The Live

Dir. John Carpenter (1988).
The Reagan revolution is masterminded by tele-canny creatures from outer space in John Carpenter’s minor classic (newly monographed by Jonathan Lethem). One of the few pulp political satires of the 1980s and a forgotten precursor of The Matrix, They Live is scarcely less timely today; Carpenter’s acid-ripped Woody Guthrie worldview posits the most visceral paranoid theory imaginable for consumer greed, industrial pollution, and media narcosis.

Fri., Dec. 10, 10:30 p.m., 2010