Following the official government advice issued Mon 16 March, which asked that people should avoid public spaces including theatres, pubs and clubs, Bury St Edmunds Film Society have regretfully been forced to cancel/postpone the remaining films in our spring season. We apologise to our supportive members and guests as we understand how disappointing this is. We have made this decision with the safety and well-being of everyone in mind. We are taking steps to rearrange our film schedule with a view to running extra screenings during the autumn. Please watch the website for updates and we will contact you again once screenings resume. Our thanks to everyone for your understanding.

After careful consideration, the Committee has reluctantly decided to cancel the screening on Sunday 15 March in the interests of the health and safety of our members and guests. We have been keeping the Covid19 Coronavirus situation under review; in the light of the continuing growth in cases we feel the time has come to mitigate any risk to our members by suspending this screening. We will continue to monitor the situation and will let you know in good time whether or not we will be cancelling further screenings.

Thank you for your co-operation and please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any queries.

Historical drama by cult director Takashi Miike (Audition); a remake of Eiichi Kudo's 1963 Japanese period piece (also called) 13 Assassins. This is loosely based on historical events and stars Kōji Yakusho, Takayuki Yamada, Yūsuke Iseya and Gorō Inagaki. In 19th-century Japan, toward the end of the Edo period, Shinzaemon Shimada (Koji Yakusho) is secretly hired by a government official to eliminate the ruthless Lord Naritsugu Matsudaira (Goro Inagaki), who is wreaking havoc on his own people. Shimada recruits a team of Assassins - the best samurai in Japan - hoping to end Matsudaira's reign of terror. The film focuses on their story, told with verve and elan, but also with real dignity and a great sense of pace, which culminates in a riveting, ingeniously plotted and inventively shot battle scene. Solid direction by Miike, beautifully shot and simply some of the best and most intense action sequences put on film. 13 Assassins made the British Film Institute's list of 10 great samurai movies.

APOCALYPSE NOW : The FINAL CUT (US, 1979, 15)

"It is not about war so much as about how war reveals truths we would be happy never to discover." American epic film directed, produced and co-written by Francis Ford Coppola. This new (third!) cut was released for its 40th anniversary in 2019 and is Coppola's most realized version of the film. Co-written by John Milius with narration written by Michael Herr. It was inspired by Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness and Herr’s own Vietnam reportage-memoir Dispatches (1977). Starring Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen and Dennis Hopper. During the Vietnam War, Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Sheen) is assigned a mission in Cambodia to search and assassinate Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Brando), a renegade Army Special Forces officer accused of murder, presumed insane and treated as a demigod by a tribe. Willard is escorted by Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (Duvall) and on arrival at Kurtz's outpost he is greeted by an American freelance photojournalist (Hopper), a manic disciple of Kurtz. This visually dazzling masterpiece is a surreal, hallucinatory, epic tragedy about the horrors of the Vietnam War. Apocalypse Now won several awards including two Academy Awards, for Best Cinematography and Best Sound and three Golden Globes for best original score (Francis Ford Coppola, Carmine Coppola), Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor (Robert Duvall) and is one of American Film Institute's top 100 films of all time.

NOTE: Film starts at 5.30pm. Bar from 5pm

THE GENERAL (US, 1926, U)