***FRIDAY, JANUARY 9***
EL TOPO, Alejandro Jodorowsky
IFC Center
Jodorowsky’s legendary, notorious cult hit essentially created the genre of the midnight movie — a spectacle so stunning and bizarre that normal hours couldn’t contain it. Incorporating influences from tarot to the Bible to surrealism into a mind-blowing western, Jodorowsky cast himself as the leather-clad gunman, El Topo (‘the mole’), who wanders through a desert strewn with mystical symbols on an unnamed quest, leaving blood and carnage in his wake. Declared a masterpiece by no less than John Lennon himself, EL TOPO tops even the most outrageous aesthetic experiments of its radical era and remains unmatched in its provocations and strange beauty. Long unavailable, EL TOPO is presented in a gorgeous new restoration personally overseen by Jodorowsky.
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WEDDING PRESENT, Richard Wallace
MoMA
Bennett’s slow-motion transition from feckless blonde to sardonic brunette was accelerated by the two screwball comedies she made with Cary Grant (himself a personality just coming into focus) in the mid-1930s. This is the second, a strenuous romp about a pair of Chicago newspaper reporters and their on-again, off-again romance. The blend of Front Page shenanigans and the sexual tensions of romantic comedy strongly suggests Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday, and very well may have had an influence on it. (The link seems unmistakable when Conrad Nagel turns up as a prototype Ralph Bellamy, a square who offers Bennett all the dull security Grant’s character can’t.) Director Richard Wallace, however, is no Hawks.
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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JUDGE ROY BEAN, John Huston
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
In a dusty, unregulated town on the West Texas frontier, an outlaw (Paul Newman) sets himself up—after completing a mass revenge killing—as a sort of vigilante justice of the peace. Huston’s final Western is an ambling, charming shaggy-dog story peppered with outbursts of violence, anchored by a performance by Newman at the height of his powers, and buttressed by a stellar supporting cast: Stacy Keach as an albino hit man, Anthony Perkins as a priest, Ava Gardner as an actress the judge lusts after from afar, and Huston himself as a grizzled mountain man who travels with a domesticated bear. From a screenplay by John Milius.
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FIGHT CLUB, David Fincher
Nitehawk Cinema
It takes some people longer to realize it than others, but eventually we all come to the same conclusion: Life’s kind of a drag, huh? A rigged game controlled by credit card companies and marketing firms with a goal of keep us all docile and dumb and in debt. It’s enough to leave you numb; which, fortunately, has an easy cure: a good, solid punch to the face.
In David Fincher’s Fight Club, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) works like a preacher in the church of ass-kicking, winning converts from all walks of life into his underground fight ring, including the film’s nameless narrator (Edward Norton). Re-invigorated by conflict, Durden’s band sets its sights on much larger targets with an elaborate plan that could tear down the entire global economy.
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NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND, Clay Yurdin
Anthology Film Archives
This adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novella (considered by some to be the first great literary expression of existentialism) tells the story of a spiteful wretch who is plagued by despair and an acute sense of awareness. It was made by Herridge for CBS’s CAMERA THREE – a show that he created and for which he served as producer-writer. Herridge’s CAMERA THREE work – exemplified in this production – was, in some ways, the TV equivalent of the Off-Broadway theater: a place for new ideas to be tried-out on a shoestring budget. As the New York Times reported, the show “genuinely fulfills the roles of an experimental workshop on television.” Michael Kane (LONELY ARE THE BRAVE, THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR) plays the bitter, nameless narrator in a stark Herridge-style production which, when first viewed by writer Nat Hentoff, so surprised and impressed him that he exclaimed, “Where the hell did that come from?”
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LA ÚLTIMA PELÍCULA, Raya Martin and Mark Peranson
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
In this documentary within a narrative—and vice versa—a grandiose filmmaker (Alex Ross Perry) arrives in the Yucatán to scout locations for his new movie, a production that will involve exposing the last extant celluloid film stock on the eve of the Mayan Apocalypse. Instead, he finds himself waylaid by the formal schizophrenia of the film in which he himself is a character. Simultaneously a tribute to and a critique of The Last Movie (Dennis Hopper’s seminal obliteration of the boundary separating life and cinema), La última película engages with the impending death of celluloid through a veritable cyclone of film and video formats, genres, modes, and methods. Martin and Peranson have created an unclassifiable work that mirrors the contortions and leaps of the medium’s history and present. An Art of the Real 2014 selection. A M’Aidez Films release
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GOSFORD PARK, Robert Altman
MoMA
The master of the house invites distinguished guests for a weekend shooting party—and is murdered in the dark of night. This English-manor whodunit, Altman’s most successful film since MASH, boasts a knockout cast of British stage and screen talent. Julian Fellowes’s cleverly layered script—pitting the babble of the landed against the gossip of the servants’ quarters—won an Academy Award and served as a model for Fellowes’s successful series Downton Abbey (2010–).
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AMOUR FOU, Jessica Hausner
Museum of the Moving Image
The 1811 suicide pact between German Romantic writer Heinrich Von Kleist and Henriette Vogel is depicted with deadpan precision and exquisite period detail. Jessica Hausner’s masterful meditation on romance is deeply moving, dryly comic, and philosophical beneath its perfectly realized visual style. Preceded bybrouillard—passage #14 (Dir. Alexandre Larose. Canada, 2014, 10 mins. 35mm. New York premiere.) Layering in-camera long takes, Larose condenses the colors and movements of a bucolic landscape into an ecstatic and spectral time-lapsed vision.
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REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE, John Huston
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
At a Southern army base midway through a long, stifling summer, a respected major (Marlon Brando) struggles to ignore his erotic attachment to a much younger male soldier (Robert Forster) while his wife (Elizabeth Taylor) carries on an affair with the man next door—that is, when she’s not brandishing a very symbolic whip. What could have been a hysterical, campy melodrama instead becomes, in Huston’s hands, a tender, languid, and deeply sad portrait of men and women pushing up against the social conventions that constrain them. Credit is due also to Carson McCullers, from whose second novel the film is adapted, and to the stellar cast—Brando’s performance here helped to jump-start his flagging career.
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***SATURDAY, JANUARY 10***
NAKED LUNCH, David Cronenberg
IFC Center
“This David Cronenberg masterpiece (1991) breaks every rule in adapting a literary classic—maybe ‘On Naked Lunch’ would be a more accurate title—but justifies every transgression with its artistry and audacity. Adapted not only from William S. Burroughs’s free-form novel but also from several other Burroughs works, this film pares away all the social satire and everything that might qualify as celebration of gay sex, yielding a complex and highly subjective portrait of Burroughs himself (expertly played by Peter Weller) as a tortured sensibility in flight from his own femininity, proceeding zombielike through an echo chamber of projections (insects, drugs, typewriters) and repudiations. According to the densely compacted metaphors that compose this dreamlike movie, writing equals drugs equals sex, and the pseudonymous William Lee, as politically incorrect as Burroughs himself, repeatedly disavows his involvement in all three. With Judy Davis and Ian Holm.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
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MASH, Robert Altman
MoMA
Set in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War, MASH chronicles the romantic escapades, after-hours tricks, and behind-the-battle-lines sports adventures of three hedonistic surgeons. Altman debuted several of his now-signature techniques—overlapping dialogue, tight close-ups, and rich performances by an ensemble cast—creating a carefully constructed sense of chaos. This antiwar dispatch earned an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and Altman’s star began to rise with the arc of the counterculture.
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THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, Orson Welles
Film Forum
Turn-of-the-20th-century Mid-America: Joseph Cotten pursues lost love Dolores Costello, despite her imperious son Tim Holt – himself smitten with Cotten’s daughter Anne Baxter – and lovelorn spinster aunt Agnes Moorehead (Best Actress, NY Film Critics). Welles’ low-key, reflective follow-up to Kane, adapted from Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzer-winning novel, chronicles the decline of a family and the end of an era. Re-edited in Welles’ absence, its ending re-written and re-shot by others. But “even in this truncated form it’s amazing and memorable” (Pauline Kael.)
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THE COMPANY, Robert Altman
MoMA
The travails of an ambitious ballerina (Campbell, who also coproduced the film) serve as the foreground for this portrait of the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago, filmed over the course of a year and featuring real Joffrey dancers. The Company is a film about the creative process itself, aptly rendering the painstaking discipline, tireless work, and personal sacrifice demanded of the dancers, and the transcendent result that is collective performance. These challenges parallel those Altman faced over four decades as a filmmaker; Roger Ebert declared it “the closest that Robert Altman has come to making an autobiographical film.”
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SINFUL DAVEY, John Huston
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
After several films of profound melancholy and vaulting ambition, Huston took a turn for the picaresque with this fleet-footed, sharply observed, and consistently underrated adventure story. Adapted from the fanciful death-row autobiography of the Scottish rogue David Haggart, though shot entirely in Ireland (a country Huston had grown to love), Sinful Davey provided John Hurt with his first starring role and found Huston working in a giddier, more playful register than he had in years.
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THE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT, Paul Stanley
Anthology Film Archives
George C. Scott gives a rich and nuanced performance in this adaptation of one of the stories that first brought author Bret Harte to national prominence. Poker Flat is a town of the Old West that is in moral and economic decline. In order to ‘save’ the community, a secret society is formed to identify ‘immoral individuals’ who will be exiled or killed. Among those banished are John Oakhurst (Scott), a professional poker player who has been winning too much money from the secret committee members, a saloon girl (Janet Ward: FAIL-SAFE, NIGHT MOVES), a madam (Ruth White: MIDNIGHT COWBOY, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, HANG ’EM HIGH), and the town drunk. In their banishment, they become snowbound in the wilderness and meet a pair of runaway lovers, Tom (Larry Hagman: FAIL-SAFE, NIXON, DALLAS) and his fiancée Piney (Lane Bradbury: ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE). The six misfit exiles take shelter together and, amidst many tense conflicts, wait out the unending storm with ever-dwindling provisions – finally facing a series of life and death choices. An engaging sample of Herridge’s devotion to “The American Experience” (a title he had adopted for many of his favorite shows of the early 1950s).
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THE AMERICAN DREAMER, L.M. Kit Carson
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
After his low-budget Easy Rider became an instant countercultural phenomenon and massive box-office hit, Dennis Hopper was given carte blanche to go to Peru and make his passion project, an experimental western entitledThe Last Movie. After a year in post-production, the resulting effort met with such scathing backlash that Hopper spent the decade in professional semi-exile. The American Dreamer, helmed by Lawrence Schiller and the late L.M. Kit Carson (star of David Holzman’s Diary), charts the period when Hopper, back from South America with reams of footage, holed up in Taos, New Mexico, and endeavored to piece together a masterpiece. A revealing portrait of the freedom and excess of the New Hollywood and of a man whose name is synonymous with both.
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THE GUESTS, Ken Jacobs
Museum of the Moving Image
Guests at the 1896 wedding of the sister of a Lumière brothers technician ascend the stairs in a one-minute film that legendary New York avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs has expanded into a unique mind-expanding 73-minute 3-D movie. Preceded by Wire Fence (2014, 22 mins.) The diamond patterns in the wire fencing for construction on his street inspired Ken Jacobs’s latest astonishing 3-D extravaganza.
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***SUNDAY, JANUARY 11***
THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR, Billy Wilder
IFC Center
“Wilder’s first film as director begins brilliantly with Rogers as a New York career woman disillusioned to find her house calls offering scalp massage constantly subject to male misinterpretation – in particular from a lecherous Benchley pursuing ‘a little drinkypoo, biteypoo, rhumbapoo’ – who masquerades as a pigtailed l2-year-old innocent in order to avoid paying full adult fare on the train home to Iowa. Very funny stuff as she meets Milland’s protective major, and finds ambiguous refuge in his sleeping compartment… she is forced to accompany him to the military academy where he instructs, and becomes mascot to a horde of hopefully lecherous cadets. Pretty irresistible… with Rogers doing a beautiful job of dovetailing sexual provocation and demure innocence.” – Time Out(London)
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THE STRANGER, Orson Welles
Film Forum
I Married a Nazi War Criminal, as War Crimes Commissioner Edward G. Robinson tracks the supposed mastermind of the Final Solution to a quiet Connecticut village, the home of boys’ school prof Welles and all-American bride Loretta Young, as well as of a looming 124-foot clock tower, scene of a hair-raising climax. Welles’ only “very profitable” picture.
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BEYOND CASSAVETES: ANDY
Anthology Film Archives
Sarafian is best known for his existential, V8-powered road picture VANISHING POINT. In 1965, however, he wrote and directed his first feature, ANDY, a boundary-pushing melodrama about a mentally challenged middle-aged man. Featuring a career-defining performance by headliner Richard Alden and atmospherically lit by journeyman DP Ernesto Caparrós (who also shot THE MIRACLE WORKER for Arthur Penn), ANDY is a lost little homebrewed gem. Not available on DVD, this is probably the film’s first theatrical screening in fifty years.
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A TALE OF WINTER, Eric Rohmer
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
From one angle, Eric Rohmer’s late-career masterpiece is a luminous Christian parable about the transformative effects of grace; from another, it’s a frightening, unresolved picture of the role that chance plays in human affairs. One summer, a young man and woman (Frédéric van den Driessche and Charlotte Véry) fall deeply, passionately in love. Five years later, after accidentally giving him a false address, she is raising his child and drifting back and forth between two infatuated men with whom she’s unwilling, or unable, to settle down. A Tale of Winter—which includes a generous excerpt of the play from which it takes its name—is the fullest expression of Rohmer’s career-long reckoning with Shakespeare, the most sophisticated of his many attempts to pin down the nature of faith, and one of his most graceful, mysterious, and emotionally overwhelming films. A Big World Pictures release.
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TELEVISION PROGRAM 4: BASEMENTS, Robert Altman
MoMA
The Room: In the second half, an adaptation of Pinter’s first play, paranoia and violence result when a series of unwanted visitors intrude on an eccentric woman’s claustrophobic living space.
The Dumbwaiter: Altman’s adaptation of the playwright’s early “comedies of menace” was originally broadcast as the first half of a Pinter double-bill titledBasements. Two British hitmen wait in the kitchen of an old mansion for an unseen employer to provide their next assignment.
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ALL THE KING’S MEN, Sidney Lumet
Anthology Film Archives
Sidney Lumet directed this intense adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s novel, which Nat Hentoff calls “a far more seizing transformation of the book than Robert Rossen’s [big-]screen version.” Willie Stark (played with thuggish bravado by Neville Brand, who won a Sylvania Award for his performance) is an idealistic country lawyer who mutates into a demagogic state Governor. After using blackmail to overcome an impeachment attempt, he fixes his political gaze upon the U.S. Senate, but his ambitions are foiled by an assassin.
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PRIZZI’S HONOR, John Huston
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Anjelica Huston won an Oscar for her sly, scene-stealing work in her father’s penultimate film, which premiered two weeks before his 79th birthday. Prizzi’s Honor has the irreverent spunk of a debut and the reflective, generous voice of a swan song. Jack Nicholson gives one of his finest performances as a beloved, longtime hit man employed by a New York mob family, but he’s nearly upstaged by his two co-stars: Kathleen Turner as the savvy, beautiful West Coast mob killer he all-too-successfully courts, and Anjelica, as his spurned ex-lover.Prizzi’s Honor is the kind of comedy that could only have been made by a director fresh from the soul-searching ofWise Blood and Under the Volcano: loose and relaxed, yet hinting at darker depths.
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