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. This weekend from BAM and The Film Society of Lincoln Center to Nitehawk Cinema and IFC Center there are more than enough wonderful films showing for you to happily disappear into. Here are 13 films that have us running straight to the theater.
***FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16***
THE ASSASSIN, Hou Hsiao-hsien
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
A wuxia like no other, The Assassin is set in the waning years of the Tang Dynasty when provincial rulers are challenging the power of the royal court. Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi), who was exiled as a child so that her betrothed could make a more politically advantageous match, has been trained as an assassin for hire. Her mission is to destroy her former fiancé (Chang Chen). But worry not about the plot, which is as old as the jagged mountains and deep forests that bear witness to the cycles of power and as elusive as the mists that surround them. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s art is in the telling. The film is immersive and ephemeral, sensuous and spare, and as gloriously beautiful in its candle-lit sumptuous red and gold decor as Hou’s 1998 masterpiece, Flowers of Shanghai. As for the fight scenes, they’re over almost before you realize they’ve happened, but they will stay in your mind’s eye forever.
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THE CODES, Wojciech Has
BAM
In this hallucinatory mystery of memory and mysticism, a man (Kreczmar) who fled Poland during World War II returns to Krakow to track down his long-lost son (Cybulski), a quest that dredges up painful family secrets. Has’ follow-up to The Saragossa Manuscript employs feverish dream imagery and an expressionistic soundtrack, resulting in a haunting investigation of wartime guilt.
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NAKED CHILDHOOD, Maurice Pialat
Museum of the Moving Image
Terrazon gives one of the most affectless child performances ever recorded in Pialat’s wrenching film, playing a troubled orphan being shunted between foster families until he begins to hope that he has discovered a home. Pialat both acknowledges and builds upon the autobiographical directness of François Truffaut’s revolutionaryThe 400 Blows (1959) in his own fiction feature debut (which Truffaut produced). Its vivid verity convinced many that the director was himself a foundling. “A simple story, simply told and awkwardly played, in an amazingly, almost maddeningly, texturally busy space… A monograph on working-class taste.” —Jean-Pierre Gorin. Preceded by L’amour existe.
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THE BIG LEBOWSKI, Joel Coen
IFC Center
All Jeff ‘the Dude’ Lebowski wants to do is go bowling, but when he’s mistaken for LA millionaire big Lebowski and a pair of thugs pee on his rug — “it really tied the room together!” — he’s forced to take action, and so the laziest man in Los Angeles County takes on nihilists, ferrets, and empire tycoons, guzzling White Russians all the while. The Coen Brother’s unstoppable cult classic has inspired countless bowling parties and drinking games, and even its own festival, and we’re happy to bring it back to the IFC Center.
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THE HOURGLASS SANATORIUM, Wojciech Has
BAM
A young man (Nowicki) visits his ailing father in a crumbling sanatorium where time collapses and death never comes. The Hourglass Sanatorium conjures a surrealist fantasia in which past and present—from the Three Wise Men to the Holocaust—collide in a mind-bending phantasmagoria. Has’ art-house masterpiece, based on the writings of Polish author Bruno Schulz, won the Jury Prize at Cannes. New restoration.
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***SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17***
RACETRACK, Frederick Wiseman
Museum of the Moving Image
In this panoramic portrait of the Belmont Park race track, Wiseman captures both the grime and shine of the horse-racing facility, his camera swinging from stable to grandstand, juxtaposing the everyday preparations of the horses (grooming, feeding, and shoeing) with the orchestrated spectacle of the race itself. Overrun by the laborers, buyers, sellers, performers, and spectators, Racetrack serves as a rich microcosm for late capitalism, as well as the business of moviemaking.
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REBELS OF A NEON GOD, Ming Liang-Tsai
Nitehawk Cinema
The loosely structured plot involves Hsiao-kang, a despondent cram school student, who becomes obsessed with young petty thief Ah-tze, after Ah-tze smashes the rearview mirror of a taxi driven by Hsiao-kang’s father. Hsiao-kang stalks Ah-tze and his buddy Ah-ping as they hang out in the film’s iconic arcade (featuring a telling poster of James Dean on the wall) and other locales around Taipei, and ultimately takes his revenge.
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THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT, Wojciech Has
BAM
One of the most legendary 60s European cult films—and Has’ best-known work—is this trancey, baroque acid-trip that follows a military officer (Cybulski) on a dreamlike odyssey through Andalusia. A proclaimed favorite of both Luis Buñuel and Jerry Garcia, The Saragossa Manuscript boasts gothic visuals, a trippy story-within-a-story structure, and an experimental score by renowned composer Krzysztof Penderecki. Based on Jan Potocki’s sprawling 19th-century novel. New restoration.
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THE SEARCHERS, John Ford
IFC Center
“We may still be waiting for the Great American Novel, but John Ford gave us the Great American Film in 1956. THE SEARCHERS gathers the deepest concerns of American literature, distilling 200 years of tradition in a way available only to popular art, and with a beauty available only to a supreme visual poet like Ford. Through the central image of the frontier, the meeting point of wilderness and civilization, Ford explores the divisions of our national character, with its search for order and its need for violence, its spirit of community and its quest for independence.” – Dave Kehr
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LA CIUDAD, David Riker
Museum of the Moving Image
Shot in gritty, neo-realist black and white, La Ciudad tells stories of loss, love, frustration, and hope as Latin American immigrants who have recently arrived in New York City struggle to build their lives, their communities, and their dreams. For his debut film, shot largely in Queens, David Riker spent five years researching the subject and hired non-professional actors to capture the “impoverished authenticity of life on the streets.” His sensitive portrayals urge us to take a closer look at today’s immigrants, who are not so different from many of our ancestors when they first arrived from a foreign land. Roger Ebert described the film as “a movie to treasure…reminiscent of The Bicycle Thief.”
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***SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18***
ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS, Luchino Visconti
Film Forum
Joining the tragic exodus of millions from Italy’s impoverished south, the formidable matriarch of the Parondi clan (Katina Paxinou, Best Supporting Oscar, For Whom the Bell Tolls ) and her brood emerge from Milan’s looming Stazione Centrale in search of a better life in the industrial north. But, as they inch up the social ladder, family bonds are ruthlessly shredded, as the love of Alain Delon’s saintly Rocco (“one of the most vivid and complex characters in all of Visconti’s work” – Vincent Canby) for prostitute Annie Girardot drives brutish boxing sibling Renato Salvatori to rape and murder. Simultaneously a documentation of a changing society; a kind of continuation of Visconti’s classic La terra trema; an evocation of the works of Sicilian titan Giovanni Verga, Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot , and Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers ; and a visual tour de force as lensed by Giuseppe Rotunno (The Leopard, 8½, Amarcord, All That Jazz, etc. ), Rocco rocketed Delon and Girardot to international stardom and vaulted Visconti to his second triumvirate — here with Antonioni and Fellini — at the cutting edge of Italian filmmaking (his first, with Rossellini and De Sica, in the heyday of neo-realism). The director’s personal favorite, Rocco’s mix of realism and intense, operatic emotion would profoundly influence the work of Coppola and Scorsese.
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THE NOOSE, Wojciech Has
BAM
A day-in-the-life of an alcoholic (Holoubek), quite literally near the end of his rope, becomes an expressionistic tour-de-force in Has’ hands. In his feature debut, the director “invests each frame with so much dread that the effect is hallucinatory… and confirms Has’ status as a neglected master” (Nick Roddick, Sight & Sound).
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FAREWELL (LYDIA AT THE APPLE), Wojciech Has
BAM
One of Has’ ripe-for-discovery early works examines life in both pre- and post-World War II Poland via the story of two unlikely lovers (Janczar and Wachowiak) wrenched apart by war. After he emerges from a concentration camp years later, the two are reunited to discover that both they and the world around them have changed. Has imbues this reflection on the passage of time with a deeply affecting sense of loss and nostalgia.
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The post The 13 Best Films to See in New York This Weekend: Pialat, Wiseman, Visconti + More appeared first on BlackBook.