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 30 film showings in New York this weekend that have us running to the theater.
***FRIDAY, JULY 17***
THE THING — A Classic Carpenter Chiller
John Carpenter // IFC Center – Fri through Sat “John Carpenter’s 1982 horror classic THE THING is, like Whiteout, a thriller set in a US base in Antarctica… some of the most extravagant horror sequences in film…
Kurt Russell is the helicopter pilot who witnesses a metamorphosing alien gradually consume, through replication and subsequent dismemberment, the base’s human residents. The imagery, often verging on the Dalí-eque, is still powerful. The shot of the scampering skull-spider will stay with you.” – The Times of London – via IFC Center
BRAND X — “The first truly entertaining Entertainment film of the new consciousness…”
Wynn Chamberlain // Anthology Film Archives – 7:00 p.m. Downtown fixture Elwyn “Wynn” Chamberlain painted Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg, produced an early Charles Ludlam play, and turned to film in
1970 with this crude, merciless consumerist satire. Inspired by a snowed-in weekend stuck watching television, BRAND X gleefully parodies boob-tube banality with copious nudity, a wicked sense of humor, and a who’s-who cast featuring Taylor Mead, Sally Kirkland, Sam Shepard, Abbie Hoffman, and Candy Darling. “The first truly entertaining Entertainment film of the new consciousness,” heralded Jonas Mekas, but Chamberlain moved on, burning his paintings and relocating his family to India in the mid-70s. His latter-day artistic output consisted solely of a series of novels. – via Anthology Film Archives
VENOM AND ETERNITY — ““I announce the destruction of the cinema”
Isidore Isou // Anthology Film Archives – 9:15 p.m.
In 1942 at only 16, Isidore Isou founded Lettrism, an avant-garde movement devoted to purely formalist poetry stripped of all semantic meaning. After a prolific decade of writing and theorizing, Isou brought his radical ideas to cinema in VENOM AND ETERNITY, a filmic manifesto for “discrepancy cinema,” where the visuals and soundtrack are treated as two separate channels, bearing little relation to one another. Over shots of Isou himself walking through the Left Blank, he intones, “I announce the destruction of the cinema” – and his images begin to turn upside down and become violently scratched. It proved a succès de scandale at Cannes, winning a made-up prize from Jean Cocteau. By 1953, Isou had begun his deconstruction of the tenets of photography, painting, dance, and theater and never returned to film, but his solitary work behind the camera became a crucial touchstone for Guy Debord, Stan Brakhage, and Olivier Assayas. – via Anthology Film Archives
BONNIE AND CLYDE — A Watershed in American Filmmaking
Arthur Penn // Film Forum – 12:30 2:40 4:50 7:00
“We rob banks.” The saga of Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie Parker and Warren Beatty’s Clyde Barrow, real-life robbers in the 30s dust bowl, begins in near farce and ends in hair-raising violence (the laughs stop after kidnappee Gene Wilder reveals his occupation). A watershed in American filmmaking, 10 Oscar niminations, including the five principle actors, with Oscars to Best Supporting Actress Estelle Parsons and Burnett Guffey for his vivid color cinematography. – via Film Forum
HEAVENLY CREATURES — A Fantastic Kate Winslet Debut
Peter Jackson // Film Forum – 9:30 p.m.
In ever-so-British 50s New Zealand, Mario Lanza-loving schoolgirls Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet (in their debuts) build their own elaborate fantasy world; but then Lynskey’s mom nixes their trip to England together — big mistake! Winslet’s character was revealed to be best-selling Victorian mystery writer Anne Perry. From the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy! – via Film Forum
CASA DE FLAVA — Reckoning With Portugal’s Colonial Legacy
Pedro Costa // MoMA – 4:00 9:15
The colonial histories of Cape Verde—and the lives many of that country’s displaced emigrants now lead in Lisbon—have taken a central role in many of Costa’s recent films, but his rarely seen second feature is the only one of his movies thus far to have actually been shot in the archipelago. Leão (Isaach de Bankolé), the comatose laborer whose removal to his home at Fogo jump-starts the film, is a clear precursor to Ventura, with whom he shares a profession and a past. But the revelation of watching the movie now is how much fierce, unblinking attention it gives to the colonists themselves: Edith Scob as an aging Portuguese woman who has made the island her ill-fitting home; Pedro Hestnes as her son; and Inês de Medeiros as the Lisbon nurse who accompanies Leão with a mixture of brashness and fear. Casa de Lava, for which Costa took inspiration from Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie, is one of the director’s most direct reckonings with Portugal’s colonial legacy. – via The Film Society of Lincoln Center
OSSOS — A 19th Century Feuilleton
Pedro Costa // The Film Society of Lincoln Center – 6:30 p.m.
Near the end of the emotionally and physically trying shoot of Casa de Lava, a handful of Cape Verdeans asked Costa to deliver bundles of letters to their émigré relatives in Lisbon. Fontainhas, the marginalized ghetto where he found many of those letters’ addressees, would become the geographic and spiritual center of his next three films. Ossos, which starred two residents of the neighborhood as young parents in crisis and a third, Vanda, as the wiser woman in their orbit, was the last of Costa’s features to be shot on celluloid and with a full crew. “The normal way of making films,” he realized during the movie’s production, was “all wrong” for these people and this place. But Ossos, taken on its own, is a deeply powerful, endlessly evocative accomplishment: “a nineteenth-century feuilleton,” as the critic Luc Sante put it, “filtered through the ambiguities of our time and executed with a mesmerizing delicacy.” – via The Film Society of Lincoln Center
IN VANDA’S ROOM — The Movie That Made a Generation of Filmmakers Rethink the Terms of Their Art
Pedro Costa // The Film Society of Lincoln Center – 6:00 p.m.
“The normal way of making films is all wrong,” Costa recalled having realized on the set of Ossos. “We should rethink all of it.” And rethink it he did. In Vanda’s Room, which Costa made in Fontainhas with a two-person crew and in close collaboration with the movie’s handful of nonprofessional stars, is a landmark in modern cinema. For nearly three hours, we watch Vanda and her sister shooting up, coughing, laughing, talking, and going about their days as bulldozers and construction equipment rumble ominously around them. (When Costa came back to Fontainhas with a portable video camera, the neighborhood was already being razed.) But we are also watching a seamless convergence of fiction and nonfiction, a thrilling dilation and expansion of cinematic time, and the discovery of a new, immensely rich visual vocabulary unique to the digital image (here printed onto 35mm film): its way of capturing natural light and the movement of bodies, here and now. It is to a certain strand of contemporary cinema as the discovery of perspective was to painting: the movie that made a generation of filmmakers rethink the terms of their art. – via The Film Society of Lincoln Center
STALKER — A Haunting Science Fiction Dream
Andrei Tarkovsky // Museum of Art & Design – 7:00 p.m.
Director Andrei Tarvoksy’s second foray into the science fiction genre, Stalker follows the journey of a shadowy guide as he leads a writer and professor into a site known only as the “zone.” As legend has it, at the center of the “zone” is a room with the power to fulfill a person’s innermost dreams. – via Museum of Art & Design
HOLLYWOOD SHUFFLE — The Opening Film in BAM’s Indie 80s Series
Robert Townsend // BAM – 2:00 4:30 7:00 9:30
Comedian Townsend maxed out his credit cards to make this wildly inventive Hollywood satire, which went on to astounding box-office success. Taking aim at the industry’s stereotypical depictions of African Americans, Townsend plays an actor trying to make it in a business where the only roles available seem to be slaves, hoods, and various “Eddie Murphy types.” Highlights include fantasy sequences in which Townsend imagines himself as everything from a film noir gumshoe to action hero “Rambro.” – via BAM
***SATURDAY, JULY 18***
THE THIRD MAN — Playing in Film Forum’s True Crime Series
Carol Reed // Film Forum – 12:30 2:30 4:50 7:10 9:20 Fri through Sat
In rubble-strewn postwar Vienna, its occupation divided among four powers, Joseph Cotten’s pulp Wester writer Holly Martins arrives to meet up with his old friend Harry Lime, only to find that he’s dead — or is he? And as the supremely naïve Cotten, a monoglot stranger in a strange land, descends through the levels of deception, and as he discovers his own friend’s corruption, the moral choices loom. A triumph of atmosphere — with its Vienna locations (including the gigantic Riesenrad ferris wheel and the dripping sewers), its tilted camera angels, its Robert Krasker-shot shadows, and Anton Karas’s unforgettable zither theme — and with its stars in perhaps their most iconic roles: bereted Trevor Howard at his most Britishly military; Alida Valli, here truly enigmatic and Garboesque; and Welles’ Harry Lime, arriving in one of the greatest star entrances ever, and adding the famous “cuckoo clock” speech to Greene’s original script, with the whole topped by its legendary, almost endlessly drawn-out finale shot. Three Oscar nominations: for director Reed, editor Oswald Hafenrichter, and cinematographer Krasker, with a win for the latter; the Grand Prize at Cannes; and the only film on both the AFI and BFI Top 100 lists of, respectively, the greatest American and British films (#1 for the Brits), as well as being named The Greatest Foreign Film of All Time… by the Japanese! – via Film Forum
BORDERLINE — A Silent Experiment With Fluid Notions of Sexuality
Kenneth Macpherson // Anthology Film Archives – 5:00 p.m.
Heavily inspired by Eisenstein, Kenneth Macpherson founded British cinema journal CLOSE UP in 1927 and began his own filmmaking practice soon after, directing three poetic experimental shorts in as many years. As its title suggests, Macpherson’s feature debut is a movie at a crossroads, a defiantly silent experiment made at the cusp of cinema’s transition to sound. BORDERLINE takes a fairly conventional love triangle plot and complicates it through radical editing patterns, a “clatter montage” where adjacent images butt up so close against one another they nearly overlap. The content of Macpherson’s film is equally startling, unafraid to explore simmering racial tensions (two of its characters are played by Paul Robeson and his wife Eslanda) and fluid notions of sexuality. After BORDERLINE met a harsh critical reception, Macpherson retired from directing and withdrew his film from circulation – it wouldn’t be rediscovered for another 50 years. – via Anthology Film Archives
RETURN TO OZ — Dorothy in the Psych Ward
Walter Murch // Anthology Film Archives – 6:30 p.m.
Groundbreaking sound designer and editor Walter Murch helped to shape the visual and aural rhythms of Francis Ford Coppola’s classic 70s pictures. For his only effort to date as director, Murch assumed a seemingly impossible assignment: a sequel to the beloved THE WIZARD OF OZ. Instead of delivering a family friendly update, Murch’s adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s second and third Oz books offers a despairing expressionist vision that feels plucked directly from a child’s nightmare. Fairuza Balk’s Dorothy arrives in Emerald City (fresh off a round of shock therapy) to find the city in tatters and a diabolical princess with her eye on Dorothy’s head. A true film maudit, beset by production problems (Murch was briefly fired for running behind schedule, only to be reinstated at the behest of Coppola and George Lucas) and an indifferent viewing public, RETURN TO OZ looks miraculous today, a rare fairy tale for adults. – via Anthology Film Archives
WORLD’S GREATEST SINNER — A Vanity Project-Cum-Labor of Love
Timothy Carey // Anthology Film Archives – 9:00 p.m. Wild man character actor Timothy Carey cobbled together a career with bit parts as heavies and hucksters for Kubrick, Cassavetes, and more, his indelible, unstable screen presence suggesting there was always a madness to his Method. He brought that same volatile energy to his first film as director (and writer, producer, and eventual self-distributor), this berserk parable about a bored insurance salesman who quits his job, forms a rockabilly band/religious movement, rechristens himself “God,” and winds up frontrunner for President, using his newfound power to sleep with women aged 14 to 92. A vanity project-cum-labor of love with little regard for good taste or common filmmaking rules, THE WORLD’S GREATEST SINNER would later find fans in Martin Scorsese and Will Oldham but didn’t break through to the grindhouse circuit upon release. Carey’s TV pilot follow-up, TWEET’S LADIES OF PASADENA, was never finished. – via Anthology Film Archives
QUO VADIS — Playing in MoMA’s Glorious Technicolor Series
Mervyn LeRoy // MoMA – 1:30 p.m.
In 64 A.D. commanding officer Marcus Vinicius returns to Rome after three years abroad waging battle for emperor Nero, a tyrant who believes he is a gifted divinity. Nero’s most trusted advisor Petronius, who is also Vinicius’ uncle, informs his nephew that Nero has recently murdered his wife and mother and married a slave named Poppaea, and that the disgruntled Roman Senate is making plans to replace Nero with General Galba of Tuscany. While visiting the home of retired General Plautius, Vinicius flirts with a woman he assumes is a household slave, but soon discovers that she is Plautius’ daughter Lygia, who rebuffs his crass advances. Over dinner, when Vinicius eagerly describes the defeat of Rome’s enemies, Lygia expresses her disgust with the brutalities of war. Plautius explains that Lygia was once a princess who was made a slave during his military campaign against her people. Plautius and his wife Pomponia adopted Lygia in attempt to make amends for her suffering. – via TCM
THE FEARMAKERS — A Rarely Screened Red Scare Thriller
Jacques Tourneur // The Film Society of Lincoln Center – 2:00 p.m.
The “fearmakers” referenced in the title of Jacques Tourneur’s rarely screened Red Scare thriller are communist elements that, having wormed their way into a major Washington PR firm, go about trying to convert the American public away from their capitalist roots. Dana Andrews, who stars as a brainwashed Korean War vet alert to the dark secret of the firm to which he’s just returned, had worked with Tourneur on Night of the Demon the previous year, and it was he who insisted that Tourneur be brought on to direct The Fearmakers. What attracted the filmmaker to the project was, he later suggested, a theme that he’d been dealing with explicitly since at least I Walked with a Zombie: “the power of people who control ideas.” – via The Film Society of Lincoln Center
O SANGUE — A Kind of Cinema That Shows How People Live
Pedro Costa // The Film Society of Lincoln Center – 4:00 p.m.
Admirers of Costa’s recent work are often thrown for a thrilling loop by the glossy, liquid textures and lush atmospherics of the director’s first feature, a beguiling fairy tale about the trials undergone by two brothers in the wake of their father’s violent death. Costa, who was barely 30 when O Sangue premiered, had spent the seven years leading up to its production immersing himself in the films of Fritz Lang, Kenji Mizoguchi, Robert Bresson, Jacques Tourneur, and Nicholas Ray. But the film, which begins with a slap to the face, is never less than a bracingly original stream of images and impressions: a nocturnal journey through a brittle forest; a burst of fireworks seen from the balcony of a ghostly hotel; a glittering fairground dream scored to a rhapsodic pop song. “O Sangue,” Costa said in a 2006 interview, “was also the beginning of my love—maybe love is the wrong word—for domestic cinema. A kind of cinema that shows how people live.” – via The Film Society of Lincoln Center
THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION PART II: THE METAL YEARS — A Fast-Paced Look at the Outrageous Heavy Metal Scene
Penelope Spheeris // BAM – 4:30 9:30 The NY premiere of the new 2K digital restoration, The Decline Of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years has been in demand for decades by fans worldwide. It’s a fast-paced look at the outrageous heavy metal scene of the late 80s. Set in Los Angeles, the film explores fascinating portraits of struggling musicians, fans and star-struck groupies. This raucous and uproarious chapter features Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne, Poison, members of Aerosmith, Kiss, Motorhead, and performances by Megadeth, Faster Pussycat, Lizzy Borden, London, Odin and Seduce. Party on, Dude! – via BAM
STRANGER THAN PARADISE — The Quintessential Indie Film
Jim Jarmusch // BAM – 2:00 7:00
Arguably the quintessential indie film of the 1980s, Jim Jarmusch’s deader-than-deadpan comedy follows New York hipster Willie (jazz musician Lurie), his buddy (ex-Sonic Youth drummer Edson), and Hungarian cousin (Balint) on the world’s most bummed-out road trip from Cleveland to Florida. With its monochrome, minimalist cool and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins soundtrack, Stranger Than Paradise ushered in a new era of low-budget American filmmaking. – via BAM
MEMORIES OF MURDER — Nerve-Shreddingly Suspenseful and Brutally Hilarious
Joon-ho Bong // Film Forum – 4:50
1986, the last year of dictatorship: and even the arrival of a Seoul detective can’t keep Song Kang-Ho’s hayseed cops from alternating between farcical incompetence and boot-stomping coercion as the strangled female corpses pile up. Based on Korea’s first actual serial killer case, multi-awarded (Film Director, Actor Korean Oscars), and nerve-shreddingly suspenseful and brutally hilarious down to its bone- chilling final scene. – via Film Forum
***SUNDAY, JULY 19***
ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE — A Bleakly Funny Hybrid of Police Procedural and Western
James William Guercio // Anthology Film Archives – 9:00 p.m.
James William Guercio first came to prominence in the music biz: he wrote a Chad and Jeremy hit, collaborated with Frank Zappa, produced Chicago and Moondog, and even played bass for the Beach Boys. His only directing credit, ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE, suggests he could’ve enjoyed an equally fruitful film career. Robert Blake stars as a pint-sized Arizona motorcycle cop who dreams of making detective, only to find a department festering beneath layers of corruption. Gorgeously shot by Conrad Hall (who Guercio afforded by taking a $1 directing salary) to recall John Ford epics, this bleakly funny hybrid of police procedural and Western combines a distinctly 70s cynicism with a handsome cinematic classicism. Guercio would produce another Robert Blake vehicle a few years later – Hal Ashby’s SECOND-HAND HEARTS – but then moved toward a career in cattle ranching and oil drilling. – via Anthology Film Archives
BROTHERS AND SISTERS OF THE TODA FAMILY — An Ozu Family Classic
Yasujiro Ozu // IFC Center – Fri through Sat
“Made soon after his return from the front in China, Ozu’s biggest hit to date prefigures some aspects of Tokyo Story. When her husband dies, Mrs. Toda and her youngest daughter are shuttled between the family’s brothers and sisters; only the youngest son, working in occupied China, is willing to care for them properly. Bourgeois selfishness is criticised while a new generation shows the ‘correct’ way forward.” – via IFC Center
ANOTHER SKY — Playing in the One-Film Wonders series
Gavin Lambert // Anthology Film Archives – 5:00 p.m.
In the middle of his stint as editor for SIGHT & SOUND, Gavin Lambert (onetime Oxford chum of future filmmakers Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson) tried his own hand at directing. Inspired by the writing of Paul Bowles (who’d later become a close friend of Lambert’s in Tangier) and beautifully filmed by Walter Lassally (THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE RUNNER), ANOTHER SKY trails a white governess brought to Morocco for work who gradually falls under the spell of the music, culture, and men of Marrakesh. But this mesmerizing slow-burn romance would prove Lambert’s only effort as director; he opted instead for a successful career as screenwriter (Nicholas Ray’s BITTER VICTORY), novelist (INSIDE DAISY CLOVER), and biographer (of George Cukor and Natalie Wood).- via Anthology Film Archives
DONNY BRASCO — Playing in Film Forum’s True Crime Series
Mike Newell // Film Forum – 2:55 p.m.
“30 years, I’m bustin’ my hump… for what?,” complains mobster Al Pacino — in one of his most sympathetic, low-key performances — but his crime protégé, Johnny Depp’s “Donnie,” has even worse job fatigue — he’s actually undercover FBI agent John Pistone (the real one served as consultant), frightened that, in his sixth year on the job, “I’m not becoming like them, I am them.” – via Film Forum
DOG DAY AFTERNOON — “Attica! Attica! Attica!”
Sidney Lumet // Film Forum – 12:30 5:25 8:00
As a scorcher unravels from day to night in Brooklyn, the motive for Sonny Wortzik’s (Al Pacino) botched bank robbery/hostage taking is revealed to be the funding of his second (male) wife’s sex-change operation — based on an actual case. – via Film Forum
THIS ISLAND EARTH — Alien Invasion
Joseph M. Newman // MoMA – 1:00 p.m.
Aliens come to Earth seeking scientists to help them in their war. - via MoMA
COLOSSAL YOUTH — A Rich and Staggeringly Complex Film
Pedro Costa // MoMA – 5:30 p.m.
Being together again will brighten our lives for at least 30 years. Costa combined the letters home of various Cape Verdean immigrants and a note written by the surrealist poet Robert Desnos to his wife shortly before his death to produce the text of the letter at the center of one of his richest, most staggeringly complex films. Its author is Ventura, an aging Cape Verdean immigrant who spends his days visiting the residents of a neighborhood that no longer exists. His wife has left him; his “children,” as he calls them, have mostly been relocated to sterile housing projects; and it is in the letter he recites throughout the movie that his hopes have all been packed. Colossal Youthwas a second leap forward for Costa after the groundbreaking In Vanda’s Room. It now seems that this shadowy, profoundly sad ghost story permitted him to move from the geographically rooted studies of Fontainhas to the abstract, jagged mental spaces in which his most recent work takes place. – via The Film Society of Lincoln Center
WHERE DOES YOUR HIDDEN SMILE LIE? — A Revealing Study of Two of Modern Cinema’s Most Intrepid Pioneers
Pedro Costa // The Film Society of Lincoln Center – 1:30 p.m.
The films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, whose body of co-directed work spanned four decades and whose masterworks include The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, Moses and Aaron, and Class Relations, are among Costa’s deepest and widest influences. In 2000, Straub and Huillet decided to create a new version of their film Sicilia! with the art students at Le Fresnoy in France. Filming the couple in a stripped-down editing room, Costa focuses on uncovering their actual working relationship: Straub, easily distracted and prone to lengthy philosophical asides to justify his ideas about the film; Huillet, more focused and practical, challenging him to make up his mind and move forward. There are moments of great humor, as well as great tenderness, in this revealing study of two of modern cinema’s most intrepid pioneers. – via The Film Society of Lincoln Center
SIDEWALK STORIES — A Silent, Black and White Homage to Chaplin’s Classic The Kid
Charles Lane // BAM – 2:00 4:30
Lane’s brilliantly inventive, silent, black and white homage to Chaplin’s classic The Kid stars the director as a homeless artist scraping by in New York City. When he winds up caring for an orphaned toddler, this modern-day Little Tramp is whisked along on an adventure that is alternately comic and heartrending. Shot on the cheap on the streets of Greenwich Village, this recently re-released gem deftly balances charming visual gags with an earnest social realism that doesn’t sugarcoat the struggle of life on the streets. – via BAM
SHERMAN’S MARCH — A Delightfully Offbeat Documentary
Ross McElwee // BAM – 7:00 p.m.
In 1981, filmmaker Ross McElwee set out to recreate General Sherman’s historic Civil War march through the South—and find true love along the way. The result: this delightfully offbeat documentary, in which McElwee records his dalliances with an array of eccentric women (including a Burt Reynolds-obsessed actress), while delivering deadpan musings on everything from American history to nuclear annihilation. – via BAM
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