Cinematheque Film Schedule

United States | 1932 | Frank Borzage

Neglected master Frank Borzage, whose 1933 romance Man’s Castle proved an audience favorite when we showed it in February, directed this Pre-Code version of Hemingway’s famous novel, about the love between an ambulance driver (Gary Cooper) and an English nurse (Helen Hayes) in Italy during WWI. This Oscar-winning classic saw its original ending changed for the U.S. release. Then in 1938 it was reissued shorn of 11 minutes. However, we will show an HD version...

Taiwan | 1998 | Hou Hsiao-hsien

Acclaimed by numerous critics as the best movie of 1998, Hou’s celebrated film focuses on the denizens of an upper-class brothel in turn-of-the-century Shanghai. Bathed in golden light and fluidly shot in the brothel’s interiors, this serene, haunting portrait perfectly captures the lonely, obsessive, enclosed lives of five elegant “flower girls” and their regular patrons. With Tony Leung. “(A) visually ravishing masterpiece…Flowers of Shanghai is perfect, and one of the most beautiful films ever made.”...

United States | 2014 | Elijah Drenner

You may not know the name, but Dick Miller’s face will be instantly recognizable to most movie buffs. Miller’s handsome-goofy presence enlivened numerous Roger Corman cheapies during the 1950s and 1960s (most notably The Little Shop of Horrors and A Bucket of Blood) and he has also been a fixture in most of the films by Corman alum Joe Dante. (He’s also worked with Scorsese, Spielberg, and James Cameron during his 50-year career.) Now this...

United States | 2014 | Julia Marchese

The New Beverly Cinema, a Los Angeles revival movie theater that has been showing daily double features of old 35mm films since 1978, is profiled in this new documentary by former employee Julia Marchese. The New Bev advocates that classic films should be seen theatrically and also projected from 35mm film. Owned, operated, and programmed by Sherman Torgan from 1978 until his sudden death (at age 63) in 2007, the cinema is now owned and...

Canada, Denmark, Mexico, Philippines | 2013 | Raya Martin, Mark Peranson

A snarky, satirical riff on Dennis Hopper’s indulgent, shot-in-Peru 1971 fiasco The Last Movie (though this movie’s title more accurately translates as “The Last Film”), this mock-doc by a Filipino filmmaker and the editor of Canada’s film magazine CinemaScope takes place in the year of the predicted Mayan apocalypse. Indie filmmaker Alex Ross Perry (Listen Up Philip) plays an insufferable American director scouting locations around Mexico’s Mayan ruins. Sensing that the death of cinema is...

Argentina | 1957 | Leopoldo Torre Nilsson

In this haunting and visually stunning drama, a sheltered young Argentine girl (Elsa Daniel), growing up in a repressive upper middle-class Catholic household during the 1920s, suffers a disastrous first love affair. Screenplay by Beatriz Guido. “This claustrophobic Gothic drama put [Torre Nilsson]—and Argentina—on the cinematic map.” –Holt Foreign Film Guide.

United States | 1935 | Rouben Mamoulian

Incorporated in 1915, the Technicolor company marks its centennial this year. We commemorate the occasion with a special screening of the first feature film shot in three-strip Technicolor (full color), Becky Sharp, based on William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Miriam Hopkins stars as the title character, a cunning, amoral, lower-class young woman who engineers a rapid rise through 19th-century European society. “Marvellous…Sophisticated, witty, and beautifully economical…The colour is supremely important.” –Time Out Film Guide.

France, Taiwan | 2001 | Hou Hsiao-hsien

Chinese pop star Shu Qi plays a bar hostess torn between two men—her possessive live-in boyfriend and a small-time gangster who offers her refuge and the promise of love—in Hou’s portrait of life in contemporary Taipei. If the urban milieu and techno soundtrack are new for Hou, the deliberate pacing, formal rigor, gorgeous cinematography (by Ping Bin Lee, who also shot In the Mood for Love), and trance-like mood recall his previous masterpiece, Flowers of...

Czechoslovakia | 1965 | Ivan Passer

This masterpiece of the Czech New Wave was the only Czech feature of Ivan Passer, who co-wrote Milos Forman’s Loves of a Blonde and The Firemen’s Ball before emigrating with him to the U.S. and becoming a Hollywood director. The movie is a funny, rueful account of a professional cellist from Prague who agrees to be the soloist in a provincial orchestra conducted by an old Conservatory friend he hasn’t seen for years. Their reunion...

Taiwan | 2005 | Hou Hsiao-hsien

Hou tells three love stories set in three different eras of Taiwanese/Chinese history, and Chang Chen and Shu Qi play the lovers in all three episodes. The first, “A Time for Love,” is set in pop-music-filled 1966 and overflows with youthful yearning. It tells of a young army recruit who becomes smitten with a young woman working in a billiard parlor. “A Time for Freedom” is an artistically daring period romance set in 1911 at...

Argentina | 1959 | Leopoldo Torre Nilsson

A repressed, virginal, Catholic university student from the provinces (Elsa Daniel) takes a room at a creepy Buenos Aires boarding house, where she helps a bed-ridden mother care for her four independent, amoral children. The experience proves mind-expanding, but not in a good way. “The director evokes with great force and conviction the film’s enclosed world with its strongly Cocteauesque overtones.” –Peter Cowie.

Finland | 1952 | Erik Blomberg

This hauntingly photographed Finnish fantasy is a vampire movie like no other. (It won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film over 50 years ago.) Set in Finnish Lapland and based on an ancient legend, the movie follows a herdsman’s lonely wife who is transformed by a shaman into a shape-shifting, vampiric white reindeer. This cursed creature wanders the snowfields of the Midnight Sun, luring hunters to their deaths.

France, Taiwan | 2007 | Hou Hsiao-hsien

Juliette Binoche stars in the first Hou Hsiao-hsien film made outside of Asia. Produced by the Musée d’Orsay, it’s one of the director’s most rapturous works. Inspired by Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 kids’ classic The Red Balloon, Hou’s movie tells of a Taiwanese film student in Paris who is hired by a frazzled single mom (Binoche) to be nanny to her seven-year-old son. “A meditation on art, life, loneliness and the links between friends and strangers.”...

United States | 1984 | Tom Schiller

So strange and unclassifiable that it was never released theatrically, this 1980s sci-fi comedy written and directed by longtime Saturday Night Live writer and filmmaker Tom Schiller (and produced by Lorne Michaels) stars Zach Galligan, Lauren Tom, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Mort Sahl, among others. Set in a surreal future where the iron-fisted Port Authority controls NYC, the film follows an aspiring artist who goes to work in the Holland Tunnel, discovers a society...

Argentina, Spain | 1961 | Leopoldo Torre Nilsson

In what may be Leopoldo Torre Nilsson’s greatest film, a convent schoolgirl (Elsa Daniel), home for the summer, decides that she wants to meet the mysterious recluse who has been living in solitary confinement on the third floor of her spooky, seen-better-days house for more than 20 years. The shocking truth ensnares her as well. With Francisco Rabal. L

Czechoslovakia | 1967 | František Vláčil

Voted the best Czech movie of all time in a 1998 poll of Czech film critics, this stirring medieval epic, set at the time that Christianity replaced paganism, chronicles a kidnapping that ignites a feud between two rival clans. “Pure cinema…Stark, daring and often astoundingly dynamic…Near hallucinatory…Not so much a drama as an ancient litany—mystical and feral rather than spiritual or religious.” –Time Out Film Guide.

United States | 1944 | Fritz Lang

In “one of the best of Fritz Lang’s American movies” (Pauline Kael), a criminology professor (Edward G. Robinson) falls hard for a woman (Joan Bennett) pictured in a painting, and soon he’s involved in murder and blackmail. This clever, nightmarish thriller is “not merely a dazzling piece of suspense, but also a characteristically stark demonstration of Lang’s belief in the inevitability of fate” (Time Out Film Guide). With Dan Duryea.

United States | 1945 | Fritz Lang

Fritz Lang’s follow-up to The Woman in the Window (see previous blurb) also starred Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, and Dan Duryea. It’s a remake of Jean Renoir’s 1931 La Chienne in which a meek, put-upon husband and Sunday painter becomes criminally involved with a tart who models for him and with her lowlife boyfriend. This movie was originally banned in New York State for being “immoral, indecent, corrupt, and tending to incite crime.” Whoa!

Argentina | 1961 | Leopoldo Torre Nilsson

This Torre Nilsson tale of moral corruption forsakes the creepy confines of dilapidated mansions for the sun, sea, and sand of the summertime beach. There a young girl pretends to love a sick boy in order to help his recovery. “Visually shows Torre Nilsson at his brilliant best.” –Int’l Film Guide 1967.

United States | 1953 | Fritz Lang

Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, and Lee Marvin star in Fritz Lang’s brutal, shocking police drama, about a clean cop who turns unrelenting avenger in his attempt to bring down a corrupt crime syndicate. “A definitive film noir.” –Pauline Kael.

United States | 1956 | Fritz Lang

Fritz Lang believed that this rarely shown thriller was as good as his earlier masterpieces M and Fury. It follows three greedy, ambitious newspaper men who each try to catch a serial sex murderer before the police do, thus winning the position of executive editor at their paper. With Dana Andrews, Ida Lupino, George Sanders, Thomas Mitchell, Vincent Price, et al.