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NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Bam

My ten-film Manoel de Oliveira retrospective Mirror of Life begins, with numerous restorations making their North American premiere.

Japan Society

One of Ozu’s greatest films, Early Spring, plays on 35mm this Friday.

Roxy Cinema

Eraserhead and An American Tail screen, the latter for free.

Anthology Film Archives

The Rules of the Game and The Flowers of St. Francis play on 35mm in Essential Cinema.

Film Forum

A René Clair retrospective continues, as does Luis Buñuel’s Él and Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman; Betty Boop and Friends screens on Sunday.

IFC Center

Hideaki Anno’s Love & Pop plays in a new restoration; Stop Making Sense, Mulholland Dr., Lost Highway, Sorcerer, and Funny Games (the good one) show late.

Nitehawk Cinema

Hanna and a print of Westward the Women screen early on Saturday and Sunday.

Metrograph

Donnie...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Roxy Cinema

The Last Temptation of Christ and The Flowers of St. Francis have 35mm showings for Easter Weekend, while Barbarella and The Terminator also screen on film; Ken Jacobs’ Two Wrenching Departures plays on Sunday with Jacobs present.

IFC Center

Gregg Araki presents Something Wild on 35mm this Friday, while his film The Doom Generation opens in a director’s cut; Beau Travail offers a Claire Denis fix; Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight screen, while Akira and Barb Wire have late showings, with Wild Things showing on 35mm.

Bam

One of Shôhei Imamura’s last films, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, is screening, while “Queering the Canon” offers films by Lizzie Borden, Funeral Parade of Roses, and more.

Museum of the Moving Image

A series on Jeanne Dielman‘s influences brings the film itself and work by Varda,...

Wim Wenders is a sophisticated man of cinema, a nine-time Cannes Palme d’Or contender who led the 1989 jury that gave Steven Soderbergh the Palme d’Or over Spike Lee. (He says he was not the architect of that collective decision.) The graduate of the ’70s German New Wave who has close ties to America has shown deep spirituality in such films as Cannes Best Director-winner “Wings of Desire,” “Faraway, So Close,” and “The Salt of the Earth.”

Still, choosing Wenders to direct a documentary about the Holy Father did not look obvious at first. It turns out that Wenders was raised in a Catholic family where “faith was important,” he told me at Cannes. He admired his father, a doctor who “lived life and his profession as a believer, he loved people and was always there for anybody who was sick.”

More recently, Wenders was struck by the joyful way his father embraced death,...

Roberto Rossellini’s Viva L’Italia (1961) is now available on Blu-ray from Arrow Academy.

”Viva l Italia is a documentary made after the event, trying to figure out what happened. I tried to place myself in front of the events of a century ago, the way a documentarist would have done who had the good fortune to follow Garibaldi’s campaign with his camera.” Roberto Rossellini

To celebrate the centenary of Italy, the Italian government commissioned Rossellini to make a biopic of Giuseppe Garibaldi, one that would follow his exploits with ‘the Thousand’ and their role in the country’s unification. Rossellini approached the film as he had The Flowers of St. Francis, presenting the main character in neo-realist mode, as though making a documentary.

Restored by Arrow Films from the original negative, this disc marks the first North American home video release of Viva l’Italia in any format,...

Any list of the greatest foreign directors currently working today has to include Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. The directors first rose to prominence in the mid 1990s with efforts like “The Promise” and “Rosetta,” and they’ve continued to excel in the 21st century with titles such as “The Kid With A Bike” and “Two Days One Night,” which earned Marion Cotillard a Best Actress Oscar nomination.

Read MoreThe Dardenne Brothers’ Next Film Will Be a Terrorism Drama

The directors will be back in U.S. theaters with the release of “The Unknown Girl” on September 8, which is a long time coming considering the film first premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016. While you continue to wait for their new movie, the brothers have provided their definitive list of 79 movies from the 20th century that you must see. La Cinetek published the list in full and is hosting many...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook)

The Handmaiden is pure cinema — a tender, moving, utterly believable love story. It’s also a tense, unsettling, erotic masterpiece. There’s a palpable exhilaration that comes from watching this latest film from Park Chan-wook. From its four central performances and twisty script to the cinematography of Chung Chung-hoon and feverish, haunting score by Cho Young-wuk, The Handmaiden is crafted to take your breath away.

Each month, the fine folks at FilmStruck and the Criterion Collection spend countless hours crafting their channels to highlight the many different types of films that they have in their streaming library. This April will feature an exciting assortment of films, as noted below.

To sign up for a free two-week trial here.

Monday, April 3 The Chaos of Cool: A Tribute to Seijun Suzuki

In February, cinema lost an icon of excess, Seijun Suzuki, the Japanese master who took the art of the B movie to sublime new heights with his deliriously inventive approach to narrative and visual style. This series showcases seven of the New Wave renegade’s works from his career breakthrough in the sixties: Take Aim at the Police Van (1960), an off-kilter whodunit; Youth of the Beast (1963), an explosive yakuza thriller; Gate of Flesh (1964), a pulpy social critique; Story of a Prostitute (1965), a tragic romance; Tokyo Drifter...

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Metrograph

Three Spielberg pictures screen this weekend, while Rohmer is highlighted with Pauline at the Beach and Full Moon in Paris on Friday.

A Rocky-Creed mini-series run on Friday and Saturday.

The Rules of the Game shows this Sunday.

Japan Society

One of David Bowie‘s greatest performances is on display in Nagisa Oshima‘s Merry Christmas,...

This time on the podcast, Scott is joined by David Blakeslee to discuss Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis.

About the film:

In a series of simple and joyous vignettes, director Roberto Rossellini and co-writer Federico Fellini lovingly convey the universal teachings of the People’s Saint: humility, compassion, faith, and sacrifice. Gorgeously photographed to evoke the medieval paintings of Saint Francis’s time, and cast with monks from the Nocera Inferiore Monastery, The Flowers of St. Francis is a timeless and moving portrait of the search for spiritual enlightenment.

Subscribe to the podcast via RSS or in iTunes

Buy The Film On Amazon:

Watch a scene from the film:

Episode Links:

The Flowers of St. Francis (1950) – The Criterion Collection The Flowers of St. Francis: God’s Jester – From the Current – The Criterion Collection The Flowers of St. Francis (1950) – IMDb The Flowers of St. Francis – Wikipedia, the...

In today's roundup of news and views: Charlie Fox on Buster Keaton, Danny Leigh on Alan Clarke, Abel Ferrara on collaboration, Adrian Martin on the "New Cinephilia," Martin Amis on Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, Sérgio Dias Branco on Roberto Rossellini's The Flowers of St. Francis, Peter Cowie on Ingmar Bergman's cinematographers, Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist, Benjamin Bergholtz on Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on Michael Mann's Heat, David Kalat on Harry Langdon, Duncan Gray on Brad Bird's Tomorrowland—and more. » - David Hudson...

In today's roundup of news and views: Charlie Fox on Buster Keaton, Danny Leigh on Alan Clarke, Abel Ferrara on collaboration, Adrian Martin on the "New Cinephilia," Martin Amis on Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, Sérgio Dias Branco on Roberto Rossellini's The Flowers of St. Francis, Peter Cowie on Ingmar Bergman's cinematographers, Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist, Benjamin Bergholtz on Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on Michael Mann's Heat, David Kalat on Harry Langdon, Duncan Gray on Brad Bird's Tomorrowland—and more. » - David Hudson...

How would you program this year's newest, most interesting films into double features with movies of the past you saw in 2014?

Looking back over the year at what films moved and impressed us, it is clear that watching old films is a crucial part of making new films meaningful. Thus, the annual tradition of our end of year poll, which calls upon our writers to pick both a new and an old film: they were challenged to choose a new film they saw in 2014—in theatres or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they also saw in 2014 to create a unique double feature.

All the contributors were given the option to write some text explaining their 2014 fantasy double feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, with or without explanation, as further imaginative film programming we'd be lucky to catch...

Part 2 of this list gets a bit more foreign. In fact, this may be the first full list that has more foreign-language films than English-language ones. Maybe English-speaking audiences aren’t as willing to watch religious films. Maybe films associated with religion come off as preachy or accusatory. Or maybe (most of) the films on this list have done it so well already that it doesn’t need to be done again.

courtesy of criterion.com

40. Marketa Lazarová (1967)

Directed by František Vláčil

The film often credited as being the best to come out of the Czech Republic, Marketa Lazarová was based on the novel by Vladislav Vančura and is an early, biting narrative about the chasm of difference between paganism and its shift into Christianity in the Middle Ages, as the daughter of a lord is kidnapped and becomes the mistress of one of her kidnappers, a robber knight. It...

The Moon, the opposite of the sun, hovers over us by night, the opposite of day. 

In F.W. Murnau’s Tabu (1931), Reri, the sacred maiden of the small island of Bora Bora, writes this to her lover Matahi: 

And indeed, when Matahi chases after her, the moon spreads its path on the sea.

He runs and swims after her, moving faster than a normal human being, defying the laws of gravity. 

Miraculously, he catches up to the boat. 

Thus, he must die, sinking back into a void…

…while ghost ships linger on in the distance…

…carrying another hopeless romantic, and a moving corpse—A second Nosferatu.

The moon is absent in Murnau’s earlier film, made nearly ten years before Tabu, but it is in the one he made nearly five years after Nosferatu, when George O’Brien leaves his wife for a midnight rendezvous with another woman. 

And indeed,...

While their scandalous love affair and subsequent marriage eclipsed the five collaborative films they made together, this month Criterion brings Roberto Rossellini’s Ingrid Bergman headlining Voyage trilogy to the collection, comprised of their first three ventures, Stromboli (1950), Europe ’51 (1952) and Journey To Italy (1954). None of these titles would be deemed a commercial success, even while several notable critics and filmmakers would champion them, such as Francois Truffaut and Eric Rohmer.

As their marriage crumbled after three children (one of whom would go on to become famed actress and model Isabella Rossellini), Bergman would eventually overcome the notoriety that had banished her from Hollywood to win two more Academy Awards, while Rossellini would go on to make other acclaimed titles, though the failures of his work with Bergman made it difficult to secure funding. The specter of their scandal (they were both married to others at the time of their affair...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Sept. 24, 2013

Price: DVD $79.95, Blu-ray $79.95

Studio: Criterion

George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman's marriage falls apart in Roberto Rossellini's Journey to Italy.

In the late 1940s, the incandescent Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman (Casablanca ) found herself so moved by the revolutionary Neorealist films of Roberto Rossellini (Open City) that she sent the director a letter, introducing herself and offering her talents. The resulting collaboration produced a series of films that are works of both sociopolitical concern and metaphysical melodrama, each starring Bergman as a woman experiencing physical dislocation and psychic torment in postwar Italy. It also famously led to a scandalous affair and eventual marriage between filmmaker and star, and the focus on their personal lives in the press unfortunately overshadowed the extraordinary films they made together.

Stromboli, Europe ’51, and Journey to Italy are intensely personal portraits that reveal the director at his most emotional and the...

Pope Movies (photo: Anthony Quinn in ‘The Shoes of the Fisherman’) [See previous post: "Pope Francis Movie in the Works?"] Now, do we need another Pope Movie? Well, actually there haven’t been that many. Most notable among the Pope Movies of decades past are Michael Anderson’s widely lambasted The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968), with Anthony Quinn as what one pundit called "Zorba the Pope," and Nanni Moretti’s widely acclaimed comedy-drama We Have a Pope, with Michel Piccoli as a cardinal who reluctantly is elected chief of the Catholic Church. Here are a few more: Rex Harrison hammed it up as Pope Julius II to Charlton Heston’s equally risible Michelangelo in Carol Reed’s The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965); Liv Ullmann played the title role in Michael Anderson’s critically massacred Pope Joan (1972), about the alleged medieval female pope; and Finlay Currie reverentially incarnated the official first pope, St. Peter, in Mervyn LeRoy’s dreary (and...

The Cannes Film Festival's unveiled its Classics program today: "Fourteen films, five documentaries, surprises, a Masterclass (Malcolm McDowell), new or restored prints: The program is based on proposals from national archives, cinematheques, studios, producers and distributors. Rare classics to discover or re-discover, they will be presented in 35mm or high definition digital prints."

The Films

The first round of descriptions comes straight from the Festival.

A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune) by Georges Méliès (France, 1902, 16'). "The color version of Georges Méliès most famous film, A Trip to the Moon (1902) is visible again 109 years after its release: having been long considered lost, this version was found in 1993 in Barcelona. In 2010, a full restoration is initiated by Lobster Films, Gan Foundation for Cinema and Technicolor Foundation for Heritage Cinema. The digital tools of today allows them to re-assemble the fragments of 13 375 images from the film and restore them one by one.

First the history, then the list:

In 1969, Jerome Hill, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas decided to open the world’s first museum devoted to film. Of course, a typical museum hangs its collections of artwork on the wall for visitors to walk up to and study. However, a film museum needs special considerations on how — and what, of course — to present its collection to the public.

Thus, for this film museum, first a film selection committee was formed that included James Broughton, Ken Kelman, Peter Kubelka, Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney, plus, for a time, Stan Brakhage. This committee met over the course of several months to decide exactly what films would be collected and how they would be shown. The final selection of films would come to be called the The Essential Cinema Repertory.

The Essential Cinema Collection that the committee came up with consisted of about 330 films.

This week the Criterion Collection releases the Roberto Rossellini War Trilogy on DVD, filling an important gap in DVD libraries everywhere. The first and third movies in the trilogy, Open City (1945) and Germany Year Zero (1948), were available in shoddy editions that did not do justice to the films, and the second, Paisan (1946), has been on the hard-to-find list for some time. These movies are notable for establishing the "Italian Neorealism" movement that cropped up just after WWII. Italy was devastated, and several young filmmakers realized that making glossy entertainments felt false under the circumstances. So they grabbed some cameras, some short ends and some inexperienced actors and hit the streets.

The odd thing about Open City is how much of it takes place indoors, and how much it resembles a standard-issue melodrama. But it still contains moments of genuine invention and power -- especially the performance of Anna Magnani --...