After years of cinematic desolation, Knoxville film audiences can claim regional distinction: Between the various film series and festivals available throughout the year, Knoxville moviegoers can see international and independent movies that never screen in cities we typically think of as more cosmopolitan. And you get the chance to see them on a big screen, with an audience, the way most of them were intended to be seen.
SEPTEMBER
Public Cinema: Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World
Scruffy City Hall (32 Market Square) • Wednesday, Sept. 14 • 8 p.m. • Free
Werner Herzog stares into the abyss that is the Internet. (See this week’s movie review.)
Lo and Behold
Public Cinema: Chevalier
Knoxville Museum of Art (1050 World’s Fair Park) • Sunday, Sept. 25 • 2 p.m. • Free
A yacht trip in the Aegean Sea takes an unexpected turn when the participants push each other to dangerous limits in this Greek comedy/drama that explores masculinity and manners.
Panos Koronis in Chevalier
OCTOBER
Public Cinema: Dead Slow Ahead
Pilot Light (106 E. Jackson Ave.) • Tuesday, Oct. 4 • 7:30 p.m. • Free
A documentary-style sci-fi art-house thriller from Spanish director Mauro Herce.
Public Cinema: Slash
Scruffy City Hall (32 Market Square) • Wednesday, Oct. 12 • 8 p.m. • Free
A high-school freshman’s erotic fan fiction earns him more attention than he’d like—but it also takes him places he couldn’t imagine before in Clay Liford’s indie comedy.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Tennessee Theatre (604 S. Gay St.) • Saturday, Oct. 15 • $10
The classic B-movie send-up has become a Halloween tradition at the Tennessee, with a shadowcast and costumed attendees. (There will be other shadowcast performances around town TBA.)
Knoxville Horror Film Festival
Regal Downtown West Cinema 8 (1640 Downtown West Boulevard) and Scruffy City Hall (32 Market Square) • Oct. 21-23
Three nights of slasher movies, gorefests, FX spectaculars, thrillers and chillers, plus a new 4K remaster of the 1979 cult classic Phantasm and the usual cavalcade of shorts and trailers.
Public Cinema: Homo Sapiens
Knoxville Museum of Art (1050 World’s Fair Park) • Sunday, Oct. 23 • 2 p.m. • Free
Director Nikolaus Geyrhalter peers into urban spaces that we’ve forgotten and abandoned in this Austrian documentary.
Costumes and Classic Cartoons Open House
Tennessee Theatre (604 S. Gay St.) • Saturday, Oct. 29 • 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. • Free
Classic Warner Bros. cartoons and kids in Halloween costumes! Plus free tours of the Tennessee Theatre.
NOVEMBER
Public Cinema: Fraud
Pilot Light (106 E. Jackson Ave.) • Tuesday, Nov. 1 • 7:30 p.m. • Free
Fraud purports to be a collage of personal YouTube videos documenting the decline and fall of an American family. But it might be something else entirely.
Public Cinema: Ruggles of Red Gap
Scruffy City Hall (32 Market Square) • Wednesday, Nov. 9 • 8 p.m. • Free
Charles Laughton stars as an English valet whose employer loses him to a brash American cattle baron in a poker game in Leo Carey’s classic 1935 comedy.
Public Cinema: Hotel Dallas
Knoxville Museum of Art (1050 World’s Fair Park) • Sunday, Nov. 13 • 2 p.m. • Free
A Romanian family’s obsession with the ’80s prime-time soap opera Dallas sets off the plot of this “genre-bending road trip” directed by the husband-and-wife team of Livia Ungur and Sherng-Lee Huang.
Hotel Dallas
Public Cinema: Starless Dreams
Knoxville Museum of Art (1050 World’s Fair Park) • Sunday, Nov. 27 • 2 p.m. • Free
Mehrdad Oskouei directed this documentary about seven young women in an Iranian prison, and the circumstances that led them there.
Senior Editor Matthew Everett manages the Knoxville Mercury's arts & entertainment section, including the comprehensive calendar section—Knoxville’s go-to guide for everything worth doing in the area. You can reach Matthew at matthew@knoxmercury.com.
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