Flim-Flam Redux

Overview

In one of cinema's great sci-fi thrillers, an unhappy middle-aged man is offered a new life. It means forgoing everything he currently knows and, naturally, that bargain comes with consequences. At its most basic, that's the premise of John Frankenheimer's 1966 masterpiece Seconds, a Cannes-premiering, Oscar-nominated Rock Hudson-starring classic that serves up a paranoia-dripping nightmare. Unsurprisingly, the hallucinatory film has much to say about both the dream of starting all over again and the follies of unthinking conformity — and it still feels oh-so relevant and chilling more than five decades after it first hit screens.

Also unsurprisingly, Seconds is a great pick for the Art Gallery of New South Wales' current film season — a series of free movie screenings that's all about fakes, scams, fabricated realities, doppelgangers, false identities and body swaps. It's just one of the titles on offer at Flim-Flam Redux, with the program screening twice a week, on Wednesdays and Sundays at 2pm, until Sunday, September 27.

Movie buffs can also catch Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Salaam Cinema, which blends documentary and fiction in depicting a casting call for a new film; Mikey and Nicky, Elaine May's gangster flick about a bookie on the run; and Despair, the first English-language feature by the great German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Some titles screen with a thematically linked short, too.

While entry is free, you do need to register in advance to attend.

Flim-Flam Redux screens on Wednesdays and Sundays at 2pm until Sunday, September 27 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.