Special 35mm Screenings

Cambridge Premiere Thursday, April 25 – Sunday, April 28

RIDDLE OF FIRE is a brand-new film tailor made to be a cult hit. It’s a neo-fairy tale in the style of those great Amblin Pictures adventures of the 1980s but shot through with an extremely contemporary sense of place… Think Harmony Korine’s The Goonies. 

This wonderful adventure film follows the Three Immortal Reptiles, a sweetly rebellious trio of dirt-bike riding kids, who are sent on a quest by their sick mother—a quest for a very specific blueberry pie. Their reward? The password to unlock the family TV so they can play a brand-new video game console. During the course of their quest, the trio run into ogres, witches, magical creatures, and enchanted forests. 

With a cast of mostly non-professional actors who all just seem to be having the greatest time committing this looney, homespun madness to celluloid (yes, indeed, this was shot on Kodak 16mm film and blown up to 35mm for this special run!), RIDDLE OF FIRE succeeds in creating a feeling of warm nostalgia without ever feeling like a pastiche or imitation of those beloved films from the Reagan Era. 

“Evokes the sensation of tuning into a late-night broadcast of an obscure and wackadoo children’s film from another dimension. Amblin’ through a menagerie of esoteric genres and cult-film references, and unified by a precise, nostalgic mise en scène that might be described as “Wes Anderson’s Gummo,” its charisma crystalizes in the raw, unpracticed performances of its young cast. The sweet air of artifice to their gleeful recitations of Razooli’s charmingly verbose dialogue paradoxically assumes an endearing kind of meta-naturalism. Intermittent line-flubs are preserved, as are the winning infectious grins of kids having the best summer of their lives.” – Peter Kuplowsky, Toronto International Film Festival