Staff Pick: Walker (On 35mm)

Belying the jingoistic pulse we all assumed simmered just below the surface, Jake’s Staff Pick is the hallucinatory biopic that breaks all cinematic conventions. From British director Alex Cox, WAKER tells the story of nineteenth-century American adventurer William Walker (Ed Harris), who abandoned a series of careers in law, politics, journalism, and medicine to become a soldier of fortune and, for many months, the dictator of Nicaragua. Made with mad abandon and political acuity—and the support of the Sandinista army and government during the contra war—the film uses this true tale as a satirical attack on American ultrapatriotism and a freewheeling condemnation of “manifest destiny.” Featuring a powerful score by Joe Strummer and a performance of intense, repressed rage by Harris, WALKER remains one of Cox’s most daring works. – Criterion.

With Ed Harris, Richard Masur, Rene Auberjonois, Peter Boyle, Marlee Matlin & Joe Strummer.