Seasons

Exploring the vibrant, chaotic, and imaginative world of Turkish cult cinema from the 1950s to the 1980s. From legendary superhero adaptations and low-budget horror to subversive cult classics and avant-garde gems, this season celebrates the unbridled creativity of Turkey's genre filmmaking history.

The Nickel is proud to present this season in collaboration with Pera Museum Film and Video Programmes and Sinematek/Sinema Evi, programmed by Gülçin Kaya Üstündağ. Art by Dominic Hicks.

Two films from 1971 in which Clint Eastwood’s cool, seductive persona turns dangerously against him.

In Don Siegel’s feverish Southern Gothic THE BEGUILED, a wounded Union soldier takes refuge in an isolated girls’ school, where desire, jealousy and resentment gather around him with increasingly poisonous force. Then Eastwood makes his directorial debut with PLAY MISTY FOR ME, casting himself as a late-night radio DJ whose casual encounter with an ardent listener develops into a nightmare of obsession and escalating violence.

A double bill of sexual menace, bruised masculinity and tables brutally turned.

Sunday 20 September
THE BEGUILED at 6pm
PLAY MISTY FOR ME at 8.30pm

Welcome to EROTIC THRILLERS, a season of dark and dangerous fantasies, handpicked from the era of late night cable and top shelf VHS.

Sleek, steamy, deliriously plotted and frequently disreputable, the erotic thriller turned sex, suspicion and voyeurism into some of the most compulsive cinema of the 1980s and 90s. Born from an era of late night cable, video store shelves and newly loosened boundaries around sex on screen, these were films in which desire was rarely innocent and looking was almost always dangerous.

Among the programme are two mystery wildcard erotic thrillers, both selected from the genre’s stranger, steamier and less respectable corners.

Brian De Palma’s BODY DOUBLE is a delirious Hollywood nightmare of voyeurism, obsession and performance that pushes the erotic thriller towards pure cinematic hallucination. WILD THINGS follows with a gloriously slippery game of sex, money and manipulation in which every apparent truth is only waiting to be overturned.

From there the season heads deeper into video store territory with FLESHTONE, a neglected late night cable curio built around phone sex, fantasy and dangerous fixation, followed by IN THE COLD OF THE NIGHT, a dreamlike descent into erotic obsession where fantasy and reality begin to bleed together.

At the centre of the programme is the film that brought the erotic thriller crashing into the mainstream: Paul Verhoeven’s BASIC INSTINCT, a glossy, confrontational collision of sex, violence and suspicion that became one of the defining cinematic sensations of the decade. Curtis Hanson’s THE BEDROOM WINDOW takes a more Hitchcockian route, turning an illicit encounter and a glimpse through a window into an increasingly tangled web of voyeurism, deceit and murder.

Roman Polanski’s BITTER MOON takes desire somewhere darker still, charting the poisonous pleasures of sexual obsession, humiliation and revenge in one of the genre’s strangest and most corrosive variations.

A SEASON OF LAW AND DISORDER

The badge is supposed to separate the cops from the crooks. DIRTY COPS is devoted to films where that thin blue line gets blurred, and all cops are bastards.

Corruption, brutality, blackmail, dirty money, hard drinking and bad intentions run through a strain of crime cinema in which the law is less a moral force than another racket. These are underseen movies of cops on the take, cops coming apart and cops crossing lines.

From grimy precinct rooms and rain slicked city streets to narcotics busts, protection rackets and deals made in the shadows, DIRTY COPS explores the particularly nasty pleasures of police cinema once law and order have gone sour. Hardboiled, morally murky and often savagely cynical, these are films where everybody has a price, authority is dangerous and doing the right thing may be the quickest way to get killed.

Welcome to DIRTY COPS, a season of badges, bullets and bad intentions.