From David Lynch at Nitehawk and Paul Schrader at IFC Center to Satyajit Ray at Film Forum and Martin Rejtman a Film Society, check out the 25 films you should be seeing in New York this week.
***MONDAY, MAY 18***
THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS, Paul Schrader
IFC Center
Stuck in a relationship rut, English lovers Colin and Mary (Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson) return to beautiful Venice, the site of their passionate tryst years prior. Lost amidst the city’s picturesque canals and dark alleys, they happen upon white-suited stranger Robert (Christopher Walken). A suave aristocrat — or so he claims — Robert plies the young couple with vino, regales them with intimate tales of his youth, and lures them back to his spectacular palazzo for a brief rest. They awaken to find their clothes gone and Robert’s mysterious, physically impaired wife Caroline (Helen Mirren) watching them sleep — and that’s when the psychosexual mind games really begin… An unlikely mix of shocking horror, wicked comedy, and European opulence, THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS boasts one of the most astonishing list of collaborators in modern movies: a script by Harold Pinter (adapted from an Ian McEwan novel), cinematography by Dante Spinotti (Heat), costumes by Giorgio Armani, music by Angelo Badalamenti (Blue Velvet), editing by De Palma regular Bill Pankow (a previous Celluloid Dreams guest), and sets by Gianni Quaranta (1900), but it’s the cool, highly controlled direction by Paul Schrader that ties the stunning individual components together into a menacing whole. Schrader himself is said to have called THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS the best directed of all his own work, and we’re thrilled to give this gorgeous, sinister erotic thriller a long-overdue big-screen celebration
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PRINT SCREE: Maggie Nelson
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Part of our new series Print Screen, this reading, screening, and discussion launches The Argonauts, the latest work by Maggie Nelson (Bluets, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning). Part intimate memoir, part bracingly intelligent essay, the book looks through and beyond the language we use to speak about gender, sexuality, difference, and queer family-making. Nelson will read from her new book and introduce a screening of three recent works of performative video art: You Will Never Be a Woman. You Must Live The Rest of your Days Entirely As a Man and You Will Only Grow More Masculine With Every Passing Year. There is No Way Out by A.L. Steiner and Zackary Drucker, with Van Barnes and Mariah Garnett (2008), Untitled (Agua Viva) by Dylan Mira (2013), and The Time-Eaters by Harry Dodge (2014). Following the screening, Nelson will join her partner Harry Dodge––who helped to curate this event––onstage for a discussion, with a book signing to follow. Presented in collaboration with McNally Jackson Books.
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THE BRIDE TALKS IN HER SLEEP and The Groom Talks in His Sleep, Heinosuke Gosho
MoMA
“This pair of gentle yet witty and inventive comedies from the director of The Neighbour’s Wife and Mine typify both the formal experimentation of early Japanese sound cinema and the social milieux that Shochiku tended to depict. ‘Virtually plotless, and feeling more like comic sketches than fully developed stories,’ writes Arthur Nolletti, Jr, ‘these light comedies, or farces, take a wholly trivial matter (often a socially embarrassing situation) and use it as a springboard for a succession of gags.’ Much of the films’ distinction comes from the wit of Gosho’s direction, the imaginative use of the new sound technology and the charm of the acting, particularly of the heroines (Kinuyo Tanaka in Bride; Hiroko Kawasaki in Groom). Yet in both films, Gosho finds room for some shrewd observation of character and environment, subtly exploring the values and assumptions of the suburban petit bourgeoisie.”
DAY OF THE OUTLAW, Andre de Toth
Anthology Film Archives
In the barren, snow-covered landscape of Bitters, Wyoming, cattle rancher Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan) carries out an ongoing feud with local farmers, focusing most of his rage on the husband of an ex-lover. Before he can act, the town is taken over by a band of bank robbers led by AWOL cavalryman Jack Bruhn (Burl Ives), whose control over the situation grows as a hostile storm further isolates the area and leaves the townspeople with seemingly no option but to wait. Painted in a harsh, high-contrast palette of pure whites and blacks, de Toth’s final western is a perfect blend of landscape and psychology, offering a bleak portrait of individuals cut off from civilization by both choice and circumstance.
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AN EVENING WITH DAVID MALJKOVIC, David Maljkovic
MoMA
David Maljković (Croatian, b. 1973), working in mediums from film and video to drawing and installation, confronts audiences with forgotten or “invisible” heritages, which are not perceived as valuable in the present moment. His video trilogy Scenes from a new heritage—currently on view in the homonymous exhibition of contemporary art from MoMA’s collection—is set between 2045 and 2060, showing three different moments in time and envisioning three different relationships to an abandoned socialist monument. For this Modern Monday event, Maljković premieres a new film depicting the historical and artistic heritage that influenced his work.
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EDGE OF DOOM, Mark Robson
Anthology Film Archives
Tenement dweller and floral store employee Martin Lynn (Farley Granger) has but one wish: a big funeral for his beloved mother. And he’s determined to get it, especially since the neighborhood church refused to bury his alcoholic, suicidal father not long ago. One of Yordan’s darkest scripts, EDGE OF DOOM is set in a world ruled by desperation, navigated by an anti-hero fueled by resentment towards a most unlikely Hollywood villain: the Catholic Church. Val Lewton veteran Mark Robson is at the top of his post-SEVENTH VICTIM game in this rarely-screened, blasphemous noir.
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IRIS, Albert Maysles
Film Forum
She has a shock of white hair, signature thick, round black glasses – and is adorned by a vast number of fabulous bracelets and necklaces. You’ve probably seen Iris Apfel at galleries, openings, flea markets, and in the pages of The New York Times’s Styles section. “My mother worshipped at the altar of the accessory,” confides the 93-year-old fashion icon to 87-year-old legendary documentarian Albert Maysles, long famous (with his brother David) for SALESMAN, GIMME SHELTER, and GREY GARDENS. Iris is a master of bravura style: mixing valuable antiques, colorful plastic doodads, Native American handicrafts, and high-end costume pieces, all to wonderful effect. The furthest thing from an empty-headed fashionista, she is witty and disarming, unpretentious, and full of the kind of wisdom you wish your grandmother had imparted.
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APARAJITO, Satyajit Ray
Film Forum
(1956) As death depletes the family, Apu (now played by Smaran Ghosal) and his mother move to Benares, and the now-young man discovers electricity, the working of the heavens, the delights of poetry, and his entrance to University—as well as his own growing sense of responsibility for the mother who has always cared for him. Approx. 109 min. DCP.
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***TUESDAY, MAY 19***
MAD MAX, George Miller
IFC Center
“George Miller’s film is an outrageous exploiter drawing intelligently on everything from Death Race 2000 to Straw Dogs for its JG Ballard-ish story about a future where cops and Hell’s Angels stage protracted guerrilla warfare around what’s left of a hapless civilian population… this edge-of-seat revenge movie marks the most exciting debut from an Australian director since Peter Weir.” – Time Out (London)
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TWO SHOTS FIRED, Martin Rejtman
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Rejtman’s first feature in a decade is an engrossing, digressive comedy with the weight of an existentialist novel. Sixteen-year-old Mariano (Rafael Federman), inexplicably and without warning, shoots himself twice—once in the stomach and once in the head—and improbably survives. As his family strains to protect Mariano from himself, his elder brother (Benjamín Coehlo) pursues a romance with a disaffected girl (Laura Paredes) who works the counter at a fast-food restaurant, his mother (Susana Pampin) impulsively takes off on a trip with a stranger, and Mariano recruits a young woman (Manuela Martelli) to join his medieval wind ensemble. Rejtman tells this story with both compassion and formal daring, pursuing one thread only to abandon it for another. Two Shots Fired is a wry, moving, consistently surprising film about the irrationality of emotions and how they govern our actions at each stage of our lives. An NYFF52 selection. A Cinema Tropical release.
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AKANISHI KAKITA, Mansaku Itami
MoMA
1936. Japan. Directed by Mansaku Itami. With Chiezo Kataoka, Shosaku Sugiyama, Sojin Kamiyama, Yoko Umemura, Takashi Shimura. “Mansaku Itami was one of the outstanding directors of jidai-geki (period film) during the mid-1930s. His treatment of the genre was primarily comic, and he sent up the codes of bushido in graceful yet daringly subversive fashion. In this witty and engaging film, Itami mocks the conventions of the genre and subverts sacred cows such as the custom of hara-kiri, while casting his regular star Chiezo Kataoka in two contrasting roles. Kakita Akanishi is described by Anderson and Richie as: ‘a genuine character study of a samurai who was not a hero in any conventional sense of the word, being instead a very ordinary man, weak in body if strong in spirit.’ The comic use of sound technology is apparent in the incongruous use of a Chopin piano piece to accompany the opening scene. Itami’s career as a director was ended by worsening health in 1938, but his son Juzo Itami sustained his father’s tradition of cinematic satire through the 1980s and 1990s.” In Japanese; English subtitles. 77 min.
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SILVIA PRIETO, Martin Rejtman
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Silvia Prieto sells soap to passersby in busy city squares, pores over phone books to find women who share her name, and won’t concede to settle down with either of the boyish men in her orbit. Rejtman’s radiant second feature, which follows Silvia (played by the singer Rosario Bléfari) for a short stretch of her life in Buenos Aires, is a comedy of details—the statue that supposedly resembles Silvia and passes from owner to owner; the blazer Silvia permanently borrows from a wealthy male admirer; the chicken she buys every night—and occasional, quiet epiphanies. Silvia Prieto is one of the jewels of recent Argentine cinema, and perhaps Rejtman’s most perfectly realized film to date.
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CHUSHINGURA, Teinosuke Kinugasa
MoMA
1932. Japan. Directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa. With Jusaburo Bando, Chojiro Hayashi, Utaemon Ichikawa, Tsumasaburo Bando, Yukichi Iwata, Sojin Kamiyama, Hiroko Kawasaki, Tatsuo Saito, Choko Iida, Kinuyo Tanaka. “This 1932 adaptation is the earliest sound version of the ever-popular and much-filmed Chushingura story of the loyal 47 retainers who avenged their feudal lord after he was obliged to commit hara-kiri due to the machinations of a villainous courtier. As the first sound version of the classic narrative, the film was something of an event, and employed a stellar cast, who give a roster of memorable performances. Director Teinosuke Kinugasa was primarily a specialist in jidai-geki (period films), such as the internationally celebrated Gate of Hell (Jigokumon, 1953), and although he is now most famous as the maker of the avant-garde silent films A Page of Madness (Kurutta ichipeji, 1926) and Crossroads (Jujiro, 1928), Chushingura is in fact more typical of his output than those experimental works. The film ranked third in that year’s Kinema Junpo critics’ poll, and Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie noted that ‘not only the sound but the quick cutting was admired by many critics.’ We believe this is its first screening in North America.” In Japanese; English subtitles. 139 min.
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INNOCENCE UNPROTECTED, Dusan Makavejev
BAM
This nuanced history combines documentary and propaganda footage with footage from a largely unseen film of the same name, made by gymnast Dragoljub Aleksic during the Nazi occupation of Belgrade.
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JOHNNY GUITAR, Nicholas Ray
Anthology Film Archives
The delicate balance of a small Arizona town is thrown into chaos with the arrival of Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden), the mysterious man-for-hire of local saloon owner Vienna (Joan Crawford). Already distrusted by local leaders thanks to her relationship with troublemaking ex-lover the Dancin’ Kid, and loathed by her arch-enemy Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge), Vienna finds herself at the center of a witch hunt when the Kid and his gang pull off a bank robbery in her and Johnny’s presence. At once a dreamlike anti-McCarthy allegory, a realistic romance, and a layered look at the links between the personal, political, and sexual, JOHNNY GUITAR remains one of the great American films and Yordan’s most famous credit.
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***WEDNESDAY, MAY 20***
SAINT LAURENT, Bertrand Bonello
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Bonello’s latest feature focuses on a dark, hedonistic, wildly creative decade (from 1967 to ’77) in Yves Saint Laurent’s life and career. Over the course of the film, the couturier—convincingly embodied first by Gaspard Ulliel, and later by Visconti stalwart Helmut Berger—becomes a myth, a brand, and an avatar of his era, moving through a string of hothouse ateliers and nightclubs whose centers of gravity all seem to realign around him. Bonello’s primary interest here, however, is cinema’s potential to capture and warp the passage of time. Saint Laurent is a kaleidoscopic torrent of lavish excess, retrospectively pieced together with a Proustian form of fast-and-loose association—and a delirious twist on the modern biopic’s rules and limitations. An NYFF52 selection. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
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THE ONLY SONG, Yasujiro Ozu
MoMA
1936. Japan. Directed by Yasujiro Ozu. With Choko Iida, Shin’ichi Himori, Masao Hayama,Yoshiko Tsubouchi, Mitsuko Yoshikawa. “Ozu was the last of the acknowledged masters of Japanese cinema to convert to sound, so his first talkie, The Only Son, makes a fitting climax to this retrospective of early Japanese sound film. Touchingly, Ozu had resisted conversion because he had promised to use a sound system developed by his regular cinematographer, Hideo Mohara, but his debut in the new medium was a masterpiece, hailed by Noel Burch as his ‘supreme achievement.’ The story of a mother who labours in a silk factory in rural Nagano Prefecture to ensure that her son can be educated, only to find him trapped in a relatively menial teaching job at night school when she visits him in Tokyo, is one of its director’s most trenchant critiques of Japanese society, and the film displays Ozu’s rigorous style, with its careful composition and suggestive montage, at its most precise and imaginative. Yet Ozu also found room for such playful and self-conscious touches as the visit to a cinema screening of an imported talkie by German actor-director Willi Forst, which (in what has been construed by more than one critic as a coded political comment) sends the protagonist’s mother straight to sleep.” In Japanese; English subtitles. 82 min.
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THE BIG COMBO, Joseph H. Lewis
Anthology Film Archives
A perfect noir catalog of sadism and sadness, THE BIG COMBO borrows THE BIG HEAT’s vengeance-is-mine ethical maze and adds an unhealthy dollop of psychosexual obsession to the mix. Lt. Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde) is determined to bring down crime boss Mr. Brown (Richard Conte) and is ready to risk his life (and others’) to do so, but his true mission seems to be to rescue Brown’s high society girlfriend from the dirty clutches of his gangster rival. Yordan’s script, loaded with memorable set pieces and side characters, is bolstered immeasurably by the inventive visuals of Joseph H. Lewis and master cinematographer John Alton.
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THE BRAVADOS, Henry King
A silent stranger (Gregory Peck) comes to town, seemingly with no purpose, until he reveals that the four men set to be hanged the next morning killed his wife while robbing his ranch. Determined to witness justice, the farmer refuses all entreaties to leave while the anxious town waits for the hangman. THE BRAVADOS plunges deep into the moral muck and never cops out, presenting Peck as an anti-hero whose desire for vengeance brings out the darkest in the man. Finding their story in the skies, Henry King and his regular cinematographer Leon Shamroy provide stunning ‘scope vistas and stylized night photography that make this masterful western one of the most underrated of the 1950s.
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REMINISCENCES OF A JOURNEY TO LITHUANIA, Jonas Mekas
BAM
A moving chronicle of loss and displacement by one of the godfathers of American avant-garde cinema.
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***THURSDAY, MAY 21***
TUDOR CRISTIAN JURIU’S THE JAPANESE DOG, Tudor Cristian Jurgiu
MoMA
A standout of New Directors/New Films 2014, Tudor Cristian Jurgiu’s feature debut returns to MoMA for a weeklong run. A striking departure from the gallows humor of the Romanian New Wave, Jurgiu’s Chekhovian The Japanese Dog instead pays loving homage to the tender and gently comical family dramas of Yasujiro Ozu, Late Spring and There Was a Father in particular. Victor Rebengiuc, a legendary veteran of stage and screen, imbues the elderly Costache Moldu with a stoic yet fragile dignity, as he reunites with his estranged son after losing his wife and home in a devastating flood. Exquisitely attuned to the rhythms of nature and rural life—and the melancholy beauty of transient things—The Japanese Dog comes by its emotions honestly and poignantly.
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KATY MARTIN
Anthology Film Archives
Apple Butter Boil
Silkscreens
Swan’s Island
By Night – No Stillness
Breathing Twice
Christophe Averian
Swimming Around the Continents
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THE DARK SIDE TO LOVE, John Carr
Anthology Film Archives
Towards the end of his life, Yordan cranked out scripts for a series of bizarre, low-budget genre films. Three were shortened and compiled in the infamous anthology NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR, including THE DARK SIDE TO LOVE, a delirious distillation of Yordan’s darkest propensities towards sex and violence. A wealthy gadabout takes on a carnival worker as a kept woman…who does porn films on the side…which are seen by a medical student…who tracks her down…only to get involved in a game of Russian roulette in which a giant beetle counts as a bullet. And there’s much, much more. Set taste and logic aside for this strange, offensive, and hypnotic UFO – supposedly based on an Erskine Caldwell novel! – and be sure to look for Yordan’s self-indicting cameo as a dirty old man.
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BLOWING WILD, Hugo Fregonese
Anthology Film Archives
Moving from western to adventure before spinning off into dark drama, the Gary Cooper/Barbara Stanwyck vehicle BLOWING WILD is a whirlwind of genres. Trapped without cash in South America after bandits destroy his oil stake and a nitro delivery gets him nowhere, unlucky Jeff Dawson (Cooper) finally ends up with Paco (Anthony Quinn), an old friend who brings him on as manager of one of his oil wells. But Paco’s wife Marina (Barbara Stanwyck), who shares a romantic past with Jeff, is determined to make the situation as uncomfortable as possible. A film of physical and emotional violence that literally explodes with jealousy, vengeance, and repression, BLOWING WILD is one of Yordan’s most idiosyncratic efforts.
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SHORTS I: DOCUMENTARIES WITH A HUMAN FACE
BAM
In the 1950s, Eastern Europe underwent a tumultuous period of de-Stalinization and liberalization, and filmmakers began testing the limits of the system by uncovering the traumas the region had faced since the ravages of World War II. This program charts the evolution of new forms of non-fiction filmmaking during this period, from socially conscious documentaries to highly experimental and poetic works produced by institutions like the Balázs Béla Studio and the Riga Film Studio.
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SHORTS II: CITY SCENE/COUNTRY SCENE
BAM
Public space takes on politically charged significance in this collection of short films, which mines Eastern European cinema from the 1960s to the 1980s for indelible images of city streets and rural locales. Attitudes toward the cinematic representation of place range from the freedom and frisson of urban life found in Dok. Film (1968) to the ominous sense of surveillance and government control in Self-Fashion Show (1976).
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DUNE, David Lynch
Nitehawk Cinema
David Lynch brought Frank Herbert’s wildly popular science-fiction novel Dune to the big screen in 1984 and it’s been a trip-tastic go-to-movie ever since. Set in the year 10,191 when the universe is dependent on a spice called Melange that can extend life and can fold time, a Duke’s son (Kyle MacLachlan) leads the enslaved desert warriors on the spice-producing planet Arrakis in an epic battle with the evil Emperor. In the tradition of futuristic space worlds like Star Wars and The Matrix, Dune is about a young man deemed the messiah rising up and trying to make things better for the people. Time, space, telepathy, monsters, madness, love, and righteousness – long live the fighters!
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