral philosophers. For over forty years, Paul Schrader has probed the guilty soul of the modern world in a relentless search for existential meaning. Raised in a strict Calvinist household—a rigorous upbringing that would influence his cinematic philosophy and his study of the “transcendental” styles of directors like Yasujiro Ozu and Robert Bresson—Schrader exploded onto the scene with his screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver , an anguished howl of urban alienation that established him as one of the leading figures of the 1970s New American Cinema. Specializing in explorations of damaged souls driven to shocking extremes in their search for salvation,…