Elements of Cinema Screening at the Brattle Theatre: Cruising

Simultaneously an amazing time-capsule of a film, a showcase for the young Al Pacino, and a gutsy thriller, Cruising was reviled during its making by the gay community who feared that Friedkin was making a homophobic exploitation film. Far from it, Cruising is a tough, based-in-reality, neo-noir that casts Pacino as a cop sent undercover in the leather scene of NYC in the late Seventies to pursue a serial killer. Despite a taut storyline, the most tension in the film comes from the revelations that Pacino’s character has about his own ‘forbidden’ desires.

Elements Of Cinema is made possible by a grant from the Cambridge Arts Council, a local agency supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.