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 than by seeing some great films—be they new 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 for you to happily disappear into. Here are 20 film showings in New York this weekend that have us running to the theater.
***FRIDAY, JULY 24***
THE BLACK SWAN – Part of the Glorious Technicolor Series
Henry King // MoMA – 1:30 p.m.
Directed in headlong style by Henry King, filled with rococo rhetoric by Ben Hecht and Seton I. Miller, and acted in the ripest tradition, “The Black Swan” is one of the waning season’s prettiest adventures. Sir Henry Morgan, Jamie Boy, and Tommy Blue—they were men, sirrah! – via NY Times
10 RILLINGOTN PLACE – Part of the True Crime Series
Richard Fleischer // Film Forum – 12:45 5:15 9:40
“What happened to the women at 10 Rillington Place?” queried the ads. Two guesses. In 1948, Welsh blue collar worker John Hurt and wife Judy Geeson, lodgers upstairs from mild- mannered John Reginald Christie (Richard Attenborough) and wife, already have trouble making ends meet when Geeson discovers she’s in the family way — but ever- helpful Christie offers a homemade do-it-yourself abortion. And then… Ultra low-key — but all the more menacing — account of the notorious serial murder case, filmed in the actual locations. – via Film Forum
RECORD OF A TENEMENT GENTLEMAN – The Melancholy of Everyday Things
Yasujiro Ozu // IFC Center
A widow, Tane, reluctantly shelters a young boy for the night when her neighbour discovers him lost and alone in the city. On further investigation, it seems that the boy’s father, a carpenter, has abandoned him out of poverty. Tane tries to do the same, but the boy will have none of it. They strike a deal — as long as he stops wetting his bed, he can stay. This is Ozu in optimistic mood, which is not to say that loss and resignation don’t figure in large part (no film-maker ever had a surer grasp of the melancholy of everyday things), just that here the generosity of spirit seems irresistible — and irresistibly comic. – via IFC Center
RIVER’S EDGE – Part of the Indie 80s Series
Tim Hunter // BAM – 2:00 7:00
The “troubled teen” pic spins crazily out of control in this disturbing portrait of high-school alienation, which plays something like John Hughes meets David Lynch. When their psychotic friend murders his girlfriend, a group of teens (including Crispin Glover in mesmerizing manic mode) help cover-up the crime with a chilling lack of empathy. Dennis Hopper co-stars as a loner whose sole companion is an inflatable sex doll. – via BAM
THE WORLD IN HIS ARMS – Part of the Glorious Technicolor Series
Raoul Walsh // MoMA – 6:45 p.m.
A couple of handsome down-east schooners, racing furiously through a wind-sweptsea with all sails set and bending full before the weather, pretty much steal a robust show from Gregory Peck, Ann Blyth and other mortals in Universal-International’s “The World in His Arms.” And this is no whit of discredit to the mere actors in a lively film; they are faced with uneven competition in this drama now on the Mayfair’s screen. – via NY Times
The Man with the Golden Arm — The Apex of Sinatra’s Acting Career
Otto Preminger // Film Society Lincoln Center – 4:00 9:15
Sinatra gives an astonishing performance as Frankie Machine, a heroin-addicted drummer released from prison who returns to his neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side and resolves to pick up the pieces of his life. Friends in low places and a toxic relationship with his wheelchair-bound wife (Eleanor Parker) threaten his newfound sobriety. Featuring withdrawal scenes that perhaps represent the apex of Sinatra’s acting career (earning him a richly deserved Oscar nomination), the film was a feather in the caps of director Otto Preminger (who flouted Hollywood’s Production Code in tackling the forbidden subject of drug addiction), composer Elmer Bernstein (whose jazz score supplies much of the film’s tension), and legendary titles designer Saul Bass – via Film Society Lincoln Center
IVAN’S CHILDHOOD – Part of the Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time Series
Andrei Tarkovsky // Museum of Art and Design – 7:00 p.m.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s debut feature film Ivan’s Childhood won the young director international acclaim and the top honor at the Venice Film Festival, launching his reputation as one of the most talented directors of his generation. The film follows the effects of World War II on the childhood of a young boy. Unlike other films of the time that sought to glorify war, Ivan’s Childhood centered on the human cost of war. With this perspective, striking cinematography and unflinching performances, Ivan’s Childhood would garner raves from wide ranging figures including Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Paul Sartre and Krzysztof Kieślowski.—via MAD
SIGN OF THE PAGAN – Part of This Is Celluloid: 35MM Encore
Douglas Sirk // Anthology Film Archives – 9:15 p.m.
Douglas Sirk’s very first CinemaScope film was also his only foray into the swords-and-sandals genre. Though it would be a stretch to call it a perfect fit, SIGN OF THE PAGAN displays his usual intelligence and precision, boasts a genuine fascination with its historical era that sets it apart from most of the rest of the genre, and features an unforgettable, larger-than-life performance by Jack Palance as Attila the Hun. Strutting around with shoulder-length hair, a Fu Manchu mustache, and brownish skin, Palance makes Attila not only truly ferocious, but also vulnerable and psychologically complex. – via Anthology Film Archives
***SATURDAY, JULY 25***
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE – Part of the Frank At 100 Series
John Frankenheimer // Film Society Lincoln Center – 9:15 p.m.
“Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?” Nothing is as it seems in John Frankenheimer’s quintessential Cold War thriller, as even this banal directive can trigger world-scale pandemonium. George Axelrod adapts Richard Condon’s account of a decorated Korean War hero (Laurence Harvey) whose inscrutable behavior and ties to a Joseph McCarthy–like demagogue alarm his former commander (Sinatra). Frankenheimer’s taut direction captures the paranoid charge of the Kennedy era, with Angela Lansbury’s turn as Harvey’s manipulative, quasi-incestuous mother landing the coup de grâce. Realizing the urgency and importance of the subject matter, Sinatra gave his all to the production, including the use of his private plane. J. Hoberman contextualized the film’s legacy by calling it “a chunk of America’s psycho-history—as much oracle as movie.” – via Film Society Lincoln Center
LOSING GROUND - Part of the Indie 80s Series
Kathleen Collins // BAM – 2:00 7:00
One of the first films to explore relationships and sexuality from the perspective of a black female director, this revelatory comedic drama follows a philosophy professor (Scott) and her artist husband (Gunn) on a life-changing summer idyll in upstate New York. Rediscovered, restored, and finally released to much acclaim just this year, Losing Ground “feels like news, like a bullentin form a vital and as-yet-unexplored dimension of reality.” – via BAM
BADLANDS – Part of the True Crime Series
Terrence Malick // Film Forum – 2:45 7:20 9:30
“I can’t allow that,” states soft-spoken James Dean-influenced garbage man Martin Sheen, just prior to cold-blooded murder. Malick’s debut is a classic outlaw-couple-on-the-run story, based on the Starkweather/Fugate case, with Sheen taking teenage baton twirler Sissy Spacek on a killing spree across the prairies. – via Film Forum
MALA NOCHE – Part of the Indie 80s Series
Gus Van Sant // BAM – 4:30 9:30
Shot on 16mm for a budget of just $25,000, Gus Van Sant’s ravishing, dreamlike feature debut is a touchstone of New Queer Cinema. Submerged in velvety black and white shadows, it charts the romantic longings of a quixotic Portland grocery store clerk (Streeter) who develops an infatuation with a Mexican immigrant (Cooeyate) who neither speaks English nor returns his affections. – via BAM
FROM HERE TO ETERNITY – Part of the Frank At 100 Series
Fred Zinnemann // Film Society Lincoln Center – 6:45 p.m
Sinatra rebounded from a professional slump with his dramatic turn as Maggio, a cocky GI stationed at Pearl Harbor in the days preceding the invasion. When he read James Jones’s epic novel about the entwining destinies of soldiers and their lovers, he knew the role of the feisty, ill-fated private would restore his career to its former glory, offering to work for free (and nearly making good on his offer). The result was one of Hollywood’s greatest comebacks, earning him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, revitalizing his film and recording careers and ensuring his place on the A-list for the remainder of his life. Sinatra credited co-star Montgomery Clift with coaching him in his most challenging scenes. Fred Zinnemann’s sensitive direction and Donna Reed’s turn as an escort earned statuettes as well, and the film was named Best Picture by the Academy. – via Film Society Lincoln Center
THE MATTEI AFFAIR – Part of the True Crime Series
Francesco Rosi // Film Forum – 12:30 p.m.
It’s only a quick plane ride home by private jet; so why do Enrico Mattei’s friends keep begging off? Rosi’s cine-inchieste (film investigation) of Gian Maria Volonté/Mattei’s turbulent life rockets from nazi fighting to international wheeling/dealing in gas and oil, but always comes back to that 1962… accident? – via Film Forum
THE BIRDS – Part of Nitehawk’s ANIMAL ATTACKS! Midnight and Brunch Series
Alfred Hitchcock // Nitehawk Cinema – 11:30 a.m.
Killer animal movies can be pretty easy: tons of people are already afraid of sharks, loads of people can’t stand spiders, Indiana Jones hates snakes… but birds? Hitchcock manages to take some of nature’s most innocuous creatures and turn them into objects of relentless horror, setting an angry murder of them loose on a quiet California town. Hitch thrusts his stranded characters into the thick of mother nature’s wrath without pausing to explain the reason behind this bird-led insurrection. Besides, we all know why. (It’s because people are terrible). – via Nitehawk
***SUNDAY, JULY 26***
LOS SURES – Part of the Indie 80s Series
Diego Echeverria // BAM – 2:00 6:30
In the early 1980s, Diego Echeverria took a 16mm camera into the streets of South Williamsburg, then a primarily Puerto Rican neighborhood and one of the city’s poorest, most crime-ridden areas. Still, amidst the urban blight, Echeverria finds a thriving street culture in which music, breakdancing, and graffiti abound. Los Sure is both an invaluable record of pre-gentrification Brooklyn and an ode to community’s resilience. – via BAM
SOME CAME RUNNING — Part of the Frank At 100 Series
Vincent Minnelli // Film Society Lincoln Center – 6:30 p.m.
Five years after his triumphant turn in the James Jones adaptation From Here to Eternity, Sinatra brings another Jones novel to the screen: the 1,200-page chronicle of postwar disillusionment and small-town hypocrisy Some Came Running, shrewdly directed by Vincente Minnelli. In one of his most textured portrayals, Sinatra is Dave Hirsh, an embittered ex-GI who returns to his Midwestern hometown to write the next chapter of his life. He’s torn between the “respectable” influences of his social-climbing brother (Arthur Kennedy) and schoolteacher love interest (Martha Hyer), and the decadence embodied by gambler Dean Martin (brilliant in his first pairing with Sinatra) and floozy Shirley MacLaine (in her breakout role). Sinatra suggested changing the book’s finale to favor MacLaine, predicting the final twist would win her an Oscar nomination; it did, with additional nods for Kennedy, Hyer, and the Sammy Cahn/Jimmy Van Heusen song “To Love and Be Loved.” – via Film Society Lincoln Center
NOTHING SACRED — Carole Lomabard at Her Screwball Finest
William A. Wellman // MoMA – 3:30 p.m.
A man posing as the Sultan of Mazipan is exposed as a Harlem bootblack at a banquet sponsored by the New York Morning Star to honor him for offering to donate ten dollars to every dollar given to establish the “Morning Star Temple,” supposedly with twenty-seven halls of culture. Editor Oliver Stone assigns the perpetrator of the hoax, star reporter Wally Cook, to write obituaries, but after he suffers several indignities, Cook convinces Stone to send him to Warsaw, Vermont to interview radium poisoning victim Hazel Flagg, who has been diagnosed as having only six months to live. Before Cook meets her, Hazel learns from her doctor, Enoch Downer, that his original diagnosis was in error and that she is not ill. However, when Cook offers to take her to New York as a guest of the newspaper, she jumps at the chance to leave Warsaw. – via TCM
SERPICO – Part of the True Crime Series
Sidney Lumet // Film Forum – 3:20 5:50 8:20
Al Pacino’s
Frank Serpico flashes back from his beginnings as a
naive, idealistic police recruit to a bearded, hippie-like undercover detective in a relentless mission against corrupt cops. Pacino’s powerhouse performance as the actual hero cop vaulted him to the front ranks of American actors.—via Film Forum
BARRY LYNDON – Part of This Is Celluloid: 35MM Encore
Stanley Kubrick // Anthology Film Archives – 4:45 p.m.
All of Kubrick’s features look better now than when they were first released, but BARRY LYNDON…remains his most underrated. It may also be his greatest. This personal, idiosyncratic, melancholy, and long (three hours) adaptation of the Thackeray novel is exquisitely shot in natural light (or, in night scenes, candlelight) by John Alcott, with frequent use of slow backward zooms that distance us, both historically and emotionally, from its rambling picaresque narrative about an 18th-century Irish upstart (Ryan O’Neal). Despite its ponderous, funereal moods and pacing, the film is a highly accomplished piece of storytelling, building to one of the most suspenseful duels ever staged. It also repays close attention as a complex and fascinating historical meditation, as enigmatic in its way as 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.” – via Anthology Film Archives
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