Assault on Precinct 13

media release: USA | 1976 | DCP | 90 min.

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Austin Stoker, Darwin Joston, Laurie Zimmer

One of the very best independent movies of the 1970s takes place in a soon-to-be-defunct inner city; police station. When a massive, marauding mob of criminals lay siege to the practically empty building, it’s up to one lone cop, a secretary, and a mysterious prisoner to defend Precinct 13. Though neither a traditional Western or zombie movie, writer/director/music composer Carpenter’s second feature plays like a pulse-pounding hybrid of Rio Bravo and Night of the Living Dead. A new 4K restoration from the American Genre Film Archive will be screened!

Admission free for all screenings, seating limited. No admission 15 minutes after scheduled start times. Please visit our website for a complete listing of programs and descriptions.

2X: JOHN CARPENTER, BILLY WILDER, MICHAEL MANN, JACKIE CHAN

Our first 2023 calendar offers double doses (presented over two consecutive weeks) of four very different and highly idiosyncratic auteurs. The first two features of celebrated genre director John Carpenter provide a glimpse into Carpenter’s developing style (Dark Star) and a fully-realized embodiment of that style (Assault on Precinct 13). Six-time Academy Award winner Billy Wilder is represented by two wonderful but lesser-known comedies: one from his first decade of filmmaking (A Foreign Affair) and one from his last (Avanti!). Thief and Heat are two highly stylized and critically acclaimed crime films of Chicago-born Michael Mann, and both will be shown on 35mm prints! The amazing martial arts acrobatics of the legendary actor-producer Jackie Chan will be on full display when we screen one entry from each of the popular film series that definitively established his big screen persona: Drunken Master II and Police Story III: Supercop.