In the suffocating heat of Paris, an American safecracker is drawn into a botched bank robbery that spirals into nihilistic excess, chemical detachment, and self-annihilation. Killing Zoe captures the early-90s collision of cinephilia and disaffection: a film obsessed with its own cool, yet unable to escape the violence and emptiness it performs. Avary stages crime as a closed circuit of bravado and decay, where loyalty erodes under narcotics and adrenaline, and style becomes a form of denial rather than control.

This screening is presented by Scanners, Inc. from a 35mm scan overseen by Peter Aldanmaz (aka NC-17), responsible for the film’s recent restoration. Drawn from release prints, the scan preserves the texture of the original theatrical experience—grain intact, reel-change marks visible, and damage left unpolished.

Set within the insulated sprawl of an East Coast liberal arts college, The Rules of Attraction fractures youth into overlapping monologues of desire, resentment, and emotional vacancy. Characters orbit one another without alignment, mistaking proximity for intimacy and indulgence for meaning. Avary adapts Bret Easton Ellis with a cold formalism that mirrors the film’s worldview: time loops, perspectives contradict, and events recur without consequence. Romance is transactional, sex is anesthetic, and connection is endlessly deferred. What emerges is not a cautionary tale but a system—self-contained, performative, and quietly brutal—where everyone is both observer and casualty.

This screening is presented by Scanners, Inc. from a 35mm scan.

On the streets of Brooklyn, a cop’s pursuit of a psychopath who murdered his partner escalates into a one-man campaign of humiliation, intimidation, and retributive violence. Out for Justice strips the police thriller down to its rawest components: territorial masculinity, public dominance, and justice reduced to spectacle. Steven Seagal’s Gino Felino operates less as a lawman than as an unstoppable corrective force, moving through bars, alleys, and family spaces with absolute certainty and zero moral hesitation.

Flynn frames the city as a hostile arena where order is imposed, not negotiated, and where legality is secondary to personal codes of loyalty and honour. The film’s notorious confrontations—played out in full view of the community—transform justice into a performance designed to shame as much as punish. Devoid of irony or self-reflection, Out for Justice embodies a particular early-90s fantasy of control: blunt, territorial, and brutally efficient, offering catharsis not through resolution, but through dominance asserted until resistance collapses.

This screening is presented by Scanners, Inc. from a 35mm scan.

In a decaying urban high school ruled by gangs, intimidation, and institutional collapse, an idealistic music teacher enters a system already beyond repair. Class of 1984 weaponises the teen delinquent film, escalating it into something closer to vigilante horror, where authority is systematically humiliated and civility proves to be a fatal weakness. Lester frames the school as a closed ecosystem of aggression—corridors as battlegrounds, classrooms as holding cells, where violence is not aberrant but structural.

The film’s moral universe is stark and unsentimental: attempts at reform are punished, empathy is exploited, and retaliation becomes the only language left intact. Its lurid set-pieces and confrontational tone reflect early-80s anxieties about social breakdown, youth nihilism, and the perceived failure of liberal restraint. Class of 1984 offers no rehabilitation narrative and no clean resolution—only the grim suggestion that once authority collapses, order can be restored only through force, leaving victory indistinguishable from surrender.

This screening is presented by Scanners, Inc. from a 35mm scan.

When a devout Midwestern businessman travels to Los Angeles in search of his missing daughter, he descends into the commercialised labyrinth of the pornography industry, confronting a world that operates by entirely different moral and economic laws. Hardcore reframes the detective narrative as a spiritual crisis, charting not just a physical search but the collapse of a belief system unable to survive contact with late-70s American capitalism. Schrader’s direction is austere and punitive, refusing sensationalism even as it exposes exploitation, coercion, and commodified intimacy.

The film’s power lies in its refusal to grant moral superiority to any side: faith offers no protection, transgression offers no freedom, and revelation provides no cleansing. As the father pushes deeper into spaces he cannot control or comprehend, the film reveals the violence inherent in both repression and consumption. Hardcore ultimately presents America as a divided landscape held together by denial, where innocence is a constructed fantasy and exposure brings not salvation, but a quieter, more devastating form of loss.

This screening is presented by Scanners, Inc. from a 35mm scan.