Thursday, August 16, 2012, 7:00 p.m.

This event is sold out.

Dir. David Cronenberg. 2012, 108 mins. With Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Sarah Godon, Paul Giamatti. The Museum is pleased to welcome back David Cronenberg (A History of Violence, Dead Ringers, The Fly, Videodrome), who was here for a complete retrospective earlier
this year. His new film, Cosmopolis, based on the prophetic novel by Don DeLillo, is a contemporary thriller that turns into a wild, hypnotic odyssey through our new millennium’s obsessions with power, money, control, information, technology, violence, sex, mortality, revolution, destruction and ultimately, redemption.

Unfolding in a single cataclysmic day, the story follows Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson)—a 28-year old financial whiz kid and billionaire asset manager—as he heads out in his tricked-out stretch limo to get a haircut from his father’s old barber, while remotely wagering his company’s massive fortune on a bet against the Chinese Yuan. Packer’s luxe trip across the city quickly becomes dizzyingly hellish as he encounters explosive city riots, a parade of provocative visitors, and is thrust into a myriad of intimate encounters. Having started the day with everything, believing he is the future, Packer’s perfectly ordered, doubt-free world is about to implode. Writing about the film from Cannes, Manohla Dargis (The New York Times) said, “Mr. Cronenberg does wonders with both the camera, especially inside the tight confines of limo, where many of the scenes are set, and with his star, coaxing a performance from Mr. Pattinson that perfectly works for the movie’s sepulchral air.”