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,” according to Tom Robbins, 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 Jarmusch, the essential Godard, or a noir crime classic, 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.
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***FRIDAY, JULY 25***
THE BURGLAR, Paul Wendkos
MoMA
“Pulp existentialist David Goodis brings his own crime novel to the screen in classic hardboiled fashion. A botched jewel heist sparks sexual tension, incestuous childhood guilt, and treachery among thieves and crooked cops—and who can blame them, with voluptuous Jayne Mansfield at the center of it all? Eagerly making his feature debut, Wendkos employs various Wellesian devices including a newsreel prologue, a climax in a fun house on Atlantic City’s Steel Pier, and a profusion of sweaty, deep focus close-ups. The Burglar represents a transitional, self-reflexive noir made at the twilight of the studio system in the late 1950s, with Goodis’ story also forming the basis for Henri Verneuil’s Le casse, a 1971 serie noire starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Omar Sharif, and Dyan Cannon.”
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ESCAPE IN THE FOG, Budd Boetticher
MoMA
“Boetticher’s wartime spy thriller pleasurably mixes Freudian pop psychology, supernaturalism, and tradecraft. A battle-scarred Navy nurse, awakening from a nightmare in which a man is about to be murdered on the Golden Gate Bridge, finds the mysterious stranger standing at the foot of her bed. Very quickly they become enmeshed in a nasty bit of international espionage involving fifth columnists, double agents, and an extremely well-placed MacGuffin. Escape in the Fog was the last of Boetticher’s five B-movies for Columbia Pictures. According to Boetticher, the film was made in only 10 days on a minimal budget, and is enlivened by an intelligent performance by Nina Foch (the star of Joseph Lewis’s My Name Is Julia Ross) and the delightfully sinister character actors Otto Kruger and Ivan Triesault.”
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SLACKER, Richard Linklater
Anthology Film Archives
“Linklater burst onto the scene with this radically de-centered, discursive film, one of the key works of 1990s independent American cinema. As dialogue-crammed as his debut feature was dialogue-free, SLACKER is a celebration of American weirdos of all shapes and sizes, and a symphony of verbal dexterity and inventiveness. A plotless, whirligig gallery of “paranoid conspiracy and assassination theorists, serial-killer buffs, musicians, cultists, college students, pontificators, petty criminals, street people, and layabouts” (Jonathan Rosenbaum), it marked the first (and in some ways still most memorable) manifestation of Linklater’s world of compulsive talkers and thinkers.”
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A MASTER BUILDER, Jonathan Demme
Film Forum
“The artistic triumvirate of Jonathan Demme, André Gregory, and Wallace Shawn update Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder, a modern classic about a successful, egomaniacal architect who has spent a lifetime bullying his wife, employees and mistresses – who nonetheless wants to make peace with himself as his life approaches its final act. Wallace Shawn gives a tour-de-force performance as the cruel, yet guilt-ridden architect, working from his own translation of the Norwegian text. Jonathan Demme’s direction is based on the near-legendary production created for the stage by André Gregory, over a period of more than 10 years. Lisa Joyce plays a sensual, mysterious young visitor who turns the household upside down, much to the consternation of Julie Hagerty, perfectly cast as Shawn’s neurasthenic, long-suffering wife. Scandinavian angst — reinterpreted by New York’s finest.”
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MURDER, MY SWEET, Edward Dmytryk
Film Forum
“Dick Powell’s Philip Marlowe, sweating through a police grilling, flashes back to tell this story of murder, blackmail, sadism, sexual servitude, and bicep-ogling Claire Trevor. Based on Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely.”
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THE MALTESE FALCON, John Huston
Film Forum
“Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade traipses through Hammett’s San Fran to recover the world’s most coveted chachka — despite the malevolent connivings of Peter Lorre’s perfumed-card-carrying Joel Cairo, “Fat Man” Sidney Greenstreet’s Kasper Gutman, and Mary Astor’s two-faced ‘Miss Wonderly.’”
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SPACE JAM, Joe Pytka
BAM
“In this 1990s box-office juggernaut, Brooklyn natives Michael Jordan (in his only starring role in a film) and Bugs Bunny join forces against aliens in a battle for cartoon freedom. Jonathan Rosenbaum praises Space Jam as a ‘great deal of fun, confirming that Jordan is every bit as mythological a creature as Daffy Duck or Yosemite Sam’ (Chicago Reader).”
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MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT, Woody Allen
BAM
“Set in the 1920s on the opulent Riviera in the south of France, Woody Allen’s latest film explores a series of events that are magical in every sense of the word. Chinese conjuror Wei Ling Soo is the most celebrated illusionist of his age, but few know Soo is only the stage persona of a grouchy, arrogant Englishman named Stanley Crawford (Firth), who has an avowed aversion to claims of real magic and spiritualism. Persuaded by his friend, Stanley goes on a mission to a wealthy family’s Côte d’Azur mansion in order to debunk an alluring young clairvoyant (Stone) who is staying there to provide psychic guidance. Romantic entanglements and elaborate cons ensue, but, in the end, the biggest trick Magic in the Moonlight plays is one that fools us all.”
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SHIRLEY: VISIONS OF REALITY, Gustav Deutsch
Museum of the Moving Image
“Thirteen paintings by Edward Hopper are brought stunningly to life in this dazzling visual feast. Masterfully recreating the colors and textures of the artist’s work Deutsch connects the meticulously rendered tableaux with a narrative that spans the myriad social upheavals of mid-twentieth century America, from the Depression to the civil rights movement. Blown up to big-screen proportions and radically re-contextualized, Hopper’s iconic images are given new meaning in this mesmerizing cinematic experiment.”
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HIGH SIERRA, Raoul Walsh
IFC Center
“A momentous gangster movie which took the genre out of its urban surroundings into the bleak sierras, and in so doing marked its transition into film noir. It isn’t just that Bogart’s Mad Dog Earle is a man ‘rushing towards death’, infallibly doomed and knowing it, from the moment he is paroled and through the half-hearted hold-up to his last stand on the mountainside. He also in a sense wills his own destruction, his dark despair fuelled by the betrayal of an innocent, clubfooted country girl whose operation he pays for, and who casually abandons him as soon as she can ‘have fun’. Terrific performances, terrific camerawork (Tony Gaudio), terrific dialogue (John Huston and WR Burnett from the latter’s novel), with Walsh — who in fact reworked the material as Colorado Territory eight years later — giving it something of the memorable melancholy of a Peckinpah Western.” – Time Out (London)
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DEAD MAN, Jim Jarmusch
Nitehawk Cinema
“Dead Man shows a man’s physical and spiritual journey through a chaotic world; one of chance, consequence, and personal evolution. After the death of his parents William Blake (Johnny Depp) heads out for employment as an accountant at Dickinson Steel Works run by a hardened man (Robert Mitchum). When circumstances unfold that Blake has shot and killed the owner’s son he flees, ultimately encountering a Indian named Nobody with whom he goes on a personal odyssey. With obvious symbolic gestures towards art and poetry, nothingness, and the delicate line between life and death, Jarmusch gives a dreamscape of a western that offers a somewhat biting look at America.”
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I ORIGINS, Mike Cahill
Nitehawk Cinema
“I ORIGINS, the second feature film from writer and director Mike Cahill, tells the story of Dr. Ian Gray (Michael Pitt), a molecular biologist studying the evolution of the eye. He finds his work permeating his life after a brief encounter with an exotic young woman (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) who slips away from him. As his research continues years later with his lab partner Karen (Brit Marling), they make a stunning scientific discovery that has far reaching implications and complicates both his scientific and spiritual beliefs. Traveling half way around the world, he risks everything he has ever known to validate his theory.”
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MOOD INDIGO, Michel Gondry
Film Society of Lincoln Center
“Eminently inventive Michel Gondry finds an ideal counterpart in Boris Vian, whose novel Foam of the Daze provides the foundation for this manic, visionary love story. Romain Duris plays wealthy bachelor Colin, whose hobbies include developing his pianocktail (a cocktail-making piano) and devouring otherworldly dishes prepared by his trusty chef Nicolas (Omar Sy). When Colin learns that his best friend Chick (Gad Elmaleh), a fellow acolyte of the philosopher Jean-Sol Partre, has a new American girlfriend, our lonely hero attends a friend’s party in hopes of falling in love himself. He soon meets Chloé (Audrey Tautou) and, before they know it, they’re dancing to Duke Ellington and plunging headfirst into a romance that Gondry rapturously depicts as only he can.”
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PUMPKINHEAD, Stan Winston
Film Society of Lincoln Center
“With the help of the local witch, a country storekeeper (Lance Henriksen) summons a marauding 15-foot demon to avenge the death of his son, accidentally slain by a group of teens on vacation. Brought to you by the SFX genius behind Aliens and Jurassic Park.”
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***SATURDAY, JULY 26***
THE RECKLESS MOMENT, Max Ophuls
MoMA
“Produced by Walter Wanger for Columbia Pictures, Ophuls’s last American film stars a never-better Joan Bennett as an upper-middle-class housewife who believes that her daughter has committed a murder and anxiously conceals the body. James Mason is the small-time blackmailer who seeks to exploit the situation, only to fall for her. Burnett Guffey’s creeping crane shots and chiaroscuro lighting are perfectly keyed to Ophuls’s brilliant, amoral critique of bourgeois family life and class ambition.”
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DRIVE A CROOKED ROAD, Richard Quine
MoMA
“Shaking off his countless prewar roles as an American innocent, baby-faced Mickey Rooney plays a lovelorn garage mechanic and amateur racing enthusiast who finds himself seduced by a gangster’s moll into driving the getaway car after a Palm Springs bank robbery—only to turn the tables when he realizes he’s been duped. This sun-drenched noir, one of Rooney’s favorites, demonstrates the actor’s range and subtlety (in director Richard Quine and screenwriter Blake Edwards he would find sympathetic collaborators, and he enlisted them to work on his popular television show); a sultry Diane Foster and a cunning Kevin McCarthy and Marvin Miller round out the cast.”
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WALK A CROOKED MILE, Gordon Douglas
MoMA
“Investigating the murder of an FBI agent and a security breach at a secret Southern California defense facility, a Scotland Yard detective and a square-jawed G-Man are led to a communist spy ring operating out of San Francisco. Walk a Crooked Mile is an early example of Red menace noir: Cold War crime films that urgently uncovered a vast Soviet conspiracy within our sacred American institutions; in this case, modern art plays a particularly incriminating role in the smuggling of atomic formulas.”
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PRONTO, Jim McBride
Anthology Film Archives
“Justly celebrated for his ground-breaking DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY (1967) and the equally inspired films he made in its wake (including MY GIRLFRIEND’S WEDDING, GLEN AND RANDA, and BREATHLESS), Jim McBride spent most of the 1990s making films for cable television. Sadly ignored by critics, many of these works find McBride in full command of his powers, including this 1997 Elmore Leonard adaptation. The great Peter Falk is Harry Arno, a Miami Beach bookie who decamps to Italy after an attempt on his life, eluding both the local mob boss who’s after his hide and the US Marshall (James LeGros) assigned to guard him. Once in Italy, however, he finds himself menaced by a Sicilian mafioso played by Sergio Castellitto.”
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THE KILLING, Stanley Kubrick
Film Forum
“Ex-con Sterling Hayden puts together the usual suspects — including sniveling runt Elisha Cook Jr. (married to rotten-to-the-core Marie Windsor), a chess-playing wrestler, and trigger-happy weirdo Timothy Carey — to pull off a racetrack heist, as the inevitable ironic twist awaits.”
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KISS ME DEADLY, Robert Aldrich
Film Forum
“A nighttime encounter with a Cloris Leachman clad only in a raincoat leads Ralph Meeker’s private dick Mike Hammer and his legality-be-damned methods on a race with double-crossing Gaby Rodgers for a mysterious, too-hot-to-handle box. Adapted from the Mickey Spillane novel, with the ultimate apocalyptic ending.”
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THE SEARCHERS, John Ford
Museum of the Moving Image
“The epic story of John Ford’s The Searchers tracks Ethan Edwards’s increasingly unhinged quest for his beloved niece, kidnapped by Chief Scar in a raid years before. John Wayne’s Ethan is as neurotically obsessed as De Niro’s Travis Bickle. As Howard Hawks once said, Wayne had more power on the screen than anyone else in movies.”
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DAY OF WRATH, Carl Dreyer
Museum of the Moving Image
“In this masterpiece by Carl Dreyer, set in a seventeenth century Danish village, the young wife of a priest is accused of witchcraft after having an affair with her husband’s son. As Anne, the wife, Lisbeth Movin’s beauty has what James Harvey describes as “an elvish cast more chorus girl than goddess—the kind of prettiness a hostile mother-in-law might be able to think of as ‘trashy.’”
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BLONDE VENUS, Joseph von Sternberg
Museum of the Moving Image
“Marlene Dietrich plays a housewife who leaves her American husband in order to fund his medical treatment by working in a nightclub. Although most famous for her gorilla-suited rendition of “Hot Voodoo,” Dietrich is great throughout, in her character’s easy and glamorous mastery not only of her act and shifting gender, but of the whole human space around her.”
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THE DRIVER, Walter Hill
Nitehawk Cinema
“Director Walter Hill’s The Driver is no frills filmmaking at its best with amazing car chase sequences and a main character who doesn’t speak. Ryan O’Neal stars as the illusive and silent man dubbed “The Driver” who is being heavily tracked by a tough and conceited detective (Bruce Dern). Obsessed with catching The Driver and willing to risk his career in order to do so, he goes to extensive lengths to bring him down including staging a faux bank heist. Naturally, there’s a woman in the middle who’s on board to thwart the Detective at every turn.”
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I AM HAPPINESS ON EARTH, Julian Fernandez
Film Society of Lincoln Center
“Julián Hernández, one of Mexico’s premier queer filmmakers (Raging Sun, Raging Sky), returns with this tale of a film director struggling with the line between his sexually charged reality and equally arousing cinematic creations. Will Emiliano be able to sustain his relationship, or will his lust for beauty and meaning lead him elsewhere? Furious couplings between gorgeous men include an exhilaratingly explicit play-within-a-play. Hernández’s boldly poetic romance compares with such films as Fellini’s 8½, Godard’s Contempt, and others exploring the connections between love, sex, creativity, and filmmaking.”
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AGE OF CONSENT, Charles Lum
Film Society of Lincoln Center
“The history of the HOIST, London’s first and only gay sex fetish bar, follows the cultural evolution of gay life and sex in modern London through AIDS, gentrification, and the ongoing political struggle to decriminalize homosexual activity in the UK.”
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***SUNDAY, JULY 27***
MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS, Joseph H. Lewis
MoMA
“An unexpected hit for Columbia in 1945, Julia Ross was among the first of many postwar films to blend the fatalism of film noir with the sentiment of gothic romance. Nina Foch, in her breakthrough role, is the lonely young woman who accepts a job as a private secretary to a wealthy old woman (Whitty) but wakes up one morning to find herself a prisoner of her employer’s softly menacing son (Macready, working his way toward his unforgettable performance in Gilda). The veteran B director Joseph H. Lewis films with unrestrained noir panache, creating dense patterns of shadow and wildly distorted spaces.”
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SO DARK THE NIGHT, Joseph H. Lewis
MoMA
“A B-movie with A-class ambitions, Lewis’s psychologically tinged whodunit stars Austro-Hungarian émigré Steven Geray as a famously obsessive, overworked Parisian detective who falls for an innkeeper’s daughter while on holiday. On the night of their engagement, she and another suitor, a young farmer, mysteriously disappear, leading to a string of perplexing murders. Re-teaming with the brilliant cameraman Burnett Guffey after their sleeper hit My Name Is Julia Ross, Lewis limns his characters’ claustrophobic circumstances in Clouzot-like fashion, using window frames and mirrors, restricted camera movements, deep focus, and shadowy, destabilizing shots to give an increasingly sinister, almost schizoid cast to the bucolic landscape—all the more impressive given that he and Guffey transformed the ragged Columbia backlot into an authentic French countryside without ever once having stepped foot in France.”
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MURDER BY CONTRACT, Irving Lerner
MoMA
“Vince Edwards plays a Melvillian contract killer who executes his assignments with ruthless, Zen-like efficiency, using any potential weapon at hand, while still finding time to take in the tourist sites around town. Unsurprisingly, his fatal flaw is his wary distaste of women, particularly the one he’s hired to kill. Irving Lerner’s perversion of the postwar American Dream—Claude wants to settle down in a humble riverside cottage, and sees his line of business as the swiftest means to that end—resembles the tarnished aspirations of so many Nicholas Ray and Martin Scorsese antiheroes. Indeed, Scorsese dedicated his 1977 film New York, New York to Irving Lerner, citing as influences the film’s spare guitar score by Perry Botkin, high-contrast black-and-white cinematography by Lucien Ballard, and lean storytelling by Ben Simcoe (and an uncredited Ben Maddow).”
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CROWDED PARADISE, Fred Pressburger
Anthology Film Archives
“Broadway legend Hume Cronyn shines in this long-lost melodrama about Puerto Rican assimilation. Directed by the elusive Fred Pressburger and featuring a roster of first-rate talent recruited from live TV (Studio One, Playhouse 90, Kraft Television Theatre), CROWDED PARADISE also highlights the sculpted, mobile camerawork of the great Boris Kaufman (L’ATALANTE, ON THE WATERFRONT) and a fine performance by the up-and-coming Mario Alcalde. Cronyn’s leering, jingoistic superintendent sparkles with sheer meanness, and Spanish Harlem provides an appropriate backdrop for this ‘Made in New York’ low-budget sleeper.”
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3:10 TO YUMA, Delmer Daves
Anthology Film Archives
“Adapted from one of Leonard’s earliest short stories, 3:10 TO YUMA features Glenn Ford and the superb Van Heflin in one of the most unusual and sublime of all westerns. Ford is outlaw gang-leader Ben Wade, whose capture by the upstanding but debt-ridden rancher Dan Evans (Heflin) triggers a tense physical and moral reckoning. As Evans awaits the 3:10 train to Yuma which will transport the prisoner, he must contend with both Wade’s gang and the temptation to trade in the bounty for Wade’s much more substantial counter-offer. It’s a classically fraught set-up, but in the hands of the woefully underrated Delmer Daves, with his radically unhurried, supple pacing, and his emphasis on the moral and psychological underpinnings of his story, 3:10 TO YUMA becomes a genuinely poetic, meditative western, a remarkably modern example of fifties Hollywood filmmaking.”
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DETOUR, Edgar G. Ulmer
Film Forum
“New York to L.A. hitchhiker Tom Neal’s pickup of the aptly-named Ann Savage leads to blackmail and death. ‘One of the defining films of the seductive genre called Film Noir.’ – Vincent Canby”
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GUN CRAZY, Joseph H. Lewis
Film Forum
“A bank robbery shot from inside the getaway car in a single take, as vicious carny girl Peggy Cummins leads good-hearted gun buff John Dall into a life of crime.”
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MASCULINE FEMININE, Jean-Luc Godard
Museum of the Moving Image
“Godard’s zeitgeist portrait of “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola” in mid-1960s Paris is filled with close-ups. As Godard has said, “every film is a documentary of the actors,” and here he allows his performers to show both the documentary and the fiction at once.”
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THE KING OF COMEDY, Martin Scorsese
Museum of the Moving Image
“In Scorsese’s trenchant satire about fandom and the pursuit of fame, De Niro is astonishing as Rupert Pupkin, a delusional aspiring comic who enlists an overzealous fan in his deranged scheme to kidnap a talk-show host.”
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A GIRL & A GUN, Gustav Deutsch
Museum of the Moving Image
“Deutsch was given special access to the archives of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction for his dazzling montage film which is comprised of five movements: Genesis, Paradise, Eros, Thanatos, and Symposium. “Cobwebbed cans of silent and early sound-era film are turned into gold by master archive hunter Gustav Deutsch… who emerges with a heady essay on eroticism and violence in cinema’s formative years.”—Richard Kuipers, Variety
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AU HASARD BALTHAZAR, Robert Bresson
Museum of the Moving Image
“Robert Bresson’s great film Au Hasard Balthazar, follows the life of a donkey, from birth to death. Thanks to Bresson’s insistence on nonacting, the humans become only marginally more overt than the animals, and nearly as mysterious to look at. Ultimately, the film is about the remoteness and inviolable beauty of animal—and human—nature.”
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DUAL, Nejc Gazvoda
Film Society of Lincoln Center
“Iben, a free-spirited Danish woman, gets stuck in Slovenia overnight when her connecting flight gets canceled. She asks Tina, a young lesbian minivan driver, to show her around Ljubljana. Both women are at a crossroads: Tina has a big interview for a bank job in the morning, and Iben is harboring a dark secret. Romantic feelings slowly build between them, and they hatch a plan to run away together.”
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