March 3 at 7pm
STRANGERS ON A TRAIN 35mm
Alfred Hitchcock, 1951, U.S., 101 min. With Farley Granger, Ruth Roman, Robert Walker
A thriller whose screenplay co-credits Raymond Chandler and whose story is based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, Strangers on a Train is nevertheless Hitchcockian through and through. An uneasy joke of a murder pact between strangers – an unhappily married tennis star and a psychopath with Oedipal issues – turns deadly serious.
March 7 at 2pm
BEAU TRAVAIL 35mm
Claire Denis, 1999, France, 90 min. With Denis Lavant, Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin. French with English subtitles.
An exemplar of a creative partnership whose “spellbind- ing visual beauty reminds you of the transporting power of pure cinema” (New York Times). Director Claire Denis and cinematographer Agnès Godard’s powerful vision of the rituals and tensions among French Foreign Legion soldiers posted in east Africa is tuned to the strains of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd, both works inspired by Herman Melville’s story of the same name. Print cour- tesy of Institut Français. Thanks to the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.
March 17 at 7pm
REAR WINDOW 35mm
Alfred Hitchcock, 1954, U.S., 114 min. With James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendell Corey.
Hitchcock’s brilliant meditation on cinema and voyeur- ism binds the viewer to the perspective of photojournalist Stewart, bound to a wheelchair with a broken leg and obsessively spying on his West Village neighbors. One of the Master of Suspense’s greatest successes.
March 18 at 2pm
GILDA DCP Charles Vidor, 1946, U.S., 110 min.With Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, George Macready.
A noir love triangle tangled in corruption and cynicism. “With the intense surrealist quality of a dream,” Gilda’s “Buenos Aires is a creation totally of the imagination, with its winding dark streets, its gambling hell…. The ambiance is one of heat, decadence, sexual ferocity barely concealed behind civilized gestures and phrases….” – Hollywood in the Forties,
March 21 at 2pm
MOUCHETTE Robert Bresson, 1967, France, 78 min. With Nadine Nortier, Jean-Claude Guilbert, Marie Cardinal. French with English subtitles
Faced with a dying mother, an absent, alcoholic father and a baby brother in need of care, young Mouchette seeks solace in nature and daily routine, a respite from her economic and pubescent turmoil. Bresson plumbs great reservoirs of feeling with this searing portrait of human desperation, elevating his trapped protagonist into one of cinema’s great tragic figures. An essential work of French filmmaking.
March 24 at 7pm
VERTIGO 35mm
Alfred Hitchcock, 1958, U.S., 128 min. With James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes
Hitchcock’s hallucinatory nightmare of loss, obsession and desire was recently named the greatest lm of all time in the British Film Institute’s respected poll, taking the title from Citizen Kane for the first time in fifty years. As the film critic B. Kite wrote, you haven’t really seen Vertigo until you’ve seen it again.
March 25 at 2pm
THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE 35mm Brett Morgan with Nanette Burstein, 2002, U.S., 93 min. With Robert Evans, Eddie Albert, Peter Bart
Taking the audience on an intimate journey into the mind of a Hollywood legend, The Kid Stays in the Picture traces the meteoric rise, fall, and rise again of Hollywood producer Robert Evans.
March 28 at 2pm
MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS DCP
Vincente Minnelli, 1944, U.S., 113 min. With Judy Garland, Margaret O’Brien, Mary Astor
Minnelli’s beloved musical depicts the everyday lives of a St. Louis family eagerly awaiting the 1904 World’s Fair. The rst Minnelli-Garland collaboration showcases the director’s ravishing evocation of an era gone by and the great entertainer’s admired contralto voice, debuting now familiar standards like “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”
April 4 at 2pm
NORTH BY NORTHWEST35mm Andy Warhol, 1965, U.S., 66 min. With Marie Menken, Ultra Violet, Ronald Tavel.
One of Warhol’s rst lms to use sound is an elaborately scripted satire about Latin American politics. The cast, rep- resenting the family of Fidel Castro, sit in chairs as if grouped for a family portrait, repeating lines fed them from the back row. Playing with John and Ivy (Warhol, 1965, 35 min.), a domestic portrait of cinematographer John Palmer and fashion model Ivy Nicholson.
April 7 at 7pm
PSYCHO 35mm
Alfred Hitchcock, 1960, U.S., 109 min. With Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles.
Though based on a book inspired by the real-life crimes of serial killer Ed Gein, “nothing in American movies pre- pared anyone for the spectacle of a psychotic momma’s boy who lived in a haunted mansion along with the pre- served cadaver of the woman he murdered 12 years before” (Village Voice). From Herrmann’s piercing score to Leigh’s staring eyeball and Perkins’ vulnerable veneer — Hitchcock’s Psycho is iconic, deeply rooted in American culture ever since the lm premiered.
April 8 at 2pm
DO THE RIGHT THING DCP Spike Lee, 1989, U.S., 120 min. With Spike Lee, Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis.
Spike Lee’s simmering exposé of racial tensions in a Brooklyn neighborhood is one of the most culturally sig- ni cant lms of the 1980s. A funny, visceral, stylized depiction of an oppressively hot day nishes with violence and a rhetorical gesture that juxtaposes quotes from Malcolm X and Martin Luther King on the nature of race relations.
April 11 at 2pm
CITIZEN KANE DCP
Orson Welles, 1941, U.S.; 119 min. With Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Dorothy Comingmore
Following the death of a publishing tycoon, reporters scramble to discover the meaning of his nal utterance. Welles and cinematographer Gregg Tolland use chiar- oscuro lighting, deep-focus cinematography and a labyrinthine ashback structure to imagine the mon- strous hollowness of the American dream. A modernist landmark of cinematic style and storytelling.
April 14 at 7pm
THE BIRDS 35mm
Alfred Hitchcock, 1963, U.S., 119 min. With Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, Jessica Tandy
Hitchcock’s legendary doomsday fantasia cast Tippi Hedren, in her screen debut, as a San Francisco socialite who pursues a bachelor back to his sleepy hometown; does her arrival spark the avian bombardment that ensues? Based on a story by Daphne du Maurier, The Birds is a tour-de-force of special e ects technology, its visual design reportedly inspired by Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
April 15 at 2pm
CASINO ROYALE Martin Campbell, 2006, U.S., 144 min. With Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Judi Dench
The 21st James Bond lm and a reboot of the series, Casino Royale is the rst to feature Daniel Craig as the titular character. In his four-star review, Roger Ebert e x c l a i m e d , “ T h i s m o v i e i s n e w f r o m t h e g e t – g o .”
April 18 at 2pm
PAISAN Roberto Rossellini, 1946, Italy, 124 min. With Carmela Sazio, Robert Van Loon, Dots M. Johnson. English and Italian with English subtitles
Rossellini’s follow-up to Rome Open City (1945) consists of six episodes set during the liberation of Italy at the end of WWII and takes place across the country. With its documentary-like visuals and intermingled cast of actors and non-professionals, Italians and their American liberators, this moving look at the struggles of di erent cultures to communicate, and of people to live their everyday lives in extreme circumstances, is a treasure of Italian cinema, available only recently in its full original release version.
April 21 at 7pm
MARNIE DCP
Alfred Hitchcock, 1964, U.S., 130 min. With Tippi Hedren, Sean Connery, Diane Baker
Marnie was largely dismissed upon its initial release, but has since been reappraised as a disquieting, Vertigo-like study of perverse romantic obsession–and a masterpiece in its own right. Hedren has the title role as a beautiful but pathologically frigid kleptomaniac blackmailed by her wealthy employer (Connery).
April 25 at 2pm
THE RULES OF THE GAME 35mm
Jean Renoir, 1939, France, 106 min. With Marcel Dalio, Nora Gregor, Jean Renoir. French with English subtitles
One of the greatest lms ever made, a scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners set at a marquis’ country château – where ugly truths about a group of haut bourgeois acquaintances are laid bare. The lm had a tumultuous history: it was subjected to cuts after the violent response at the premiere, the orig- inal negative was destroyed during World War II and it wasn’t reconstructed until 1959. The original version is presented here.
April 28 at 7pm
FRENZY 35mm
Alfred Hitchcock, 1972, U.S., 116 min. With Jon Finch, Barry Foster, Alec McCowen
A bartender is mistaken for the strangler in a London mur- der spree in this revisiting of one Hitchcock’s favored themes, the wrongfully accused man. Hearkening back to The Lodger, Frenzy contains notable diversions from the silent classic: the killer is revealed early, the innocent man is coldly unlikable and the violence is seamy–particularly a controversially prolonged murder-rape sequence.