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 27 films that have us running straight to the theater.
_____________________________________________________
***FRIDAY, APRIL 17***
REBELS OF THE NEON GOD,
Museum of the Moving Image
Dir. Tsai Ming-liang. 1992, 106 mins. Archival 35mm print. With Chen Chao-jung, Jen Chang-bin, Lee Kang-sheng. “A tender/tough survey of beautiful, dissolute Taipei youth on their nightly prowls of fluorescent-lit food courts and video arcades.” (Dennis Lim, The Village Voice.) Tsai’s startling debut feature concerns a listless student, Hsiao-kang (Lee), who drops out of cram school without telling his parents, played here by Lu Hsiao-ling and Miao Tien. With his free days and stolen tuition, Hsiao follows around the pack of hoodlums who broke his cab-driver father’s rearview mirror—Ah-tze, Ah-ping, and Ah-tze’s girlfriend, Ah-kuei—with his fixation on Ah-tze lingering in an unresolved space between kid-brother idolization and erotic longing. Rebels of a Neon God features expressive elements which would disappear from Tsai’s later work, including a propulsive synth theme and handheld camerawork.
READ MORE
THE AMULET OF OGUM, Nelson Pereira dos Santos
MoMA
1974. Brazil. Directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos. With Ney Santanna, Anecy Rocha, Joffre Soares, Maria Ribeiro, Jards Macalé, Emmanuel Cavalcanti. After Firmino, a blind balladeer, is robbed by a gang of thugs, they demand a performance, and he proceeds to tell them a tale about the Amulet of Ogum. The story centers around a young man, Gabriel, who is granted invincibility after taking part in an Umbanda ceremony, and who, because of his supernatural abilities, soon becomes embroiled in Caxias’s violent underworld. The Amulet of Ogum is a crime picture and much more, combining the genre with Brazil’s syncretic religious traditions, which during this period had been actively suppressed by the government. In Portuguese; English subtitles. 112 min.
READ MORE
FULL MOON IN PARIS, Eric Rohmer
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
“He who has two women loses his soul; he who has two houses loses his mind.” In Rohmer’s fourth Comedies and Proverbs film, Louise, a young interior decorator (Venice Film Festival Best Actress winner Pascale Ogier), keeps two residences—one with her boyfriend, Remi, and one without. She chases the freedom of the single life in her Paris pied-à-terre, while Remi stays in the other residence, seemingly a homebody. Rohmer’s finely drawn characterization brings out the confusions and small devotions that complicate a familiar paradox, rarely rendered with such subtlety and maturity. With Fabrice Lucchini as Louise’s friend. A Film Movement release.
READ MORE
LA POINTE COURTE, Agnes Varda
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Varda was 25 when she shot her enormously influential debut feature, a marital drama set in a small coastal fishing village in Sète. “The film,” Varda later insisted, “was created for and with the fisherman,” and it’s indeed an acute, searching immersion in the daily business of provincial life. It was also Varda’s first of many attempts at working out what would become one of her career-long goals: to navigate fluidly between the terrain of her characters’ private emotional lives and the topography of (as she later put it) the “geographically and politically specific environments” in which they live. Varda, who grew up partly in Sète, famously claimed to have seen almost no movies before making La Pointe Courte, but the film is in direct conversation, accidentally or not, with many of its neorealist ancestors. It spoke equally well to the future: many critics and scholars now consider it the first proper entry in what would become the Nouvelle Vague.
READ MORE
WHITE OUT, BLACK IN, Mike Binder
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Set in Ceilândia, a city established by the Brazilian government to prevent the poor from settling in the capital of Brasilia and the location for most of director Adirley Queiros’s unique docufictions, this biting critique of race mixes science fiction with testimonials from two men physically disabled by police violence in 1986. A “researcher” from the future comes to collect evidence against the state, and the pair give testimonials of their lived experience; meanwhile, an act of terrorism against this “apartheid” is being plotted… Queiros’s take on Afrofuturism is subtle, ingenious, and utterly contemporary.
READ MORE
LAST EMBRACE, Jonathan Demme
BAM
Wracked with guilt over his wife’s death, a paranoid secret agent (Scheider) emerges from a sanitarium to mysterious death threats and an even more mysterious woman (Margolin) living in his apartment. Featuring a lush, Old Hollywood-style score by Miklós Rózsa and a cliff-hanging climax at Niagara Falls.
READ MORE
BASIC INSTINCT, Paul Verhoeven
BAM
Whilst in flagrante delicto, a rock star takes an icepick to the abdomen courtesy of a mystery blonde. With echoes of Vertigo, the troubled cop (Douglas) investigating the murder develops an obsession with the dangerously alluring prime suspect (Stone, turning a simple leg cross into the ultimate power play). Verhoeven’s notoriously kinky thriller puts a sleek, postmodern spin on Hitch’s pet themes.
READ MORE
GREENDALE, Bernard Shakey
IFC Center
“Shot with low-tech equipment, the grainy, overlit Greendale sets a dreamy, David Lynch-like mood as Young tells the story of the fictional Green family, who live in a Northern California town that bears their name. Multi-generational anti-war activists and pro-environmental warriors, the Greens become beleaguered in a world of intensifying media scrutiny, corporate arrogance, personal tragedy, and the devil himself (in the form of a dancing dude in a red suit), culminating in the family’s disillusionment and renewed commitment. There’s no dialogue: The lyrics of Young’s song cycle speak for the characters, making GREENDALE a novel hybrid of music video and visionary movie.” – Tom Keogh
READ MORE
THE PALM BEACH STORY, Preston Sturges
Film Forum
(1942) Sturges’ “Topic A” (S-E-X): under the credits, a maid faints thrice, one Claudette Colbert kicks her way out of a closet, while a second, in a bridal gown, hails a cab. Colbert, on the run from husband Joel McCrea, is pursued by amorous zillionaire Rudy Vallee — whose man-crazy sister Mary Astor chases McCrea. Then Sturges picks up the pace. Approx. 87 min. 35mm.
READ MORE
***SATURDAY, APRIL 18***
THE BEST OF EVERYTHING, Jean Negulesco
Museum of the Moving Image
A highly stylized and star-studded adaptation of Rona Jaffe’s 1958 best-seller, this film became part of the group mind-set for the pilot. Although I felt that it was a visually glamorized, and extremely melodramatic, I could see that its story was a well-observed representation of working women in New York at the time. The workings of the office, the romantic complications, and the living situations all smacked of the truth. Like many popular films of the time, it helped to inform our characters—they certainly would have seen it, and it would have had an impact on their real expectations. −Matthew Weiner
READ MORE
SLEEPING ON DARK WATERS, Tsai Ming-Iiang
Museum of the Moving Image
Dir. Tsai Ming-liang. 2008, 53 mins. Digital projection. A documentary on the shooting of the 2006 film I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone in Tsai’s homeland of Malaysia, Sleeping on Dark Waters combines personal history with a privileged glimpse into the notoriously camera-shy director’s working methodology. Preceded by Madam Butterfly (2009, 36 mins. Digital projection), Tsai’s first shot-on-digital work. Commissioned for the centenary of Puccini’s birth, this idiosyncratic reinterpretation of the opera of the same title made in Kuala Lumpur with I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone actress Pearly Chua is comprised of only three shots, anticipating changes in his work spurred by new possibilities offered by digital cameras.
READ MORE
I DON’T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE, Tsai Ming-Iiang
Museum of the Moving Image
Dir. Tsai Ming-liang. 2006, 115 mins. 35mm. With Lee Kang-sheng, Chen Shiang-chyi, Norman Atun. In his first film shot in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian-born Tsai returns home and looks empathetically at the city’s polyglot migrant population. A matrix of dependency forms as a Bangladeshi living in a massive, abandoned building invites a Chinese drifter to share his mattress, and the drifter in turn becomes involved with a woman who is caring for the comatose son of her boss. “Culminates with a transcendent vision of doomsday love. Even by Tsai’s elevated standards, the final shot is one of otherworldly beauty.” (Dennis Lim, The Village Voice).
READ MORE
LIONS LOVE, Agnes Varda
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
“It’s your story—you do it!” Lions Love, made during Varda’s sojourn in California, was one of the director’s boldest, goofiest reckonings with the American counterculture. Warhol superstar Viva floats into a precarious ménage à trois with James Rado and Gerome Ragni, the lyricists of the musical Hair. Gleeful, unabashed disrobings; stretches of poolside drifting; visits from Eddie Constantine and Shirley Clarke; the announcement, by way of the trio’s boxy TV, of the shootings of Andy Warhol and RFK: Varda captures it all with her usual mischievous humor, occasionally—in an early show of her gifts as a personal essayist—stepping in front of the camera herself. An NYFF ’69 Selection.
READ MORE
VAGABOND, Agnes Varda
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
It’s been one of Varda’s favorite devices, from La Pointe Courte to Documenteur, to structure her movies around fictional characters that act as foils for the non-actors they’re surrounded by. But it was only in Vagabond, one of her most celebrated features, that she filmed those non-actors trying—and failing—to figure the movie’s main character out. Mona, played in a career-high performance by Sandrine Bonnaire, has left her posh urban office job for a life on the road. The people with whom she comes into contact—a wealthy academic; a philosophical shepherd; a Tunisian laborer; an aging, giggly countess in need of company—are as fascinating and revealing a cross section of modern France as Varda has ever assembled, but the movie’s focus is squarely on Mona herself: a strong-willed young woman for whom freedom, you start to sense, is its own costly end.
READ MORE
MULHOLLAND DR., David Lynch
BAM
Bright-eyed aspiring actress Betty (Watts) arrives in LA with dreams of stardom, but soon finds herself sucked into the nightmarish underbelly of Hollywood’s Dream Factory as she becomes entangled with an amnesiac femme fatale (Harring). Hitchcockian doubles, illusory identities, and surreal slips into the dark and disturbing abound in David Lynch’s neo-noir freak-out.
READ MORE
MISSISSIPPI MERMAID, Francois Truffaut
BAM
“Degradation, by love” is how Truffaut characterized the theme of this dark tale of romantic obsession based on a Cornell Woolrich novel. Jean-Paul Belmondo stars as a wealthy tobacco farmer on an African island who gets a surprise when his mail order bride turns out to be a mysterious beauty (Deneuve) with a shady past. Truffaut peppers this color noir with allusions to everything from Renoir to Johnny Guitar, but its lacerating depiction of amour fou is pure Vertigo.
READ MORE
DEAD MAN, Jim Jarmusch
IFC Center
“A quantum leap by American independent Jim Jarmusch—a hypnotic and beautiful black-and-white western (1995). Johnny Depp plays an accountant from Cleveland named William Blake who travels west with the promise of a job to the infernal town of Machine, only to be told that the job’s been taken. After killing a man (Gabriel Byrne) in self-defense and sustaining a mortal bullet wound, Blake is guided toward death by a Native American outcast named Nobody (Gary Farmer) while a trio of bounty hunters and various others try to track him down. This masterpiece is simultaneously a mystical, highly poetic account of dying; a well-researched appreciation of Native American cultures; a frightening portrait of modern American violence and capitalist greed that refuses to traffic in the stylistic alibis of Hollywood; a warm, hilarious depiction of cross-cultural friendship; and a hallucinatory trip across the American wilderness. With Billy Bob Thornton, Mili Avital, John Hurt, and Robert Mitchum (in his last screen performance).” – Jonathan Rosenbaum
READ MORE
THE LADY EVE, Preston Sturges
Film Forum
(1941) Con gal Barbara Stanwyck, aided by “dad” Charles Coburn, preys on owlish herpetologist Henry Fonda, in the comedy that topped The New York Times’ 10 Best list: Citizen Kane came in second. Approx. 94 min. 35mm.
READ MORE
***SUNDAY, APRIL 19***
FACE, Tsai Ming-Iiang
Museum of the Moving Image
Dir. Tsai Ming-liang. 2009, 138 mins. 35mm. With Lee Kang-sheng, Lu Yi-ching, Fanny Ardant, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Laetitia Casta, Jeanne Moreau, Mathieu Amalric. Tsai’s second film set in France—partially financed by and shot in the Louvre—is perhaps his most unapologetically ravishing, imagistic work to date. Lee plays a director who arrives in Paris to film his version of Salomé myth, who finds himself chasing an elusive vision while struggling to deal with the death of his mother and, yes, plumbing problems. The Christian Lacroix-costumed cast includes New Wave icons Jean-Pierre Léaud (whose relationship to François Truffaut mirrored Lee’s to Tsai), Fanny Ardant, Nathalie Baye, and Jeanne Moreau, choices which reflect Tsai’s deep debt to French cinema, in particular Truffaut, who is a constant reference point here.
READ MORE
CITIZEN KANE, Orson Welles
MoMA
“Welles’s first feature is probably the most respected, analyzed, and parodied of all films. Although its archival and historical value are unchallenged, Citizen Kane, nevertheless, seems fresh on each new viewing. The film touches on so many aspects of American life—politics and sex, friendship and betrayal, youth and old age—that it has become a film for all moods and generations. In its expansive way, it creates a kaleidoscopic panorama of a man’s life. Loosely based on the life of the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, Citizen Kane is the saga of the rise to power of a ‘poor little rich boy’ starved for affection, as Welles himself was after his parents’ early deaths. It is also a meditation on emotional greed, the ease of amassing wealth, and the difficulty of sustaining love.
READ MORE
BLACK PANTHERS AND OTHER SHORT WORKS, Agnes Varda
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
A selection of short documentaries by Agnès Varda: Black Panthers is a casual, open-air portrait of a bustling “Free Huey” rally in Oakland that arose from Varda’s transformative encounter with the Black Panthers in 1968; Women Reply: Our Bodies Our Sex is a frank examination of how women are taking control over their bodies and lives; the exuberant Salut les Cubains is sourced from the vast cache of photographs Varda shot during her 1962 trip to newly post-Revolution Cuba; and Ulysse is a stunning essay film and a wide-ranging, concentrically expanding inquiry into history, memory, politics, and place.
READ MORE
THE GREEN RAY, Le Rayon Vert and Eric Rohmer
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
“Ah, for the days / That set our hearts ablaze.” Rohmer’s mid-career triumph follows a depressed, newly single Parisian secretary as she spends her summer vacation looking for happiness and true love. Starring Rohmer axiom Marie Rivière as the directionless Delphine, the film’s a masterpiece about unspoken feelings of melancholy and uncertainty, fashioned from the simplest of elements: a change in plans when a holiday falls through. It’s a rare chronicle of in-between moments and moods that’s proven hugely influential, with a glorious, unforgettable guest appearance by a sunset… Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
READ MORE
LAURA + SIGMUND FREUD’S DORA: A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY, Andrew Tyndall, Anthony McCall, Claire Pajaczkowska and Jane Weinstock
BAM
One of Freud’s most curious case studies—in which an eighteen-year-old suicidal woman walked out on his psychoanalytic treatments after three months—receives a fascinating feminist deconstruction.
READ MORE
LA CAPTIVE, Chantal Akerman
BAM
A reclusive young man’s (Merhar) infatuation with a curiously passive woman (Testud) traps them both in a ritual of unfulfilled desire as he obsessively tails her every move à la Jimmy Stewart’s detective in Vertigo. Visionary director Chantal Akerman’s mesmerizing take on Proust’s La Prisonnière “transcends any notion of adaptation and touches on the distance between lovers who are doomed to dream apart” (The New York Times).
READ MORE
HUMAN HIGHWAY: DIRECTOR’S CUT, Bernard Shakey and Dean Stockwell
IFC Center
“The director’s cut version of Neil Young’s mind-bending 1982 post-apocalyptic musical comedy, in which the rock legend writes, directs and stars alongside an eclectic and eccentric cast including Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn, Dennis Hopper and Devo.
READ MORE
MUDDY TRACK, Bernard Shakey
IFC Center
Bernard Shakey takes the viewer on a trip thru the 1987 Neil Young and Crazy Horse European Tour, with much of the story captured by Neil Young’s hand held camera “Otto”. A soundtrack drenched in feedback and distortion punctuates a look into life on the road from the artist’s POV.
READ MORE
YEAR OF THE HORSE, Jim Jarmusch
IFC Center
“Super-8 and 16-millimeter multiple-camera perspectives of Neil Young and Crazy Horse onstage in 1996 are the emotional center of this concert film and bio. Cinematographers L.A. Johnson and Jim Jarmusch (who also directed) seem particularly attuned to the enthralling repetition in the band’s music and stage behavior, and editor Jay Rabinowitz maximizes this seductive quality with decisive, flowing cuts during the plentiful performance segments. The rest of the movie is allotted to interviews with band members and support staff, moving homages to dead people who were involved with the band, gorgeously doctored footage of crowds, and snippets—some from 1976 and 1986—of band members arguing, rehearsing, and relaxing. Many shots contain the typical reflexive acknowledgment of the filmmaking process—the filmmakers interacting with their subjects, the subjects playing to the camera or talking about being documented—but it never becomes cloying, perhaps because the movie also contains footage so intimate it’s hard to believe a camera was present. This portrait debunks the idea that Young’s the dominant figure in the band by giving lots of screen time to Ralph Molina, Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro, and Billy Talbot—and not just so they can talk about Young. Still, his powerful yet understated persona asserts itself in alluring flashes.” – Chicago Reader
READ MORE
The post 27 Films to See This Weekend: Lynch, Jarmusch, Varda + More appeared first on BlackBook.