Happy birthday for filmhouse

The season features the best of the big new releases including witty period romance Love &Friendship and Richard Linklater’s college comedy Everybody Wants Some!!

The cinema’s Under The Radar series continues to present brilliant new independent films from around the world, including the Irish music drama Sing Street and acclaimed Turkish drama Mustang.

A fascinating programme of documentaries includes Michael Moore’s new feature Where to Invade Next and a look at the career of one of the UK’s top filmmakers in Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach.

One of the highlights of the classic movie line-up is the Oscar-winning animation Spirited Away, shown as part of the continuing Studio Ghibli retrospective season.

Marking the cinema’s birthday there will be a special sing-a- long screening of the musical Calamity Jane and the EFFie Awards return for a third year.

One of the highlights of the cinema’s selection of top independent films is the Dublin-set drama Sing Street, from John Carney, director of Once. It follows a 15 year old school boy in the 1980s who forms a band to impress a mysterious girl he likes.

Shown in association with Q-Film, Holding the Man is based on Timothy Conigrave’s hilarious cult-classic memoir, telling the remarkable true-life love story of two young men who embark on a forbidden high school romance.

Juliet Stevenson (Truly, Madly, Deeply) stars in British drama Departure, about a mother and son both ‘coming of age’ while packing up their holiday home in the South of France, as the family starts to disintegrate.

In Australian drama, The Daughter, a re-working of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, Christian returns home for his father’s (Geoffrey Rush) wedding and reconnects with old friend, Oliver. As he gets to know Oliver’s wife and daughter, he uncovers a family secret that could tear them apart.

Delightful family animation, Long Way North, set in the late 1800s, sees a young aristocratic girl leave St Petersburg to find her grandfather, a renowned explorer who is yet to return from his latest Polar expedition.

A selection of the best foreign language films from around the world includes gripping Turkish drama Mustang, which follows five free-spirited young sisters who are confined to their home to keep them pure for their future husbands.

Japanese drama Our Little Sister from Hirokazu Koreeda (Like Father, Like Son) follows three adult sisters who meet their 13 year old half-sister for the first time at their estranged father’s funeral and together begin a new life of joyful discovery.

The latest big releases coming up at the Errol Flynn Filmhouse include the period romantic comedy Love & Friendship, based on Jane Austen’s short novel Lady Susan, starring Kate Beckinsale as a manipulative widow seeking to find husbands for herself and her daughter. The cast also includes Chloë Sevigny and Stephen Fry.

From the award-winning director Richard Linklater (Boyhood) comes a hilarious new comedy, Everybody Wants Some!!, following a group of baseball-playing college friends embracing freedom in the 1980s.

Tom Hanks stars in romantic comedy A Hologram for the King, playing an American businessman who travels to Saudi Arabia with a view to selling a new IT system.

Baffled by local customs and stymied by an opaque bureaucracy, he eventually finds his feet with the help of a wise-cracking taxi driver and a beautiful Saudi doctor.

Comic buddy crime thriller The Nice Guys, set in the 1970s, features Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe as a down-on- his-luck private investigator and a hired enforcer who must team up to investigate the apparent suicide of porn star, only to uncover a conspiracy.

The Avengers saga continues in Captain America: Civil War. After their latest mission is marred by civilian casualties, The Avengers find themselves under pressure to be regulated by the UN, causing a rift between Captain America (Chris Evans) and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr).

Wickedly funny horror thriller Green Room sees an aspiring rock band trapped in a club following a violent crime, with Patrick Stewart as the club’s extremely nasty owner.

There will also be further chances to see some recent audience favourites, including the biographical comedy Florence Foster Jenkins with Meryl Streep as the tuneless would-be opera singer, the futuristic film High-Rise starring Tom Hiddleston, war thriller Eye in the Sky starring Helen Mirren and biographical drama The Man Who Knew Infinity with Dev Patel as a young Indian mathematics genius accepted into Cambridge.

The Errol Flynn Filmhouse has an insightful selection of documentaries coming up. One of the highlights is Michael Moore’s subversive and hilarious new film, Where to Invade Next, in which he confronts the most pressing issues facing America today and finds solutions in the most unlikely places. The screening will be followed by a live satellite Q&A with Michael Moore.

Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach is a funny, provocative and revealing account of the life and career of one of Britain’s foremost filmmakers, as he turns 80 and looks back at over 50 years of filmmaking.

Shown as part of Northampton Music Festival, Where You’re Meant to Be follows Scottish cult-pop raconteur and former Arab Strap frontman Aidan Moffat as he tours Scotland in 2014, performing his modern re-interpretations of old folk songs.

The first definitive, feature length portrait of controversial American artist Robert Mapplethorpe since his death from AIDS in 1989, Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures includes intimate revelations from friends and family as well as candid never-heard- before interviews with the man himself.

Discover Arts: Teatro alla Scala – The Temple of Wonders tells the story of one of the world’s most exclusive music and performing arts venues, taking viewers through the main historical, musical, social and political events in La Scala’s 238-year history.

June’s classic film selection features a brace of movies from Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, starting with his celebrated 1962 debut feature Ivan’s Childhood, following a young Russian orphan who escapes from a Nazi prison camp and becomes a scout for the Soviet troops.

Tarkovsky’s 1972 sci-fi drama Solaris sees a psychologist sent to investigate unexplained behaviour on board a space station orbiting the fictional planet Solaris.

Other classics include Billy Wilder’s hysterical comedy Some Like it Hot, which sees Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon hiding from Chicago mobsters by masquerading as women in an all-female band, where they befriend singer Sugar, played by Marilyn Monroe.

The Studio Ghibli Retrospective continues this month, showing animated films from the visionary Japanese studio. Films scheduled for June are Only Yesterday, Princess Mononoke and the Oscar- winning family adventure Spirited Away. All are shown in Japanese with English subtitles. Full details are available on the cinema’s website.

As part of the popular programme of live broadcasts and event cinema, there will be a screening of an imaginative showcase of Latin-inspired dancing, Ballet Hispanico Double Bill, featuring Pedro Ruiz’s Club Havana and Gustavo Ramirez Sansano’s Picasso-inspired take on Carmen, recorded in New York.

The RSC Live screening of Hamlet, starring Paapa Essiedu, is already sold-out, but there is another chance to see the National Theatre’s acclaimed production of The Audience, recorded in London’s West End in 2013, starring Helen Mirren as the Queen.

Shown as part of Northampton Music Festival and marking the Errol Flynn Filmhouse’s third birthday, there will be a special sing-a- long screening of the classic 1954 musical Western Calamity Jane, starring Doris Day.

The cinema’s birthday also sees the return of the annual EFFie Awards where film-goers can vote for their favourite films seen at the Errol Flynn Filmhouse over the last year. Further details are available on the website.

All tickets can be booked in advance by calling box office on 01604 624811 or online at www.errolflynnfilmhouse.com, where full details can be found of the forthcoming programme with dates and times of all screenings.