POP UP CINEMA BRIGHTON

White Wall Cinema presents

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FRIDAY APRIL 17TH​

CUTTER'S WAY
 4K REMASTER 

DIRECTOR: Ivan Passer

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STARRING: Jeff Bridges, John Heard, & Lisa Eichhorn.

Hailed by Time Out as “nothing less than a modern masterpiece,” Cutter’s Way serves as the closing salvo in a lineage of taut, politically charged thrillers such as All the President’s Men, The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, and The Conversation. Empire magazine called it “a classy monument to the paranoia of post-Watergate America.” The film also fits neatly into the tradition of L.A. Neo-Noir cinema such as The Long Goodbye, Chinatown, Thief, Body Heat, Blue Velvet, To Live & Die in L.A., L.A. Confidential, Heat and even The Big Lebowski and Mulholland Drive.

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If you’ve only ever known John Heard as Macaulay Culkin’s dad in the Home Alone movies, you’ve been missing out on something truly special. A recent Financial Times article on Ivan Passer’s spectacular Cutter’s Way described Heard as “one of America’s great lost actors.” Despite a steady career that included memorable roles in Big, After Hours, Beaches, In the Line of Fire, The Pelican Brief, and The Sopranos, Heard’s masterful work in this film went largely unrecognized at its initial release due to a fumbled promotional effort by the studio. Today, however, Cutter’s Way stands as a masterclass in screen acting and one of American cinema’s finest forgotten gems.​

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The film also features an exceptional performance by Jeff Bridges (Lebowski, True Grit) as Richard Bone, a laid-back gigolo who becomes entangled in a murder investigation after witnessing the body of a dead cheerleader dumped in a quiet Santa Monica neighbourhood.

When his friends, Cutter (Heard), a disabled Vietnam veteran, and his intelligent, grounded wife Maureen (Lisa Eichhorn - Yanks, The Talented Mr. Ripley), learn about the murder, Cutter channels all his obsessive, unpredictable, and paranoid energy into confronting the suspected culprit: a powerful local oil tycoon, dragging the trio into an ever spiralling series of events. Portraying cynicism, vulnerability, and simmering anger all at once, Heard is positively electrifying in the role, and the entire film radiates with a unique neo-noir energy, that makes it both the definitive final statement on the post-Watergate era and a primal scream against the erosion of the American dream.

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Finally restored in 4K, Cutter’s Way is an engrossing, unusual, thrilling, and intelligent murder mystery with sharp political undertones, a landmark of American cinema that too few have experienced in all its glory.