Cinematheque Film Schedule

United States | 1973 | Robert Altman

A hopelessly square and shabby Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) drifts and mumbles through hip, bonkers 1970s L.A. in Robert Altman’s funny, rueful update of Raymond Chandler’s novel. With Sterling Hayden and Henry Gibson; music by John Williams.

United States | 1955 | Charles Laughton

This poetic, haunting chiller was named the second best movie of all time (right behind Citizen Kane) by France’s Cahiers du cinema magazine in 2008. Robert Mitchum plays a psychopathic country preacher who relentlessly pursues two children who know where $10,000 is hidden. This eerie, expressionistic allegory of good and evil, innocence and corruption was the only film that actor Charles Laughton directed. James Agee wrote the lyrical screenplay. With Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish....

United Kingdom | 1943 | Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

This magnificent Technicolor epic from the directors of The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus “may be the greatest English film ever made” (Anthony Lane, The New Yorker). Spanning the Boer War to WWII, the movie charts the friendship between a British military man (Roger Livesey) and his German counterpart (Anton Walbrook) who are linked by three near-identical women through the years. Winston Churchill denounced the movie as “disgraceful” and tried to stop its production and...

France, Portugal, United States | 2006 | David Lynch

David Lynch’s last completed feature (and only full-length film since Mulholland Drive) was the only film that the Cinematheque showed for an entire week. Laura Dern, Justin Theroux, Jeremy Irons, and Harry Dean Stanton star in this three-hour head trip that The Boston Globe called “maybe most aggressively surreal feature film ever released to movie theaters in this country.” Shot on digital video, the film follows an actress (Dern, spectacular) who lands a dream movie...

France | 1936-52 | Jacques Tati, Max Ophüls, Jean Renoir

On July 14, 1985, the Cinematheque presented its first film. It was Bertrand Tavernier’s 1980 French movie A Week’s Vacation and it showed in CWRU’s Strosacker Auditorium. Three decades later we celebrate our 30th anniversary (and Bastille Day, of course) with another top-notch French program, this time at the Capitol Theatre. On 7/14/15 we screen three short works by three master filmmakers. The headliner is Jean Renoir, whose great A Day in the Country (Partie...

United States | 1959 | Jack Webb

How could we not show this movie for our 30th anniversary? Jack (Dragnet) Webb plays a harried, hard-bitten night editor at a big city tabloid newspaper who must adroitly negotiate dramas inside and outside his newsroom on the way to getting out the next day’s edition. “-30-“ is a designation used by newspapermen to indicate the end of a story. With William Conrad, David Nelson, Joe Flynn, and Richard Deacon.

France, Netherlands, United Kingdom | 1989 | Peter Greenaway

Set in and around a posh gourmet restaurant owned by a gangster (Michael Gambon) with an unfaithful wife (Helen Mirren), Peter Greenaway’s most notorious movie is a food film that just might make you lose your appetite. Intellectually, though, there’s a lot to chew on. This exploration of the dual natural of man is a banquet of elegantly rendered tableaux peppered with sex, vitriol, cruelty, and stomach-churning violence.

United States | 1997 | Harmony Korine

Artist and filmmaker TR Ericsson, whose work is on view in the Cleveland Museum of Art Transformer Station exhibition “Crackle & Drag” through 8/23, will introduce tonight’s screening of Harmony Korine’s polarizing directorial debut. Set in post-tornado Xenia, Ohio, the movie is a bizarre freak show in which a bunch of juveniles kill time by engaging in a variety of outré activities. Condemned by many but admired by Lukas Moodysson, Gus Van Sant, and Werner...

Spain | 1973 | Victor Erice

This haunting film focuses on two young girls living in a rural village in 1940 Franco Spain, at the end of the Spanish Civil War. One of the children (the extraordinary Ana Torrent, then 8) escapes the repressed atmosphere at home via private reveries and fantasies inspired by the movie Frankenstein, which she has just seen.

France, Sweden | 1966 | Robert Bresson

A donkey named after one of the Three Wise Men is the passive center of Robert Bresson’s unique parable of suffering and transcendence. Balthazar, whom we follow from birth to death through a variety of owners (most memorably a melancholy young girl), is both witness to and victim of human cruelty and folly. He ultimately emerges as some kind of saint. Voted 16th best movie of all time in an international poll of critics and...

United States | 1999 | Stanley Kubrick

Set at Christmastime, Kubrick’s final film finds him taking perhaps his boldest journey ever—into the mysteries of marriage and the depths of the human heart. A young husband (Tom Cruise), distraught over his wife’s confession of lustful fantasies involving another man, embarks on a surreal and scary nighttime odyssey of sex and death. With Nicole Kidman and Sydney Pollack.

Germany, United States | 1984 | Wolfgang Petersen

Wolfgang Petersen’s follow-up to Das Boot was, in its day, the most expensive film ever made outside the U.S. or the USSR. It’s an elaborate, special effects laden fantasy in which a neglected, bullied schoolboy enters into a book’s imaginative universe—where he must help save the world of Fantasia from a destructive force known as “The Nothing.”

United States | 1978 | Martin Scorsese

One of the greatest rock docs ever made was impeccably filmed (on 35mm) by Martin Scorsese. The Band (Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson) are joined by Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Neil Diamond, Emmylou Harris, The Staple Singers, Ringo Starr, Muddy Waters, and others for an unforgettable farewell concert in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day 1976.

United States | 1941 | Preston Sturges

In one of Preston Sturges’ greatest films, a successful Hollywood movie director, tired of making fluff, decides to try his hand at a Serious Film. (The title of his movie may sound familiar: O Brother, Where Art Thou?) To learn about life and poverty, the helmer goes on the road disguised as a hobo. With Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake.

France, Italy | 1972 | Bernardo Bertolucci

A guilt-ridden and grief-stricken American expatriate (Marlon Brando) enters into a carnal, “no questions asked” relationship with a young French woman (Maria Schneider) whom he meets by chance one day. This notorious, controversial classic is also a stunning piece of cinema, shot by the great Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now).

United States | 1971 | Dennis Hopper

Dennis Hopper’s follow-up to his hugely successful directorial debut Easy Rider was a self-indulgent, over ambitious, drug-addled, critically drubbed box office flop. (It prompted his self-imposed exile from Hollywood for almost ten years.) Yet it remains a fascinating failure that has never been released to DVD or Blu-ray. Hopper plays a stuntman on a Hollywood film crew shooting a Western in the Peruvian Andes. When the movie wraps, Hopper decides to stay behind and live...

United States | 1971 | Peter Bogdanovich

Here’s the film you chose to be the last one we show in Aitken Auditorium. (We move into a new theater at 11610 Euclid Avenue on Saturday, August 1.) Peter Bogdanovich’s celebrated and evocative coming-of-age story is set in a small, dying north Texas town during 1951 and 1952. However, there’s more sex and drama in this small, close-knit community than you might imagine. The star-studded cast includes Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Ellen...