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. We wait for the pleasure of a Friday night, knowing the burdens of the work week have a brief respite, and what better way to indulge seeing some great films—be it new to you treasures or your favorite classics. And this weekend from BAM and MoMA to The Film Society of Lincoln Center and Nitehawk Cinema there are more than enough wonderful films showing for you to happily disappear into. Here are 26 films that have us running straight to the theater.
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***FRIDAY, APRIL 3***
NED RIFLE, Hal Hartley
IFC Center
The third and final film in the Henry Fool trilogy. Henry Fool and Fay Grim’s son Ned sets out to find and kill his father for destroying his mother’s life. But his aims are frustrated by the troublesome, sexy, and hilarious Susan, whose connection to Henry predates even his arrival in the lives of the Grim family. A funny, sad, and sexy adventure, Ned Rifle is an intellectually stimulating and compassionate satire.
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THE BEDFORD INCIDENT, James B. Harris
BAM
The war-hawk captain (Widmark) of an American submarine destroyer relentlessly pursues a Soviet vessel until the conflict threatens to escalate to nuclear warfare. The Bedford Incident contains shades of Dr. Strangelove, with Kubrick’s macabre humor replaced by a cold sweat of unrelenting tension that doesn’t let up until the jaw-dropping climax.
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THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN, Josef von Sternberg
MoMA
1935. USA. Directed by Josef von Sternberg. Screenplay by John Dos Passos, Sam Winston, based on the novel The Woman and the Puppet by Pierre Louys. With Marlene Dietrich, Lionel Atwill, Cesar Romero, Edward Everett Horton. 80 min.
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THE BEAST, Walerian Borowczyk
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Bestial dreams interrupt the venal plans of a French aristocrat attempting to save a crumbling mansion by marrying off his deformed son to a horny American heiress. Drawing on the legends surrounding the beast of Gévaudan, Prosper Mérimée’s novella Lokis and Freud’s Wolf Man, The Beast is an erotic black farce hell-bent on trampling every pretense of good taste. In The Beast, the only decorum and restraint is to be found in Scarlatti’s harpsichord music. Note: contains explicit sexual content.
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BEAT THIS! A HIP HOP HISTORY, Dick Fontaine
BAM
Filmmaker Dick Fontaine’s hugely entertaining documentary was one of the first examinations of hip-hop culture, just as it entered its golden age. Full of wit and edited with style, Beat This features out-there sci-fi imagery and reams of terrific archival material, including live performances by Afrika Bambaataa and Kool Herc and incredible footage from Herc’s original dance parties.
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BLANCHE, Walerian Borowczyk
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Borowczyk’s wife Ligia Branice gives a heartrending performances as Blanche, the young, beautiful wife to an aging, senile baron (legendary Swiss actor Michel Simon). When an amorous king pays a visit, not only does he fall under Blanche’s spell, but so does his page, the infamous philanderer Monsieur Bartolomeo. Filmed by Borowczyk to resemble a Medieval fresco, Blanche also features stunning ancient musical arrangements drawn from the Carmina Burana song book.
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A BUCKET OF BLOOD, Roger Corman
Anthology Film Archives
In his most famous (and regrettably one of his very few) starring roles, Miller shines as Walter Paisley, an aspiring beatnik who stumbles on art-world success when he accidentally kills his landlady’s cat and, on a whim, covers it in clay. After passing the result off as a genuine sculpture he’s proclaimed an artistic genius. But soon he finds himself pursuing increasingly desperate and horrific means to produce new sculptures and maintain his artistic glory. A BUCKET OF BLOOD is an ingenious satire of counter-cultural pretension, and among the highpoints of Corman and Miller’s careers.
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THAT GUY DICK MILLER, Elijah Drenner
Anthology Film Archives
You know the face, and have heard the voice, but just can’t figure out where. The character actor’s character actor, Dick Miller is nothing short of a living legend to those who delight in his every bit role, in a career that to date encompasses more than 175 feature films and over 2,000 television appearances. The new documentary, THAT GUY DICK MILLER, performs the Nobel-Award-worthy public service of shining a spotlight on this national treasure, one of the most reliably inspired and omnipresent actors of the past 50-plus years.
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**SATURDAY, APRIL 4**
DEAR HEART, Delbert Mann
BAM
Stumbling upon this film gave me the impetus to finally write the pilot. I was taken by this mainstream Hollywood film that reflected a very casual attitude towards sex, something that seemed uncharacteristic to my preconceptions of the era. With its glib bachelor hero and dowdy, conservative ingénue, it tells a tale of moral corruption and heartbreaking duplicity in the form of a light comedy. As Glenn Ford tries to change his ways and take responsibility for his meaningless romances in glamorous Manhattan, I found a jumping-off point for the series. −Matthew Weiner
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COP, James B. Harris
BAM
A deranged cop (Woods) goes rogue to track down a serial killer in this crazily violent pulp crime thriller adapted by Harris from a James Ellroy novel. The story’s sleazy exploitation trappings are lifted up by Harris’ perverse humor, echoes of classic film noir, and Woods’ off-the-wall manic energy, which Roger Ebert said “makes Dirty Harry look cool and reflective.”
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PATHS OF GLORY, Stanley Kubrick
BAM
Kubrick’s classic is a brutal World War I combat film, explosive courtroom drama, and blistering antiwar statement, starring Douglas as a French colonel who stands up for three men facing execution for desertion during a doomed mission. With steely monochrome photography, bravura tracking shots through the trenches, and an unforgettable final sequence, Paths of Glory is arguably the apex of Kubrick and Harris’ partnership.
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GOTO, ISLAND OF LOVE, Walerian Borowczyk
Film Society of Lincoln Center
A petty thief works his way up the absurd hierarchy of Goto, an archipelago cut off from civilization by a tumultuous earthquake. His dream is to possess Glossia, a stifled beauty trapped in a loveless marriage to a melancholic dictator. Originally banned in Communist Poland and Franco’s Spain, Goto, Island of Love features bizarre sights, poetic flashes of color, and the stunning deployment of Handel’s organ concerto. A NYFF7 selection.
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PATTERNS, Fielder Cook
Museum of the Moving Image
I saw this film version as a child on sick day from middle school; it was originally written and produced for live television in 1955. Rod Serling ingeniously creates a boardroom passion play with a chilling first-person climax that I never forgot. We used it often over the life of the series to get a sense of the real offices and to see how virtue and ambition can clash when the older generation is pushed aside and ruthless business confronts humanity. − Matthew Weiner
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BEYOND THE BEYOND, Lourdes Portillo
MoMA
2008. USA/Mexico. Directed by Lourdes Portillo. With Ofelia Medina, Kyle Kibbe, Jose Arauso. Portillo’s most recent work uses a range of narrative elements to explore the realities of shifting global wealth and drug trafficking along the Mayan coastline of Mexico. Real conversations with tourist guides, merchants, and American expats about the corruption and violence caused by drug trafficking are interspersed with stylized narrative scenes that reveal documentary filmmakers’ heroic preoccupations. In Spanish; English subtitles. 43 min.
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SORORITY GIRL, Roger Corman
Anthology Film Archives
One of the earliest films in both Corman’s and Dick Miller’s filmographies, SORORITY GIRL is a scathingly brutal cheapie that traces the downward spiral of spoiled, sociopathic rich girl Sabra (Susan Cabot). Schooled in emotional stuntedness and inhumanity by her haughty, hateful mother, she wreaks havoc on her fellow sorority members at the University of Southern California, shamelessly exploiting and persecuting them. Typically for Corman, what would have been a cynical exploitation film in almost anyone else’s hands is, despite the conditions of its production, a blunt but remarkably perceptive portrait of a sociopath – though there’s bitchy fun to be had too!
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THE STREETWALKER, Walerian Borowczyk
Film Society of Lincoln Center
An uptight salesman loses himself in the arms of an ethereal prostitute in a headlong rush toward the end of the night. Featuring Sylvia Kristel’s best performance and a stoic turn by Warhol favorite Joe Dallesandro, Borowczyk’s most atypical offering rivals Taxi Driver in terms of rendering urban life as a seedy inferno. The film’s eclectic soundtrack includes 10cc, Chopin, Elton John, and Pink Floyd. Note: contains explicit sexual content.
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THEATHRE OF MR. AND MRS. KABAL, Walerian Borowczyk
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Bizarre, grotesque, and yet strangely moving, Borowczyk’s existential soap opera eschews dialogue (for the most part) and conventional narrative to evoke the highs and lows of married life. Set in a barren wasteland thinly populated by exotic flora and fauna, Borowczyk’s only animated feature (rendered in sparse, coarse, and, for the most part, monochrome graphics) serves as a stiff antidote to Disney’s saccharine whimsy.
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GREMLINS, Joe Dante
Anthology Film Archives
Joe Dante’s GREMLINS was produced by Spielberg and became a huge hit, but it’s no E.T. True, its ‘hero,’ Gizmo the mogwai, is an adorable, wide-eyed, furry little creature of unknown origins (by way of Chinatown). But, given as a gift to our human protagonist Billy (Zach Galligan), Gizmo comes along with three rules: never expose it to bright light, never get it wet, and never, EVER feed it after midnight. Needless to say, rules (especially in horror movies) are made to be broken, and soon the placid town of Kingston Falls is overrun with murderous, anarchic, and not at all furry Gremlins, who lay a path of destruction which Dante delights in portraying. A bona fide 1980s popcorn-movie classic whose mischievous spirit and Looney Tunes-inspired havoc remain fresh thirty years later, GREMLINS is also graced with one of the best latter-day performances by Dick Miller, as Billy’s Gremlins-menaced neighbor Mr. Futterman.
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**SUNDAY, APRIL 5**
LOLITA, Stanley Kubrick
BAM
Kubrick offers up a deliciously twisted take on Vladimir Nabokov’s eyebrow-raising masterpiece, in which European academic Humbert Humbert (Mason) develops an infatuation with his landlady’s all-American 14-year-old daughter (Lyon). Harris’ final film as producer for Kubrick features a scene-stealing performance by Peter Sellers as the mysterious Clare Quilty.
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THE KILLLING, Stanley Kubrick
BAM
Harris and Kubrick kicked off their three-film winning streak with this ultra-tense heist film, in which a band of two-bit crooks pull an elaborate racetrack robbery—only to see their perfectly laid plan unravel after the job. Unfolding in an intricate flashback structure, this coolly ironic noir features hardboiled dialogue by Jim Thompson and memorable character turns by professional oddballs like Elisha Cook Jr. and Timothy Carey.
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IMITATION OF LIFE, Douglas Sirk
Film Forum
(1959) “I’m going up and up and up. And no one’s going to pull me down!” When single mother Lana Turner loses her daughter (eventually growing up to be Sandra Dee) at Coney Island, she winds up finding equally husband-less African American mother Juanita Moore and budding photographer John Gavin, gaining both a loyal domestic and Faithful Friend. But then the betrayals multiply, as Turner single-mindedly pursues Broadway super-stardom — while blind to Dee and Gavin getting overly-chummy — and Moore’s daughter Susan Kohner (“giving one of the most desperate performances in Sirk’s work” — David Thompson) breaks her mother’s heart by “passing for white.” Sirk’s remake of a Fannie Hurst tear-jerker (films in 1934 with Claudette Colbert) was one of its studio’s biggest hits ever and the director’s farewell to Hollywood, subconsciously symbolized by its grandiose final funeral, featuring gospel great Mahalia Jackson. With competing Best Supporting Actress nominations for Moore and the in-life Hispanic/Jewish Kohner. This new 4K restoration showcases the lush Technicolor cinematography of Russell Metty, who’d shot the supremely b&w Touch of Evil only a year before. Approx. 124 min. DCP.
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IMMORAL TALES,
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Four episodes, each rolling back further into the annals of history, bound only by a maxim by La Rochefoucauld: Love pleases more by the ways in which it shows itself. A veritable cavalcade of depravity, Immoral Tales features cosmic fellatio, transcendental masturbation, blood-drenched lesbianism, and papal incest. A box-office smash in France, the film spent much of the 1970s embroiled in censorship problems around the world. With appearances by Paloma Picasso and a 23-year-old Fabrice Luchini.
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BEHIND CONVENT WALLS, Walerian Borowczyk
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Inspired by a passage in Stendhal’s Promenades dans Rome, Borowczyk’s first Italian production concerns the antics of a convent full of sexually repressed nuns. Deceptively frivolous, Borowczyk’s film is nevertheless a serious exploration of the relationship between flesh and spirit. Likened to Boccaccio by Alberto Moravia, Behind Convent Walls features striking handheld cinematography by Luciano Tovoli and the final performance of Borowczyk’s wife, Ligia Branice. Note: contains explicit sexual content.
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STORY OF SIN, Walerian Borowczyk
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Based on the novel by Stefan Żeromski, Story of Sin is Borowczyk’s singular Polish feature film. Grażyna Długołęcka plays Ewa Pobratyńska, the doomed heroine whose passion for a married anthropology student takes her on a perilous journey across early-20th-century Europe. Casting a critical eye on the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, Story of Sin counts as Borowczyk’s most passionate film, a delirious melodrama that reaches an ecstatic pitch. Nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Note: contains explicit sexual content.
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WAR OF THE SITES, Roger Corman
Anthology Film Archives
“WAR OF THE SATELLITES attempts Kubrickian themes on a Bowery Boys budget. As humans prepare to leave their planet, an advanced alien race sends down an agent to replace the mild-mannered scientist in charge of the space project. Once again, rebellious youth saves the day, as the professor’s assistant (the irrepressible Dick Miller) sees through the deception and takes matters into his own hands. What differentiates Mr. Corman from more dedicated schlockmeisters like William Castle and Jess Franco is his almost unshakable sobriety. He seldom falls back on making fun of his material, preferring instead to play by the rules and with a straight face.” –Dave Kehr, NEW YORK TIMES
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GREMLINS 2, Joe Dante
Anthology Film Archives
Rare is a sequel that bests the original, but GREMLINS 2 manages to outsmart and undermine its blockbuster predecessor a hundred times over. A parable for our times (circa 1990), this improbable tale takes place in the towering Manhattan super-building of Clamp Enterprises, where poor furry Gizmo is being used as a guinea pig by gonzo billionaire Daniel Clamp (played with a Donald Trump-like zeal by the rubbery John Glover). Next thing you know Gizmo gets wet and, well, hell breaks loose. Luckily his pals Billy (Zach Galligan), Katie (Phoebe Cates) and Murray (Dick Miller, natch) are there to help save him and New York from the whacked-out antics of the deplorable, deadly Gremlins. Simultaneously a tribute to the great sight gags of Frank Tashlin and a riotous parody of disaster movies in the Irwin Allen mold, this great meta-film is 100% Joe Dante.
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