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 28 films that have us running straight to the theater.
***FRIDAY, MAY 29***
THE HUNGER, Tony Scott
IFC Center
“Deneuve is the ageless, possibly final survivor of an ancient immortal race dependent on humans for both sustenance and companionship. Her superior blood allows her lovers a triple lifetime until they ultimately succumb to instant decline… [the] style is often glorious, from a bloody sun sinking over a gothic hi-tech Manhattan skyline to living quarters that are sumptuous. Neat touches of grim humour also: Deneuve and Bowie manhunt in a disco as Bauhaus sing ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’; and Bowie rots away in a hospital waiting room where the 20 minutes wait becomes a subjective century of ageing. Visual sensualities will have a feast.” – Time Out (London)
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CHILD’S PLAY, Tom Holland
IFC Center
35mm print “When Hicks buys her six-year-old son a talking doll called Chucky for his birthday, she has no idea it’s possessed by the malevolent spirit of psychopath Dourif, whom Chicago cop Sarandon blew away in a shootout the day before. So when her babysitting friend (Manoff) takes a dive from her apartment window and the kid says the doll did it, he gets a ticket for the funny farm. Sarandon doesn’t buy it either, until vengeful Chucky tries to strangle him while he’s driving… Holland’s sure handling of the suspense and shock moments lends the film a sharp and scary edge.” – Time Out (London)
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THE 400 BLOWS, Francois Truffaut
BAM
One of the exhilarating first blasts of the French New Wave, Truffaut’s landmark debut stars his alter-ego, Jean-Pierre Léaud, as a juvenile delinquent who escapes his troubled home life to run wild through the streets of Paris. Throughout, Truffaut delights in the expressive freedom of the CinemaScope frame, not least in the joyous carnival ride sequence and the heart-stopping final scene.
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THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, Dario Argento
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
In Dario Argento’s directorial debut, Sam (Tony Musante), an American writer living in Rome, witnesses a vicious knife attack on a beautiful woman (Eva Renzi) inside an art gallery. After the police fail to make any progress in the case—and confiscate his passport, preventing him from leaving the country—Sam becomes obsessed with uncovering the black-leather-glove-wearing assailant’s true identity. His investigations only lead the murderer toward Sam and his girlfriend (Suzy Kendall). Featuring POV shots of the killer stalking the city at night, gory slow motion, and one of Ennio Morricone’s most distinctive scores, this giallo classic is not to be missed.
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THE WHITE ANGEL, L’angelo Bianco and Raffaello Matarazzo
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
King of Italian melodrama Raffaello Matarazzo merges elements of luridness and coincidence with the earthier style of the neorealists in one of his signature films. Continuing the fraught narrative that began in his earlier Nobody’s Children, Guido (Amadeo Nazzari) is now reeling from the loss of his son—a tragedy that has sent the boy’s mother, Luisa (Yvonne Sanson), into a convent. Spotting Luisa’s doppelgänger, Lina (also portrayed by Sanson), affords him the chance to right past wrongs—or repeat the same mistakes. Featuring storms at sea and a stint in a women’s prison, The White Angel is one part Sirk and one part Vertigo, with sensational aspects offset by Matarazzo’s attention to character psychology and fine performances (especially by Nazzari, known for playing the movie star who picks up Giulietta Masina in Nights of Cabiria).
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ESPIONAGE AGENT, Lloyd Bacon
MoMA
1939. USA. Directed by Lloyd Bacon. With Joel McCrea, Brenda Marshall, Jeffrey Lynn, George Bancroft. Released by Warner Bros. a few months after Confessions of a Nazi Spy, Espionage Agent continues the studio’s campaign for active intervention in the brewing European war. The frankly didactic screenplay features McCrea as a fledgling American diplomat who marries a stateless refugee (Brenda Marshall, in her first film appearance), who soon reveals her inconvenient connections to a Nazi spy ring operated by the inevitable Martin Kosleck. McCrea’s career is ruined, but perhaps not all is lost—can they infiltrate Kosleck’s organization and expose the enemy agents operating in our midst? 16mm. 84 min.
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THE FLY, David Cronenberg
Nitehawk Cinema
If there was ever a film re-make to tackle for David Cronenberg, The Fly would be it. The story of an eccentric scientist who, after successfully teleporting a living creature, decides to try the experiment on himself to devastating results is ripe for the old Cronenberg body horror treatment. Nearly thirty years after the original, the fear of overreaching one’s scientific reach is made even more terrifying. In this updated version we have a single Dr. Seth Brundle (Goldblum) luring a journalistic (Earth Girls Are Easy co-star Geena Davis) into the lab for a story of a lifetime but, as we know, that damn fly had to get in the way. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
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M, Joseph Losey
Anthology Film Archives
It’s impossible to imagine improving upon Fritz Lang’s legendary M (1931), which contains one of the greatest performances of all time courtesy of Peter Lorre. But a film by Joseph Losey is nothing to sneeze at, especially one from his fascinating American period (before he was blacklisted and relocated to the UK). And comparisons to Lang/Lorre aside, his version of M is a terrific, tightly constructed work, and a prime example of 1950s Hollywood filmmaking. Boasting incredible LA location work, with unforgettable sequences set in the now-vanished Bunker Hill neighborhood and in the famous Bradbury building (whose highly picturesque atrium has been utilized in films including BLADE RUNNER and D.O.A.), M is a remarkable achievement in its own right.
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THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, Roger Corman
Anthology Film Archives
Made with a (slightly) bigger budget and longer shooting schedule than the previous films in his Edgar Allan Poe cycle, MASQUE found Corman (with the help of cinematographer and future director Nicolas Roeg) enjoying greater freedom to explore new stylistic paths, resulting in one of the most visually striking of the Poe films, and arguably Corman’s masterpiece.
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***SATURDAY, MAY 30***
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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THE DEMON, Brunello Rondi
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Brunello Rondi, best known for his contributions to Fellini scripts (La Dolce Vita, 8½), makes his sophomore directorial effort with this profoundly unnerving treatise on compulsion and superstition. In a southern mountain village mired in religious fanaticism, peasant girl Purificazione (Daliah Lavi) loves Antonio (Frank Wolff) obsessively. When he chooses to marry someone else, she visits a curse upon him, inciting the townspeople to believe she’s a witch possessed by the devil. The film is a clear forerunner to The Exorcist (a crazed Lavi performs the infamous “spider walk” a decade before Linda Blair), but Rondi leaves us to decide if she’s bedeviled by supernatural forces or mental illness. Lavi’s delirious performance is abetted by Carlo Bellero’s stunning black-and-white photography.
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THE LAW OF THE TRUMPET, Augusto Tretti
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
“Tretti is the madman that Italian cinema needs,” proclaimed Federico Fellini, for whom Tretti worked as an assistant on Il Bidone. His first film as director (sadly, he made only four) was The Law of the Trumpet, an absurdist comedy about Celestino (Angelo Paccagnini), a young ex-con who takes a job in a trumpet factory and falls for the lovely Maria (Eugenia Tretti), only to lose her to his boss, Mr. Liborio, upon learning that Maria’s father owns a brass mine. For the roles of Liborio and three other male characters, Tretti cast his neighbor Maria Boto, an elderly woman who explains in a prologue that she’s never seen a film in her life, before imitating Leo the MGM lion. A truly bizarre finale caps this singular work, whose fans included Michelangelo Antonioni.
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LA DOLCE VITA, Federico Fellini
BAM
Starring Marcello Mastroianni in his most iconic performance, Fellini’s epic follows a playboy paparazzo’s weeklong adventure amin the moral decay of mid-century Roman bourgeoisie. While its condemnation by the Catholic Church spurred international buzz, what remains most striking today is the film’s extravagant visual style, a break from Fellini’s early-career neorealism. Rife with eye-popping set pieces—including a dance of seduction in Trevi Fountain between Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg—this CinemaScope masterpiece demands to be seen on the big screen.
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VIOLENT SUMMER, Valerio Zurlini
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Set amid the civil unrest leading up to Italy’s 1943 armistice, Violent Summer stars Jean-Louis Trintignant as Carlo, a feckless beach bum and son of a well-to-do Fascist. During an Allied air raid, he meets Roberta (Eleonora Rossi Drago), a mother and naval officer’s widow, who openly criticizes Carlo’s draft-dodging. Despite their (slight) age difference and the protestations from Roberta’s family, the two grow closer. After Carlo’s father flees without a word following Mussolini’s “resignation,” Carlo is forced to enlist to support the Fascist cause. The film’s shocking finale brings the couple’s devotion and the horror of war into sharp focus.
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NUMBERED DAYS, Elio Petri
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Cesare (Salvo Randone), a widowed plumber, witnesses a man his age suffer a fatal heart attack on a tram. Deeply shaken by this death, Cesare quits his job—and then discovers he too has a heart condition. He resolves to explore the city around him, scrutinizing the social expectations that have guided his life up until this point. Co-scripted by the prodigious Tonino Guerra, who wrote Amarcord and Blow-Up, this melancholy meditation on modern life and consumer values offers some of the most exquisite night photography of Rome ever committed to celluloid.
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THE LAST WAGON, Delmer Daves
Anthology Film Archives
“A study in race-hate the Old Western way, this worthy follow-up to BROKEN ARROW finds director Delmer Daves returning to Arizona’s Martian valleys and mesas, this time filming in overwhelming, hallucinatory CinemaScope. George Mathews’s swinish Sheriff Bull Harper is bringing Richard Widmark’s ‘Comanche’ Todd to justice for the murder of the other three Harper brothers. But when the wagon train of settlers that they’re traveling with is attacked by Apaches, the despised Todd, who has lived most of his life with the Indians, becomes the last line of defense for the few surviving youths of the party, leading them through the ‘Canyon of Death’ in a wagon made from the remaining wreckage.” –Nick Pinkerton
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PATHER PANCHALI, Satyajit Ray
Film Forum
(1955) In a poor Bengal village, Mom tries to hold things together while dreamy Dad looks for work, daughter Durga is accused of stealing, aged “Auntie” (82-year-old former actress Chunibala Devi) eats more than her share, while the young Apu (8-year-old Subir Bandopadhyay) drinks it all in — including the memorable run through the field of waving grasses for his first sight of a train. Approx. 125 min. DCP.
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SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON, John Ford
Anthology Film Archives
“Of all John Ford’s lyrical films, this 1949 feature is the one that most nearly leaves narrative behind; it is pure theme and variation, centered on the figure of a retiring cavalry officer (John Wayne, playing with strength and conviction a man well beyond his actual age). The screenplay (by Frank Nugent and Laurence Stallings) is entirely episodic, and it ends in a magnificently sustained series of anticlimaxes, suggesting it could spin out forever. In Ford’s superbly creative hands, it becomes perhaps the only avant-garde film ever made about the importance of tradition.” –Dave Kehr, CHICAGO READER
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THE CRANES ARE FLYING, Mikhail Kalatozov
Anthology Film Archives
“One of the most acclaimed Soviet films of all time. Set during WWII, it is a tragic story of the shattering of love and youthful ambitions by war. Two young sweethearts, Veronica (Tatiana Samoilova) and Boris (Alexei Batalov), are certain they will marry and live happily ever after. Then, Boris volunteers for the army. Kalatozov employs the kind of visually extravagant style that had been prohibited by Stalinist dogma since the silent era. With its unusual angles, huge close-ups, and bravura editing techniques, the film recalls the best of the Soviet masters Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, and Eisenstein. It is also distinguished by extraordinary performances, especially that of Samoilova, and by a sense of personal intimacy unique in the Soviet cinema of its time.” –Judy Bloch, PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE
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***SUNDAY, MAY 31***
ANDREI RUBLEV, Andrei Tarkovsky
BAM
Tarkovsky uses the life of the medieval icon painter (Solonitsyn)—who toiled in the face of barbarism to create visionary paeans to God—to craft a transcendent parable about the role of the artist in society. The awe-inspiring widescreen compositions have the same totemic majesty as Rublev’s own work, all rendered in hallucinatory black and white—until the glorious final moments.
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LE AMICHE, Michelangelo Antonioni
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
A rare adaptation for Antonioni, who co-wrote the script adapted from Cesare Pavese’s novella Among Women Only, Le Amiche is widely considered the work in which he first struck on the themes that would define him as a filmmaker. Fashion designer Clelia (Eleonora Rossi Drago) arrives in Turin for the opening of a salon and rescues Rosetta (Madeleine Fischer) from a suicide attempt. Adrift in the city, Clelia is drawn into the world of Rosetta and her three affluent friends, all lovelorn and discontented despite their material comforts. Valentina Cortese (the aging diva in Truffaut’s Day for Night) is particularly memorable as the spurned wife of the artist Rosetta pines for. The film was awarded the prestigious Silver Lion at the 1955 Venice Film Festival.
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HEREMIAS, Lav Diaz
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
A merchant (Ronnie Lazaro) parts ways with his companions, a pack of nomadic artisans, as a deadly typhoon approaches. With only an ox by his side, he embarks on an aimless excursion with mythical undertones and curious premonitions. This epic, initially conceived as the first part of a diptych celebrating stillness and storytelling in all its forms, has a nine-hour runtime that allows for complete immersion in the title character’s existence, inducing a sustained appreciation of natural beauty and observance of one’s surroundings. But amid the lovely scenery and droll digressions (highlight: a bus driver explains the fabled origins of a town called Princess Lizard), Diaz makes sly but pointed comments about police corruption, government impunity, suffering, and sacrifice.
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THE LIFE AQUATIC, Wes Anderson
Nitehawk Cinema
Co-written with Noah Baumbach, The Life Aquatic is Wes Anderson’s parody and homage to Jacques-Yves Cousteau. The film features the eccentric oceanographer Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) who sets out to get revenge on the mythical “Jaguarshark” that ate his partner Esteban…and he’s going to make a documentary about it. Along for the ride is Zissou’s crew of misfits including his estranged wife, a journalist, and his successful, well dressed arch-rival, Alistair Hennessey. So put on your red beanie to set out on the quirky underwater expedition that is much more than a shark hunt. It always is.
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PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET, Samuel Fuller
Film Forum
(1953) “Are you waving the flag at me?,” sneers pickpocket Richard Widmark at cops and Feds on the trail of that microfilm he’s lifted on the subway from Jean Peters’ purse — after all, she was messengering it, albeit unwittingly, to the REDS! But then, in Widmark’s world, “Who cares? Your money’s as good as anybody else’s”; while professional snitch Thlema Ritter thoughtfully pulls out a price chart when called on for a fingering. (This was Ritter’s fourth straight Supporting Actress Oscar nomination —her sixth was for Birdman of Alcatraz; she never won.) Peters herself — soon to be Mrs. Howard Hughes in real life — is everybody’s patsy, blackmailed into the mule deal by sweaty ex-“boyfriend” Richard Kiley with promise of a clean final breakup, robbed twice, cold-cocked, hit with a beer-in-the-face wakeup call, and rag-dolled around an apartment; and shot. But finally, as Ritter says, “Even in our crummy line of business, you gotta draw the line somewhere.” Vintage Fuller hard-boiled pulp, with final chin-bouncing-on-each-step subway station showdown. (Released the year Stalin died, Pickup’s Cold War attitudes horrified Gallic Fuller fans; in the French dubbing, the whole thing was changed to a drug deal.) Approx. 80 min. DCP.
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APUR SANSAR, Satyajit Ray
Film Forum
(1959) Struggling writer Apu — now an adult and played by Ray’s perennial star Soumitra Chatterjee — ends up substituting in an arranged marriage with Sharmila Tagore — then 14, and a distant relative of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, an important Ray influence — but even as love comes, tragedy looms; but Apu finds in his son the promise of new life. Approx. 105 min. DCP.
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ROCKY IV, Sylvester Stallone
Nitehawk Cinema
Rocky IV is an American versus Soviet showdown in the boxing ring! After winning his championship, everyone’s favorite boxer Rocky Balboa is all set to retire and enjoy life with his wife. But after his friend Apollo Creed is killed in the ring by the new Russian boxing sensation Ivan Drago, those plans drastically change. Rocky trains hard once again (in one of the franchise’s best training sequences) and heads to the USSR to avenge the death of his friend in one long, arduous match with Drago.
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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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