Sundays may be a “wan, stuff shadow of a robust Saturday” or a day of “forced leisure for folks who have no aptitude for leisure,” but a weekend is still a weekend. The pleasure of a Friday night, the knowing the burdens of work week have a brief respite carry themselves into the following two days of leisure, and what better way to indulge in that leisure than heading to the cinema.
And this weekend, there are more than enough wonderful films showing around New York for you to disappear into. Whether it’s your favorite Rohmer, classic Ray and Herzog, or anther round of “In the Flesh,” there is surely something to satisfy every cinematic appetite. I’ve rounded up the best of what’s playing around the city, so peruse our list, and enjoy.
***FRIDAY, AUGUST 29***
A TALE OF SPRINGTIME, Éric Rohmer
BAM
Temporarily in need of an apartment, Parisian philosophy instructor Jeanne (Teyssèdre) accepts an invitation to stay with young acquaintance Natasha (Darel) and her father (Quester)—but soon finds herself embroiled in her hosts’ messy emotional drama. The inaugural entry in Rohmer’s Four Seasons cycle, this absorbing slice-of-life comedy is anchored by a trio of refreshingly complicated characters, all drawn with the director’s trademark light touch.
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THE BIG LEBOWSKI, Joel and Ethan Coen
IFC Center
All Jeff ‘the Dude’ Lebowski wants to do is go bowling, but when he’s mistaken for LA millionaire big Lebowski and a pair of thugs pee on his rug — “it really tied the room together!” — he’s forced to take action, and so the laziest man in Los Angeles County takes on nihilists, ferrets, and empire tycoons, guzzling White Russians all the while. The Coen Brother’s unstoppable cult classic has inspired countless bowling parties and drinking games, and even its own festival, and we’re happy to bring it back to the IFC Center.
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THE LITTLE AMERICAN, Cecil B. DeMille
MoMA
“America’s sweetheart” is torpedoed by a U-boat, becomes a spy for the Allies in France, and is sentenced to a firing squad. The film was released three months before American entry in the war and no doubt contributed to hatred of the “Huns.”
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WRITTEN IN THE WIND, Douglas Sirk
Museum of the Moving Image
In Sirk’s operatic melodrama, secret loves and unrequited passions destroy a wealthy Texas oil man and his family. As described by Sirk, “it was a piece of social criticism, of the rich and the spoiled and of the American family.” Malone won an Oscar for her startling portrayal of the millionaire’s nymphomaniac sister.
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THE BUDDING OF BRIE, Ron Sullivan
Anthology Film Archives
Perhaps the best adult film parody of classic Hollywood, legendary director “Henri Pachard” (Ron Sullivan) takes on Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Oscar-winning ALL ABOUT EVE, transforming it from a venomous Broadway backstage tale into a tongue-in-cheek spoof of the studio system. Lovable Hillary Summers stars as Brie Livingston, a small town simpleton pitied by legendary screen diva Diana Farnsworth (Joe Sarno favorite Jennifer Jordan) and recruited to be the star’s personal secretary. Of course Brie is not everything she appears to be, and will stop at nothing to usurp the box office throne from her increasingly irritated employer. Among her conquests on the road to stardom are suave director Eric Edwards, testy critic Jake Teague, miserable agent R. Bolla, and Sapphic Hollywood wife Laurien Dominique. With still-impressive period detail in its production design and costumes, a delightfully clever script blessed with plentiful in-jokes and sharp dialogue, and cult icon Jordan giving Bette Davis a run for her money as the vainest movie star imaginable, Sullivan’s film is an enduring classic richly deserving of its dedicated following. A marvelous X-rated love letter to the Hollywood dream factory!
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BLACK CAESAR, Larry Cohen
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
“I was born in New York City on a Monday…” This furious, low-budget crime picture dates from the golden age of Blaxploitation, when the genre was mining Hollywood’s past for stock narratives that could be given new and politically radical resonances. Black Caesar reworks the Hollywood gangster film, but the story—a poor black shoeshine boy takes out a corrupt mob boss, only to accept the white man’s power structures when he himself gains control—strikes a closer and more sensitive nerve. By the time Brown recorded the movie’s soundtrack, including the classic “Down and Out in New York City,” his music was evolving into an early and hugely influential form of funk, and its jumpy, aggressive rhythms meld seamlessly with the film’s claustrophobic urban setting.
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DETOUR, Edgar G. Ulmer
Nitehawk Cinema
A fast-talker loner club performer, a mysterious death, and a black-mailing dame…you can’t get more film noir than that. The best of genre, “King of the B’s” director Edgar G. Ulmer takes us cross country from New York to Los Angeles along with nightclub pianist as Al Roberts hitchhikes to visit his girlfriend. But after the driver he’s with suddenly dies, Roberts takes on his identity in order to avoid suspicion with the police. From that point, he only plunges deeper trouble with the law and the ladies.
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THE NAKED ROOM, Nuria Ibáñez
Anthology Film Archives
Among the most immensely powerful, exquisitely sensitive, and formally inspired documentary films in recent memory, THE NAKED ROOM takes place entirely within the confines of a pediatric therapist’s office in a Mexico City hospital, observing the initial consultations of a succession of deeply troubled kids, and brilliantly transforming this constricted space into a microcosm vast in its metaphorical dimensions. Not content to limit the physical scope of the film to the four walls of the therapist’s office, director Nuria Ibáñez focuses entirely on the faces of the children themselves, as they struggle to express their feelings of severe depression and trauma, and describe the situations that have brought them to this pass. Constructing the film almost entirely out of close-ups on the children, and relegating everything else – the doctor, the parents and guardians of the kids, the décor of the consulting room – off-screen, Ibáñez has created a film that is visually minimalist but that contains multitudes.
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NEAR DARK, Kathryn Bigelow
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
A pistol-packing outlaw family of blood suckers in an RV drift across Midwestern farm country in search of prey in this classic vampire road movie. Kick-ass action, hilariously gory setpieces, a mesmerizing Tangerine Dream score, and brilliant performances by Lance Henriksen and Bill Paxton: it’s finger-licking good!
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THAT MAN FROM RIO, Philippe de Broca
Film Forum
A blow dart-wielding thug snatches a rare statuette from the Musée de l’Homme; anthropologist Jean Servais (Rififi) is kidnapped in broad Parisian daylight; serviceman Jean-Paul Belmondo begins his 8-day leave by changing to civvies in a Métro entrance and witnesses fiancée Françoise Dorléac (Catherine Deneuve’s sister, killed in a car accident 3 years later) getting kidnapped herself – and then the chase begins: by motorcycle, shoe leather, flight to Rio de Janeiro sans ticket or passport, airport baggage carrier, cable car, pink car complete with green stars and a rumble seat, water skis, Amazon river boat, seaplane, jungle vine… all shot in breathtaking widescreen and color. Even as Dorléac, rescued, is kidnapped again, Belmondo performs his own blood-curdling stunts against that sugar loaf Rio skyline and across that under-construction unearthly architecture of Brasilia (even parachuting almost into the jaws of a hungry croc). Non-stop spoof of… James Bond? More like a pre-Raiders Raiders – but does Belmondo get back in time from that leave? Co-scripted by Jean-Paul Rappeneau (later director of Cyrano de Bergerac), with music by Georges Delerue (Hiroshima Mon Amour, Jules and Jim, and The Conformist: screening August 29 – September 4). This new restoration has been supervised by Pierre Lhomme, DP of Melville’s Army of Shadows and de Broca’s King of Hearts.
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***SATURDAY, AUGUST 30***
A SUMMER’S TALE, Éric Rohmer
BAM
An introverted young student (Poupard) finds himself caught between three alluring women while on a beach holiday in Brittany in this breezy coming-of-age comedy. The lightest and brightest of Rohmer’s Four Seasons quartet, this gorgeously shot, sun-kissed summer idyll is an affectionately bittersweet paean to young love.
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BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, Ang Lee
Museum of the Moving Image
Ang Lee won the Academy Award for Best Director for this groundbreaking blockbuster about the secret romance between two cowboys in Wyoming, adapted from Annie Proulx’s celebrated short story. Heralded as a twist on the American western, Brokeback Mountainis perhaps even more resonant as a contemporary American melodrama, in its nearly Sirkian take on the tragic love between two men and the social strictures that keep it taboo.
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SKI PARTY, Alan Rafkin
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
“Are you really the ski patrol?” Brown, flanked by the Famous Flames, literally skis into this prime slice of ’60s youth-movie cheese and, yanking off his winter coat, makes a cabin of sweatered, smiling teenagers feel good.Ski Party, in which certified heartthrob Frankie Avalon and his right-hand man Dwayne Hickman disguise themselves as young women to get special access to their sweethearts’ social lives, was an alpine extension of the then-booming beach-party genre (famed for its heavy use of musical cameos). Brown’s performance, backed by an invisible organ and horn section, is the movie’s highlight, and another milestone besides: filming the scene, Brown later confessed, was the only time that he had gone in for a split and torn the seat of his pants.
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SE7EN, David Fincher
IFC Center
“Serial killers and mismatched cops overcoming antagonism are seldom fresh, fruitful subjects for movies, but this exceptionally (and impressively) nasty thriller blends genres to grim and gripping effect. Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and Mills (Brad Pitt) are the detectives brought together when an obese corpse is discovered in a dismal apartment. Mills, who with his wife (Paltrow) has recently moved to the city from upstate, resents what he perceives as Somerset’s patronising attitude; still, the older cop, about to retire and weary of crime and moral apathy, is unusually educated, as becomes clear when they find a second mutilated body and he insists his young partner start reading the likes of Milton, Chaucer and Dante. Somerset’s theory? That a messianic murderer is perpetrating crimes to punish the Seven Deadly Sins – in which case there are five more to go. The film’s world is so shadowy, decaying and intentionally dated that one often wonders whether anyone involved has heard of electricity; at the same time, however, Somerset and Mills’ slow voyage from claustrophobic murk into blinding light makes for a vivid dramatic metaphor. Moreover, Fincher handles the violence with sensitivity, announcing its obscenity in spoken analyses and briefly glimpsed post mortem shots, but never showing the murderous acts themselves.” – Time Out (London)
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THE BIG PARADE, King Vidor
MoMA
Vidor’s pacifist romance about a rich doughboy and a French peasant, set against the spectacular canvas of the war, put Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on the map. This is arguably the best film made about World War I made after the war.
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SOULPOWER, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Zaire ’74—a three-day music festival for which dozens of top-flight performers, some African, others American, convened in Kinshasa a month before Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s “Rumble in the Jungle”—took place during a period of intense political and artistic ferment in American music. Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s document of the festival, assembled more than 30 years after the fact (from footage shot by, among others, Albert Maysles and Roderick Young) and bookended by a pair of searing performances by Brown, captures the event in all its tension, ecstasy, sweat, and uncertainty: Ali trades mock-punches with the lead singer of The Spinners, Bill Withers brings down the roof with a devastating rendition of “Hope She’ll Be Happier,” and revolution is in the air throughout.Soul Power is a revealing portrait of an era as manifested by some of its most dynamic and politically engaged performers.
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NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE, Werner Herzog
Nitehawk Cinema
Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre is the most hauntingly beautiful film to ever tackle the Bram Stoker legend of Dracula. As the story goes, Jonathan Harker travels to meet this elusive Count Dracula (played to a stunningly sick effect by Klaus Kinski) in order to secure land deeds in Wismar, Harker’s home town. Dracula follows him, bringing a wave of plague and destruction along with him, as he searches to steal the heart of Harker’s wife, Lucy. Perfectly paced, hazily dreary, and set to the most evocative score, Herzog’s Nosferatu elegantly intertwines death and love. Newly restored, its cinematic magic.
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WOMAN OF THE YEAR, George Stevens
Anthology Film Archives
When asked by HUAC if he had ever been a member of the Communist Party, screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr. famously responded, “I could answer…. But, if I did, I’d hate myself in the morning.” Best known as the first film that Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn co-starred in, WOMAN OF THE YEAR pits cultivated journalist Tess Harding (the role was loosely based on the career of Dorothy Thompson, a famous columnist and broadcaster) against Sam Craig, a down-to-earth sportswriter she ends up marrying. Lardner complained that his original ending was butchered by a rewrite by the conservative (and uncredited) screenwriter John Lee Mahin.
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WAYNE’S WORLD, Penelope Spheeris
Nitehawk Cinema
What started out as one of Saturday Night Live’s best sketches turned into one of the wackiest and irreverent pop-culture comedy of the 1990s. Penelope’s Spheeris’ film takes our two metal-head buddies, Wayne (Mike Myers) and Garth (Dana Carvey), from their local public access television show to the big time. But with larger-budgets, sleazy executives, and hot rocker girlfriends come bigger problems. Will the two save their show, their friendship AND the girl?!
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THE BLUES BROTHERS, John Landis
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
The Blues Brothers—Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, at the height of their comedic and dramatic powers—were a pair of SNL characters before they were a band, and a band before they were a pair of film heroes. (Their first album was released in 1978.) But their big-screen debut, a trigger-happy action odyssey in which the two brothers, one fresh out of jail, flee Nazis, cops, and country singers in an attempt to put on one great show, remains their crowning achievement, partly thanks to its scene-stealing musical cameos: Aretha Franklin as the singing proprietress of a soul-food restaurant; Ray Charles as a music-store owner; and Brown—whom the movie’s success temporarily helped lift out of a professional slump—as the roof-raising leader of a gospel choir.
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WHAT PRICE GLORY, Raoul Walsh
MoMA
The famous rivalry between Marines Flagg and Quirt is carried to the French trenches, bistros, and bedrooms. This film has been preserved and restored with support from the Film Foundation.
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TITILLATION, Damon Christian
Anthology Film Archives
A welcome return to ‘porn noir’ territory after our March series, Damon Christian’s private-dick farce is marked by a visually inventive bosom fascination, illustrated through wealthy Felix Fitzwilly’s obsession with an elusive buxom goddess who will magically fit into a large bronze brassiere in his collection. Fitzwilly enlists the aid of grizzled investigators Spado Zappo (Eric Edwards) and Pigeon Johnson (Randy West) to find his mystery lady, a journey that features more twists and turns than expected. Russ Meyer star Kitten Natividad makes one of her first adult film appearances as the object of Fitzwilly’s affections, and Trekkies will no doubt recognize talented leading lady “Heaven St. John” aka Angelique Pettyjohn, a full-figured blonde starlet making the surprise transition from mainstream Hollywood to the X-rated world as Fitzwilly’s femme fatale secretary. The first west coast film of the series, this is a sterling example of the kind of delicious fun happening in the California industry of the adult film’s ‘Golden Age.’
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PORTRAIT OF JENNIE, William Dieterle
Museum of the Moving Image
A hidden Hollywood treasure, the supernatural romantic melodrama Portrait of Jenniehas gained an intense cult following over the years. A masterpiece of mood and atmosphere, the film begins in Depression-era New York, where a struggling painter (Cotten) befriends an eccentric, otherworldly child (Jones)—who seems to age at a startling rate. As she becomes his muse, he sets out to unlock Jennie’s mystery, leading to an extravagant denouement that earned the film an Academy Award for best special effects.
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***SUNDAY, AUGUST 31***
AUTUMN TALE, Éric Rohmer
BAM
This richly layered comedy follows a widowed vineyard owner (Romand) whose two best friends take it upon themselves to play matchmaker for her—which leads to an elegantly plotted romantic roundelay. Bursting with the sensual delights of the French countryside, the sublime final installment in Rohmer’s Four Seasons series is full of witty and offhandedly profound observations on human nature—and features one of Rohmer’s most appealing and self-possessed heroines.
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STAGECOACH, John Ford
IFC Center
“STAGECOACH’s virtues remain intact. The visual contrast of claustrophobic interior spaces (the coach, the various way stations) with the expanse of Monument Valley provides a vivid physical correlative to the film’s thematic push for freedom, and the linear plot has a captivating metaphorical quality in its progress from a dying city through the wilderness to a city reborn. The film moves from east to west, with all that implies. With John Wayne, Claire Trevor, and the incipient Ford stock company.” – Dave Kehr
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JAMES BROWN PERFORMANCE COMPILATION
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
A truly one-of-a-kind assortment of clips of the Godfather of Soul, on stage and in his element. Spanning multiple periods of his career and featuring invaluable footage of Brown on The Ed Sullivan Show and Soul Street, this selection finds Mr. Dynamite workin’ it as only he could.Archival footage courtesy of Historic Films Archives and Joe Lauro.
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REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, Nicholas Ray
Museum of the Moving Image
“You’re tearing me apart,” cries 1950s icon James Dean in his definitive movie, released a month after his death. Dean’s Jim Stark expresses the turmoil that bubbles beneath the surface of a placid community in Nicholas Ray’s charged Freudian melodrama.
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THE T.A.M.I. SHOW, Steve Binder
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
The Holy Grail of concert films—with an eye-popping lineup including Chuck Berry, The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, The Beach Boys, and The Rolling Stones—went unseen outside the bootleg circuit for decades due to rights disputes. Seen in its full glory, it’s a showcase for American pop music at the undisputed height of its passion, humor, pathos, virtuosity, and vigor. Lesley Gore’s voice was never more commanding, and Mick Jagger shakes a mean maraca, but the undisputed highpoint is Brown’s four-song set: a sustained, expertly modulated outpouring of passion performed—fittingly, for an artist who began his career as a gospel singer—with the sweaty, bone-straining urgency of a man who feels his soul is on the line.
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THE COLOR PURPLE, Steven Spielberg
Museum of the Moving Image
In adapting Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about a poor black woman’s journey to self-actualization in the rural South of the early twentieth century, Spielberg fashioned an emotionally overwhelming, decades-spanning tearjerker that manages to be both an old-fashioned epic and a more modern-minded tale of female indomitability. With Allen Daviau’s cinematography indebted to the work of John Ford, the film is a nonstop visual feast, and features an ever-intensifying central performance by Goldberg that is a wonder to behold.
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THE CONFORMIST, Bernardo Bertolucci
Film Forum
In Mussolini’s Italy, repressed Jean-Louis Trintignant, trying to purge memories of a youthful, homosexual episode – and murder – joins the Fascists in a desperate attempt to fit in. As the reluctant Judas motors to his personal Gethsemane (the assassination of his leftist mentor), he flashes back to a dance party for the blind; an insane asylum in a stadium’ and wife Stefania Sandrelli and lover Dominique Sanda dancing the tango in a working class hall. But those are only a few of this political thriller’s anthology pieces, others including Trintignant’s honeymoon coupling with Sandrelli in a train compartment as the sun sets outside their window; a bimbo lolling on the desk of a fascist functionary, glimpsed in the recesses of his cavernous office; a murder victim’s hands leaving bloody streaks on a limousine parked in a wintry forest. Bernardo Bertolucci’s masterpiece, adapted from the Alberto Moravia novel, boasts an authentic Art Deco look created by production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, a score by the great Georges Delerue (Contempt, Jules and Jim, and That Man From Rio) and breathtaking color cinematography by Vittoria Storaro, who supervised this director approved restoration.
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JOY, Harley Mansfield
Anthology Film Archives
When does a film about sexual assault become a comedy? When it stars Sharon Mitchell, in her film debut, as a young lass who can’t get enough! Virginal young Joy is hesitant to go all the way with her boyfriend, but an unexpected and brutal assault by an apartment intruder has the unusual side effect of turning her into an insatiable nymphomaniac. “JOY GRIPS CITY!” scream the newspapers, as New York’s most surprising sex criminal sweeps through the streets, grabbing any man she fancies. In the process, her frenzied antics have inspired the women of the city to indulge in their urgent desires and follow suit, resulting in widespread assaults on men. Surprisingly not all the men of the city are enjoying this surge in female dominance, inspiring one policeman to take down Joy once and for all. Offering a subversive commentary on female empowerment and sexual agency, this ribald romp from the permissive 1970s must be seen to be believed!
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