A month of fantastic varied cinema screenings at the Towner Gallery

New releases this month include Paul Schrader’s critically-acclaimed First Reformed, starring Ethan Hawke, and Carla Simón’s astonishingly assured debut film, Summer 1993.

Gemma Arterton gives a career-best performance in The Escape; Ian McEwan adapts his own novel for the screen with The Children Act; and Spike Lee is back on top-form with BlackKklansman.

Merchant Ivory’s Maurice, directed by Call Me By Your Name’s James Ivory, and restored and re-released this year by the BFI.

The film, which is part of the Towner’s Queer Film strand tells the story of Maurice Hall (James Wilby), growing up in repressed Edwardian England, coming to terms with his sexuality.

The gallery will also feature documentaries on wide-ranging topics: from Jean-Michel Basquiat’s meteoric rise to fame in Boom for Real to Studio 54, which charts the rise and fall of the legendary New York club.

Love, Cecil follows the career and life of renowned aesthete and tastemaker Cecil Beaton. And finally, British landscape artist Andy Goldsworthy’s practice is explored in Leaning Into the Wind.

Towner has also launched a new partnership with the University of Sussex. Every month they will invite an academic from the University’s Film Studies department to introduce a film of their choice.

On 16 September, for the first film in this partnership, we present one of Joan Crawford’s very best: Mildred Pierce, the only film for which she ever won an Oscar.

The film will be introduced by Dr Michael Lawrence, head of the department.

Towner’s Family Screenings return this month with Mary and the Witch’s Flower on September 22.

Young Mary follows a mysterious cat into the woods, where she discovers a broomstick and the mysterious Fly-by-Night flower, a rare plant which blooms only once every seven years. Together, the flower and the broomstick whisk Mary away to Endor College, a school of magic, run by Doctor Dee and headmistress Madam Mumblechook.

For full listings visit www.townereastbourne.org.uk/events/film/