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.
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***FRIDAY, OCTOBER 3***
MR. TURNER, Mike Leigh
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner is certainly a portrait of a great artist and his time, but it is also a film about the human problem of… others. Timothy Spall’s grunting, unkempt J.M.W. Turner is always either working or thinking about working. During the better part of his interactions with patrons, peers, and even his own children, he punches the clock and makes perfunctory conversation, while his mind is clearly on the inhuman realm of the luminous. After the death of his beloved father (Paul Jesson), Turner creates a way station of domestic comfort with a cheerful widow (Marion Bailey), and he maintains his artistic base at his family home, kept in working order by the undemonstrative and ever-compliant Hannah (Dorothy Atkinson). But his stays in both houses are only rest periods between endless and sometimes punishing journeys in search of a closer and closer vision of light. A rich, funny, moving, and extremely clear-eyed film about art and its creation. A Sony Pictures Classics
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THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR, Joseph L. Mankiewicz
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
This delicately funny, poignant, and haunting film, adapted by Philip Dunne from the Josephine Leslie novel (written under the pseudonym R.A. Dick), seems to have grown in resonance over the years. Mankiewicz’s love affair with Gene Tierney had ended by the time shooting started, but you would never know it from the way he and DP Charles Lang photograph her. Rex Harrison, whom Mankiewicz referred to as his “Stradavarius,” gave the first of four performances for the director as the ghost of a sea captain who appears before Tierney’s young widow Lucy Muir and dictates his “memoirs” to her; and George Sanders is the children’s author who temporarily steals Mrs. Muir’s heart. Fox’s period pieces were always a cut above everyone else’s, and their vision of a seaside village in Edwardian England is one of their supreme achievements. And the score is by Bernard Herrmann at his very best. In short, a convergence of remarkable talents that resulted in a truly great film.
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BOOM, Joseph Losey
Film Forum
On her own secluded island, a terminal-but-in-denial Elizabeth Taylor trades barbs with Noël Coward’s “Witch of Capri” until the advent of a mysterious Richard Burton as the “Angel of Death.” Adapted from Williams’ The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.”
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THE INCIDENT, Larry Peerce
BAM
Fear rides the rails in this gritty Gotham nerve-shredder as two sadistic hooligans (Musante and Sheen, each making their film debut) terrorize the passengers (Ed McMahon, Ruby Dee, and Thelma Ritter among them) aboard a Bronx subway train. Steeped in the nihilism of New Hollywood, The Incident is a tense, edgy portrait of violence run amok in the urban.
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SPEEDY, Ted Wilde
BAM
This time capsule of 1920s New York is an amusement ride from beginning to end, with Harold Lloyd—whose athletic slapstick is in top-notch form—as the title character, a soda jerk turned cabbie fighting to save the city’s last horse-drawn trolley from the evil forces of the mass transit monopoly. This silent masterpiece includes a sequence in which Speedy entertains his girlfriend in Coney Island—a mini-masterpiece of sight gags and slapstick—and be on the look out for a cameo by Babe Ruth!
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SUMMER AND SMOKE, Peter Glenville
Film Forum
In pre-WWI Mississippi, delicately refined minister’s daughter Geraldine Page (Oscar nominee, Best Actress) yearns for hell-raising doctor-next-door Laurence Harvey, but he’s busy chasing Rita Moreno. But after moral consequences, things and people change symmetrically. Adapted from an unsuccessful Williams play – but Page’s first stage triumph.
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PASOLINI, Abel Ferrara
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Pier Paolo Pasolini—filmmaker/poet/novelist, Christian, Communist, permanent legal defendant, and self-proclaimed “inconvenient guest” of modern society—was an immense figure. Abel Ferrara’s new film compresses the many contradictory aspects of his subject’s life and work into a distilled, prismatic portrait. We are with Pasolini during the last hours of his life, as he talks with his beloved family and friends, writes, gives a brutally honest interview, shares a meal with Ninetto Davoli (Riccardo Scamarcio), and cruises for the roughest rough trade in his gun-metal gray Alfa Romeo. Over the course of the action, Pasolini’s life and his art (represented by scenes from his films, his novel-in-progressPetrolio, and his projected film Porno-Teo-Kolossal) are constantly refracted and intermingled to the point where they become one. A thoughtful, attentive, and extremely frank meditation on a man who continues to cast a very long shadow, featuring a brilliant performance by Willem Dafoe in the title role. Note: This film contains scenes of a sexually explicit nature.
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TORRID ZONE, William Keighley
MoMA
Sheridan appears in her fully ravishing, red-headed glory in a major Warner production that featured her alongside two of the studio’s strongest male leads, James Cagney and Pat O’Brien. Sheridan, a tough-talking American chanteuse stuck without cash in a banana republic, gets involved in the rivalry between a fruit company’s shipping manger (O’Brien) and its number one plantation overseer (Cagney), as the local revolutionary (George Tobias) tries to topple it all. Photographed in tropical sepia tones by the great James Wong.
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***SATURDAY, OCTOBER 4***
SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, John Badham
BAM
John Travolta discoed his way into pop-culture immortality as the white-suited Tony Manero, a Bay Ridge hardware store clerk who lives only for the thrill of the dance floor. Packed with Bee Gees hits and colorful 1970s Brooklyn character (including the then-graffiti-scrawled MTA),Saturday Night Fever captures both the glamour and grit of the disco era.
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THE WONDERS, Alice Rohrwacher
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, Alice Rohrwacher’s follow-up to Corpo celeste (NYFF 2011) is a vivid story of teenage yearning and confusion that revolves around a beekeeping family in rural central Italy: German-speaking father (Sam Louwyck), Italian mother (Alba Rohrwacher), four girls. Two unexpected arrivals prove disruptive, especially for the pensive oldest daughter, Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu). The father takes in a troubled teenage boy as part of a welfare program and a television crew shows up to enlist local farmers in a kitschy celebration of Etruscan culinary traditions (a slyly self-mocking Monica Bellucci plays the bewigged host). The film never announces its themes but has plenty on its mind, not least the ways in which old traditions survive in the modern world, as acts of resistance or repackaged as commodities. Combining a documentary attention to daily ritual with an evocative atmosphere of mystery, The Wonders conjures a richly concrete world that is nonetheless subject to the magical thinking of adolescence.
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INHERENT VICE, Paul Thomas Anderson
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Paul Thomas Anderson’s wild and entrancing new movie, the very first adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel, is a cinematic time machine, placing the viewer deep within the world of the paranoid, hazy L.A. dope culture of the early ’70s. It’s not just the look (which is ineffably right, from the mutton chops and the peasant dresses to the battered screen doors and the neon glow), it’s the feel, the rhythm of hanging out, of talking yourself into a state of shivering ecstasy or fear or something in between. Joaquin Phoenix goes all the way for Anderson (just as he did in The Master) playing Doc Sportello, the private investigator searching for his ex-girlfriend Shasta (Katherine Waterston, a revelation), menaced at every turn by Josh Brolin as the telegenic police detective “Bigfoot” Bjornsen. Among the other members of Anderson’s mind-boggling cast are Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, Martin Short, Owen Wilson, and Jena Malone. A trip, and a truly great American film. A Warner Bros. Pictures release.
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NINOTCHKA, Ernst Lubitsch
IFC Center
“A sparkling, witty political fairy tale from 1939, about a cold but beautiful lady commissar (Greta Garbo) who melts to the bourgeois charms of Paris and Melvyn Douglas, jeopardizing both honor and career. That’s love. Garbo fully complements the casual sophistication and stylistic grace of director Ernst Lubitsch, cleverly playing off her dour public image. The satire may be mostly a matter of easy contrasts, but the lovers inhabit a world of elegance and poise that is uniquely and movingly Lubitsch’s. Billy Wilder, who would later uncurdle into the last exemplar of the Lubitsch tradition, collaborated on the script.” – Dave Kehr
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SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER, Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Film Forum
Shrink Montgomery Clift probes hysteric Elizabeth Taylor’s wounded psyche, with stubborn opposition from the “hero’s” mother, Katharine Hepburn. Gore Vidal adapted from Williams’ one act play.
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THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, Mario Bava
Nitehawk Cinema
Considered to be the first Giallo, Mario Bava’s seminal film The Girl Who Knew Too Much (aka La ragazza che sapeva troppo) is a beautiful composition of a murder mystery meets horror movie. Nora is a young American visiting family in Rome when the shock of her Aunt’s sudden death sends her into the stormy night…and into her own whodunit. Her obsessive desire to prove that someone killed a young woman on the Spanish Steps involves a rather handsome detective (John Saxon) and a sequence of unfolding haunting events. (One scene in particular was reconstructed by Martin Scorsese in his remake of Cape Fear). As is typical with the Bava’s master cinematography and storytelling, The Girl Who Knew Too Much perfectly balances out the fright with humor and gorgeous imagery as it shows one of the first final girls in contemporary horror film.
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***SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5***
EDEN, Mia Hansen-Løve
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Mia Hansen-Løve’s fourth feature is a rare achievement: an epically scaled work built on the purely ephemeral, breathlessly floating along on currents of feeling. Eden is based on the experiences of Hansen-Løve’s brother (and co-writer) Sven, who was one of the pioneering DJs of the French rave scene in the early 1990s. Paul (Félix de Givry) and his friends, including Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter (otherwise known as Daft Punk), see visions of ecstasy in garage music—as their raves become more and more popular, they experience a grand democracy of pure bliss extending into infinity, only to dematerialize on contact with changing times and the demands of everyday life. Hansen-Løve’s film plays in the mind as a swirl of beautiful faces and bodies, impulsive movements, rushes of cascading light and color (she worked with a great cameraman, Denis Lenoir), and music, music, and more music. Eden is a film that moves with the heartbeat of youth, always one thought or emotion ahead of itself.
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GUYS AND DOLLS, Joseph L. Mankiewicz
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
This lavish Goldwyn production (Mankiewicz’s first film in CinemaScope and his sole musical), based on one of the greatest works of American musical theater, is true to the spirit of the Loesser/Burrows/Swerling original, curious casting decisions and the loss of key songs (like “My Time of Day” and the lovely “More I Cannot Wish You”) aside. While most of the world thought that Frank Sinatra would make a perfect Sky Masterson, the role was bestowed upon the non-singing Marlon Brando, and Sinatra was cast as Nathan Detroit. Vivian Blaine, Stubby Kaye, and choreographer Michael Kidd were retained from the original production and, in a burst of inspiration, Goldwyn cast Jean Simmons in the role of Sarah Brown (Goldwyn supposedly paid Simmons the following compliment: “I’m so glad I couldn’t get Grace Kelly”). Mankiewicz had to negotiate his way through the ongoing war between his male stars, the problem of adapting Damon Runyon’s dialogue to the screen, and the “dollar-bill proportions” of the ’Scope screen, but he made a charming movie.
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HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT, Josh & Bennie Safdie
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Harley (Arielle Holmes) is madly in love with Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones). She’s sure he loves her just as much, if only he could express it. Both of them are heroin addicts, kids who pretend to be heavy-metal rockers but spend their time scuffling, arguing, and preying on each other as they wander around New York looking for a fix and the chump change to pay for it. The script, based on a Holmes’s memoir and written by the Safdies with Ronald Bronstein, is a miracle of economy. Sean Price Williams’s cinematography expresses the clouded vision of kids who can’t imagine how invisible they are to the New Yorkers who take their homes and jobs for granted. And the Safdie Brothers, in their toughest and richest movie, direct a cast composed largely of first-time actors so that they disappear into their characters, horrify us, and break our hearts.
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THE FRENCH CONNECTION, William Friedkin
BAM
William Friedkin’s gritty cat-and-mouse masterpiece is as tough as police thrillers come, with Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider as a pair of flawed yet dedicated cops out to intercept a huge heroin shipment arriving from France. Their pursuit of urban kingpin Alain Charnier (Rey) leads to one of the most spectacular car chase scenes (shot in Brooklyn, along 86th Street and Utrecht Avenue) ever filmed.
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NATIONAL GALLERY, Frederick Wiseman
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Frederick Wiseman’s glorious new film is about the energies of, and around, painting—discussing, framing, mounting, lighting, repairing, restoring, creating, and, perhaps most of all, looking at painting. This is a film of color, light, and sensuous action, in the artwork on the walls and within the universe of London’s great National Gallery itself. In fact, the dividing line between the paintings and the life around them dissolves almost immediately, as Wiseman attunes us to pure response: the individual’s response to the paintings, the painter’s response to the subject at hand, the filmmaker’s response to the people, activities, and light around him. There are discussions of budgetary concerns and social media, but the film and the people within it are always drawn back to the magnetic power of the art itself. National Gallery is a film of faces: the faces of those looking and the faces of those who look back from the canvases, in an endless, joyful exchange.
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NAIL IN THE BOOT, Mikhail Kalatozov
MoMA
In this ostensible allegory of Soviet industry, the poor quality of a nail in a soldier’s boot leads to the defeat of a military unit on maneuvers. Its symbolism lost on the literal-minded, who felt it reflected poorly on the military preparedness of the Red Army, the film was banned by Soviet officials. Perhaps more threatening than the film’s subject was its style: “The film came at a time when other directors had already begun to feel the chill of criticism for abstract films” (Alexander Birkos, Soviet Cinema: Directors and Films). This masterful film marked the beginning of a seven-year period of inactivity for Kalatozov. Silent; Russian intertitles, simultaneous English translation, and piano accompaniment.
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CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, Richard Brooks
Film Forum
Okay, so he’s on crutches. But why is Paul Newman cold-shouldering his slip-clad wife, Elizabeth Taylor’s Maggie the Cat? Newman and “Big Daddy” Burl Ives repeated their roles from Williams’ Broadway smash.
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ON CINEMA: PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Close your eyes and the films of Paul Thomas Anderson will come back to you with a visceral force—the ill-fated visit to the drug dealer’s house in Boogie Nights… the ocean of oil cascading from the derrick in There Will Be Blood… the troubled emotional momentum of The Master… these are some of the great visionary passages in modern movies. Anderson will select clips from and discuss the films that have inspired and excited him.
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THE PRINCESS OF FRANCE, Matías Piñeiro
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
As in his critical hit Viola (2013), Matías Piñeiro doesn’t transplant Shakespeare to the present day so much as summon the spirit of his polymorphous comedies. Víctor (Julián Larquier Tellarini) returns to Buenos Aires after his father’s death and a spell in Mexico to prepare a radio production of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Reuniting with his repertory, he finds himself sorting out complicated entanglements with girlfriend Paula (Agustina Muñoz), sometime lover Ana (María Villar), and departed actress Natalia (Romina Paula), as well as his muddled relations with the constellation of friends involved with the project. As the film tracks the group’s criss-crossing movements and interactions, their lives become increasingly enmeshed with the fiction they’re reworking, potential outcomes multiply, and reality itself seems subject to transformation. An intimate, modestly scaled work that takes characters and viewers alike into dizzying realms of possibility, The Princess of France is the most ambitious film yet from one of world cinema’s brightest young talents, a cumulatively thrilling experience. A Cinema Guild release.
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The post 23 Films to See This Weekend: P.T. Anderson, Mia Hansen-Løve, Joseph L. Mankiewicz + More appeared first on BlackBook.