Coming Soon
Sunday, 20 March 1988
Expanded, like the following year’s A Short Film About Love, from one of the episodes of his Dekalog (Thou Shalt Not Commit Murder), A Short Film About Killing stars Mirosław Baka as Jacek, an antisocial and quite possibly psychotic drifter newly arrived in Warsaw whose taste for wanton cruelty finds expression in the brutal and senseless murder of a middle-aged taxicab driver (Jan Tesarz), and puts Jacek on a trajectory towards death row. Released as a spirited public debate concerning capital punishment was ongoing in Poland, Kieślowski’s hard-to-shake film—unsparing in its depiction of violence—is a full-throated indictment of state-sponsored murder.
Distributor: Janus Films
Sunday, 20 March 1988
Tomek (Olaf Lubaszenko), a desultory, puffy-faced 19-year-old postal clerk temporarily staying in his godmother’s apartment in a Warsaw housing project, spends his idle hours brushing up on his Portuguese and peering through a telescope at Magda (Grażyna Szapołowska), a beautiful older woman in a neighboring building—but after a while voyeurism alone isn’t enough, and Tomek begins meddling in the affairs of the object of his obsession with consequences that will put both in peril. “A taut, sombre little masterpiece” [Sight & Sound], expanded from the script of the seventh episode of the Dekalog (Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery).
Distributor: Janus Films
Monday, 20 March 1995
Not technically Adam Sandler’s debut as a leading man—that would, of course, be 1989’s Going Overboard—but the film in which the Sandman’s manchild screen persona emerged fully formed, Davis’s nonpareil masterpiece follows beer-swilling layabout scion of obscene wealth Billy Madison (Sandler) as he endeavors to prove himself capable of running the Madison Hotel chain by graduating grades 1 through 12 in a marathon sprint. Joining us for the screening will be editor Jeffrey Wolf, ACE, whose deft handling of the academic decathlon sequence would, in a just world, be as closely studied as Battleship Potemkin’s “Odessa Steps.”
Distributor: Universal
Q&A with editor Jeffrey Wolf, ACE, moderated by editor Meg Reticker, ACE, on Friday, April 17th
Sunday, 12 March 1961
Set along the Kazakh steppe during Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands campaign, this exquisitely wistful road movie follows the titular young girl on her lorry ride to a town with a better school, exchanging alternately sad and amusing tales with her adult travel companions along the way. A significant appearance by Vasily Shukshin—a VGIK classmate of Andrei Tarkovsky and celebrated writer of the new rural literature that emerged during the Thaw—as a gruff tractor-driver who tells the ambivalent story of his rocky marriage to a refined city girl, signals Barnet’s keen awareness of the passage of time and its inevitable toll.
35mm print courtesy of Austrian Filmmuseum
One screening only!
Introduction by The Theater of the Matters and programmer Edo Choi on Saturday, April 11th
Friday, 12 March 1982
Born out of a commitment to the idea that it’s never too early to introduce kids to the pleasures of movies made outside of the commercial mainstream—and the suspicion that young audiences are often more open-minded and curious than their elders when it comes to such matters—Metrograph presents the latest iteration of Art Cinema for Tots, a celebration of handcrafted, kid-friendly films that reconcile the smart and the silly. In this edition, join us for Journeys, a suite of enchanting, adventurous shorts, including Charlie Chaplin’s early silent family outing gone awry, A Day’s Pleasure, and Hermína Týrlová’s lively stop-motion animation The Little Train, about a cheeky little coal train who gets tired of working and attempts to set off to see the world!
Director of Programming (and mom) Inge de Leeuw describes the experience: “The sound levels will be dimmed, and there will be a gentle light on, creating a relaxed atmosphere where young viewers feel at ease. They won’t be confined to their seats; they can move around, explore, and enjoy the wonder of the big screen. It will be a playful, interactive cinematic journey, designed with little explorers in mind.
” A Day's Pleasure (Charlie Chaplin, 1919, 21 mins)
The Little Train (Hermína Týrlová, 1959, 14 mins)
Wednesday, 12 March 1997
One of the essential works of the 1990s, Lemmons’s feature debut is a seductive Southern Gothic yarn distinguished by its smoldering sensuality and—thanks in no small part to the work of cinematographer Amy Vincent—lived-in, palpable sense of place, specifically Louisiana in the early ’60s. When the 10-year-old daughter of a well-to-do Creole American family catches her father in a moment of infidelity, a summer of lost innocence, rising household tensions, and unearthed secrets begins. Samuel L. Jackson and Jurnee Smollett, as father and daughter, lead a formidable cast that includes living legends Lynne Whitfield, Debbi Morgan, Meagan Good, and Diahann Carroll, exuding intensity as the mysterious fortune teller Elzora. A seductive tour de force that plays out in an atmosphere thick with premonitions, hoodoo folk wisdom, and household magic.
Distributor: Lionsgate
Q&A with cinematographer Amy Vincent, ASC, and director Kasi Lemmons moderated by cinematographer Dejan Georgevich, ASC, on Saturday, April 11th
Saturday, 12 March 2005
A procurer and drug dealer getting by on his wits in the streets of Memphis, Terrence Howard’s D-Jay dreams of a different life, and towards that end steps into the studio with Anthony Anderson and DJ Qualls to be reborn an emcee. An egalitarian vision of all-American self-reinvention, featuring some of the finest nuts-and-bolts songwriting scenes in all of cinema, breakthrough performances from Howard and Taraji P. Henson, Amy Vincent’s vividly grotty cinematography—inspired by the juke joint photographs of Birney Imes—and, of course, the Academy Award–winning Best Original Song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.” “[Howard gets] the most flamboyant and riveting opening scene any movie actor has had since George C. Scott in Patton. Brewer has seized the phenomenon of rap-music stardom to focus on the universality and pathos of a man’s desire to determine his future.” —Armond White, New York Press
Distributor: Paramount
Q&A with cinematographer Amy Vincent, ASC, on Saturday, April 11th
Friday, 20 March 1942
If one were to point to a single film as the encapsulation of Walt Disney’s contribution to the art of animation, one could do much worse than this loose adaptation of Austrian Felix Salten’s novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods, in which we follow the eponymous white-tail deer from fawnhood to buckdom, through changing seasons and harrowing challenges. The fruits of the Herculean efforts of the best and brightest in the House of Mouse bullpen, closely studying fine art depictions of animals and taking notes at the Los Angeles Zoo, Bambi is a film fully in thrall to the wonders of the natural world, incalculably influential and utterly beguiling.
Walt Disney Studios/20th Century
Saturday, 22 October 1966
Sembène adapted one of his own short stories for his directorial debut, the winner of the Prix Jean Vigo and by many reckonings the film that announced sub-Saharan African cinema to the wider world. Dreaming of a new life in France, Senegalese housemaid Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop) follows her employers from Dakar to their home in the Antibes, where she finds herself treated with a new tone of high-handed authority, and slowly, silently—save for what we hear of her inner life via French-language voiceover—succumbs to the stultifying effects of deepening depression.
Distributor: Janus Films
Introduction by Thomas Dodman, associate professor of French at Columbia University, on Saturday, April 11th
Friday, 20 March 1987
Uncertain as to where his future lies after his father’s death robs him of his sense of vocation, medical student Witek (Bogusław Linda) impulsively decides to catch a train to Warsaw when… Kieślowski’s triptych “sliding doors” film shows three possible outcomes branching off from this pivotal moment, with our protagonist alternately joining the Communist Party, joining the anti-Communist resistance, or resuming his studies with renewed vigor, and facing further adversities (and the vicissitudes of fate) in every case. Suppressed by Polish authorities on its completion in 1981, Blind Chance would only surface six years later—in a compromised form—in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival. “One of Krzysztof’s best films, perhaps even the best and the most original.” —Agnieszka Hollard
Distributor: Janus Films
Tuesday, 21 July 1987
Rohmer uses the amorous misadventures of two girlfriends in the Paris suburbs to test the old proverb “les amis de mes amis sont mes amis” (“the friends of my friends are my friends”) in the final episode of his “Comedies and Proverbs” series. Taking an identifiable stab at a yuppie(ish) set, Rohmer’s witty Shakespearean roundelay involves the buttoned-up Blanche (Emmanuelle Chaulet, in a superb debut) and the free-spirited Lea (Sophie Renoir), and their current amours. The pair are tempted by each other’s love interests, testing both their friendship and their understanding of matters of the heart. A Metrograph Pictures release.
Sunday, 23 October 1938
Nebbish soon-to-be-wed paleontologist Cary Grant would be perfectly happy to stay home and play with his dinosaur bones, but then Katherine Hepburn’s strident and relentless heiress crash lands into his life with other plans. A whirlwind of deranged comic havoc that sends gags flying off in every direction, Hawks’s family-friendly caper marks perhaps the pinnacle achievement of the screwball comedy, with superb supporting work by a wire-haired terrier and a leapin’ leopard.
Distributor: Walt Disney Studios/20th Century
Saturday, 25 October 1986
An early and less often screened knockout from the fertile mind of Miyazaki, making his first film under the Studio Ghibli banner, this amazing, ornately animated adventure set in a fantastic version of the 19th century gets underway when an orphan girl, Sheeta, quite literally falls from the sky and into the arms of an unsuspecting boy named Pazu. Together, they set off to find Laputa, a fabled floating island that was once the home to an extinct civilization, and which hides a treasure of untold value—though they’ll first have to outwit sky pirates and army thugs in order to get there.
Distributor: GKIDS
Sunday, 25 August 1974
The actual Chinatown neighborhood in Los Angeles doesn’t play a major role in Polanski’s noir-inflected film of dirty dealings in 1930s Southern California, but it does a whole lot of metaphorical heavy lifting in the film’s famous kicker line, symbolic of a place where the rules and the language are beyond comprehension. Faye Dunaway is a woman in trouble; Jack Nicholson is the nosey detective Jake Gittes who thinks he can get her out of it; and John Huston is the vilest plutocrat in all of cinema, reshaping the future of a thriving city with concern only for fattening his pockets. Native Angelino Robert Towne’s screenplay is perhaps his finest, an indictment of the conscienceless concerns that, in his hometown’s years of golden promise, were already silently steering its fate.
Distributor: Paramount
Wednesday, 20 March 2019
Daria Kashcheeva, whose short Daughter, a dialogue-free work tenderly exploring the strained relationship between a father and daughter, was nominated for a 2020 Academy Award, joins us at Metrograph to present that film and her lauded follow-up, Electra, alongside three of her carte-blanche picks.
“Julie Černá’s Stone of Destiny is a lyrically inventive animated musical that follows a singing anthropomorphized stone on a symbolic quest for freedom, meaning, and self-understanding. Its poetic blend of surreal encounters, emotional nuance, and imaginative visual metaphor creates a dreamlike atmosphere that deeply resonated with me and forms a sensitive, contemplative counterpoint within this programme.
“Inside by Viktorie Štěpánová is an intimate animated documentary about searching for a relationship with one’s own body. I am deeply moved by the sensitive connection between the chosen animation technique and the fragile, personal theme, which keeps the film both physical and vulnerable at the same time. It naturally belongs in this programme through its attention to corporeality and to the inner traces left in us by relationships and the surrounding reality.
“Nora Štrbová’s Spaces is a deeply personal animated documentary about memory—about how our identity begins to fragment when memories start to disappear. Drawing from the story of her brother, Štrbová uses fragmentary animation to evoke the inner world of someone whose memory can no longer hold reality together. Its fragile form and intimate narration transform a personal experience into a universal question: what of us remains when our memories begin to fade?” —Daria Kashcheeva
Daughter (Daria Kashcheeva , 2019, 15 mins)
Electra (Daria Kashcheeva , 2023, 26 mins)
Stone of Destiny (Julie Černá, 2025, 11 mins)
Inside (Viktorie Štěpánová, 2020, 5 mins)
Spaces (Nora Štrbová , 2020, 8 mins)
Q&A with filmmaker Daria Kascheeva moderated by Illustrator and author Yao Xiao on Saturday, April 18th
Thursday, 20 March 2025
Shot over the course of eight years and making its New York theatrical premiere at Metrograph, Winter’s Bone director Granik’s limited series follows ex-con-turned-CEO Coss Marte in the day-to-day operation of the Lower East Side fitness center that he founded, ConBody, where clients can learn the sort of stripped-down, intensive workout routines one develops in the confinement of a prison cell, and where Marte provides a second chance to other formerly incarcerated people via offering them gainful employment as trainers. An extraordinary story of not only one man beating the odds, but of many, many men and women facing the struggle to find new purchase in a society they’ve fallen out of step with while “on the inside,” a struggle in which the chances of recidivism are overwhelming. The screening includes a workout opportunity during intermission led by trainers from ConBody.
Introduction and Q&A with director Debra Granik and ConBody founder Coss Marte on Sunday, April 26th
Thursday, 20 October 2022
The film that won Oldboy and The Handmaiden director Park Best Director honors at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the noir-tinged Decision to Leave is a mesmerizing, slow-burn romance/mystery about a detective (Park Hae-il) whose investigation into a man’s suspicious death in the mountains becomes complicated when he finds himself becoming captivated by the deceased’s Chinese-born widow (Tang)—who also happens to be the prime suspect in her late husband’s death. A complex, consistently surprising work of exquisite tonal control, which gives Tang a role custom-tailored for her combination of sensual allure and entrancing charm, and offers audiences one of the most unforgettable denouements in recent cinema.
Distributor: MUBI
Thursday, 12 March 2026
The first four episodes of Kieślowski and co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz’s serial masterwork—each episode inspired by one of the Ten Commandments, focused on a resident or residents of a single late-Communist era housing complex, and exploring the difficulties that arise in following ancient proscriptions in a complex contemporary world—introduce us, in turn, to a scientist who places inordinate faith in his personal computer (I Am the Lord Thy God), a doctor at an intensive care unit who’s confronted with an insoluble moral dilemma (Thou Shalt Not Take the Name of Thy Lord God in Vain), a young man whose Christmas Eve celebration with his wife and child is interrupted by the resurfacing of a former lover (Honor the Sabbath Day), and a woman whose understanding of her relationship to her parents is called into question with the appearance of a letter from her late mother (Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother).
Distributor: Janus Films
Introduction by Annette Insdorf, Columbia University Film Professor and author of “Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski" on Sunday, April 12th
Monday, 12 March 1990
The fifth and sixth episodes of Kieślowski and co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz’s serialized epic—titled, respectively, Thou Shall Not Kill, later expanded on in Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Killing, and Thou Shall Not Commit Adultery, expanded as A Short Film About Love—are perhaps the most celebrated entries in the Dekalog: the former concerns a young man guilty of the motiveless murder of a cab driver and the attorney assigned to mount his defense; the latter, a 19-year-old peeper whose obsession with a fellow resident in his housing complex inspires him to sabotage her relationship with her lover, and from there further psychological gamesmanship. No less compelling—and ethically knotty—however, is the seventh chapter, Thou Shalt Not Steal, in which the disputed “property” in question is a six-year-old girl caught in a tug-of-war custody battle between her grandmother and mother, which soon crosses over the line of legality.
Distributor: Janus Films
Monday, 12 March 1990
Kieślowski and co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz’s monumental serial counts down the remaining Commandments with episodes Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness, Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Wife, and Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbors Goods. In the first-named, an ethics professor considers the repercussions—some quite unexpected—of her failure to help a Jewish girl in grave danger during the war years; in the tragicomic …Covet They Neighbors Wife, an incurably impotent man of early middle age encourages his wife to take a lover, a bit of largesse he comes to bitterly regret; in the final chapter, the surviving sons of a recently deceased stamp collector, coming into the joint possession of their father’s collection and learning of its enormous value, take a dangerously heightened interest in the hobby they’d until recently dismissed. The capstone to one of the most majestic structures to have been erected in cinema, television origins notwithstanding.
Distributor: Janus Films
Tuesday, 26 March 1963
Using a false identity provided by the cops, private detective Hideo Tajima (Joe Shishido, in his first substantive role for Suzuki) infiltrates an upstart yakuza clan headed by Manabe (Tamio Kawaji), trying to keep up appearances while undermining his new employer’s gun-running operations and, incidentally, romancing his boss’s mistress. A dynamically edited noir thriller staged with the brio and colorful verve of a movie musical, and one of the finest of the fast-and-dirty potboilers that Nikkatsu kept the director busy with while under contract, Suzuki’s bucking at the constraints of being assigned by-the-numbers genre fare approaching breaking point is clearly felt in in Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards!, as suggestions of the ultrastylized excess of his mid-’60s output creep into every other frame.
Distributor: AGFA
Tuesday, 20 March 1979
A program of Kieślowski’s short nonfiction films, where the same dedication to capturing the textures of the “real” found in his fiction work first appears, and remains abundantly evident. Includes The Office, an early study in bureaucratic torment produced while the director was still at Łódź Film School; I Was a Soldier, a platform for blind veterans to recall their experiences and recount their dreams; From a Night Porter’s Point of View, a 17-minute interview with a highly opinionated minor security functionary who revels in the small portion of authority he enjoys; Hospital, an immersion into 24 hours in the life in an overcrowded and underfunded Warsaw emergency room; Talking Heads, in which 79 interviewees from various walks of life and of all ages answer the questions “What year were you born?”, “Who are you?”, and “What do you most wish for?”; and Railway Station, the fruits of, per Kieślowski, “about 10 nights… trying to photograph ‘lost’ people” at the Warsaw Central Railway Station.
The Office (1966, 6 mins)
I Was a Soldier (1970, 16 mins)
From a Night Porter's Point of View (1979, 17 mins)
Hospital (1977, 20 mins)
Talking Heads (1980, 15 mins)
Railway Station (1980, 13 mins)
Sunday, 25 March 1973
Human Oms on the distant planet Ygam rise up against their giant blue Draag owners/overseers, who treat their tiny charges as pets to be either dandled or punished as whim dictates, in Laloux’s surreal, anti-authoritarian animated parable, based on Stefan Wul’s 1957 novel Oms en série, a film whose immediately recognizable, at times hallucinatory images come from stop-motion cutouts born of the imaginations of artist and writer Roland Topor and character designer Josef Kábrt, reaching a ravishing pinnacle in its celebrated sex scene. Jazz pianist Alain Goraguer’s psych-out score offers the ideal accompaniment to Fantastic Planet’s otherworldly landscapes and fabulous flora and fauna, altogether adding up to an out-of-this-world audiovisual experience.
A clip from The Finesse (Christopher Kulendran Thomas, 2022, 10 mins)
Fantastic Planet (René Laloux, 1973, 72 mins)
Introduction by artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas on Sunday, April 26th
Friday, 20 March 1998
Raoul Duke, Dr. Gonzo, and a stash containing just about every drug known to man hit Sin City in a red Chevy Impala for the mother of all freakouts in Gilliam’s appropriately maniacal, deliriously vulgar adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s 1971 roman à clef of the same name, starring Johnny Depp as Thompson’s literary alter ego and Benicio del Toro as his legal counsel, so to speak. “[Has] a scuzzy integrity of its own. There’s a good grasp of period, an impressive impersonation of the author-hero by an almost unrecognizable Johnny Depp… Like Richard Lester put through a postmodern blender… [Gilliam] skewers his native country with guts and zeal.” —Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Distributor: Universal
Thursday, 26 March 1992
Voiced by an impressive cast that includes Tim Curry, Tone Loc, Christian Slater, Cheech Marin, and Robin Williams as a blabbermouthed chiropteran named “Batty Koda,” Kroyer’s feature directorial debut introduces viewers to the secret world of fairies found in the undergrowth of an Australian rainforest—a world hidden from human eyes, but threatened with destruction by the incursion of man-made machines. By turns charming, enchanting, and sweetly comic, unstinting in its environmentalist messaging though never sanctimonious or finger-wagging, and altogether one of the most endearing of the animated features to appear following the enormous success of Disney’s 1989 The Little Mermaid, which helped revive the magic of animation for a new generation.
Distributor: AGFA
Wednesday, 12 March 2025
Contrary to Marx, the history of 20th-century fascism began with a healthy dose of farce when, in 1919, poetaster, decadent, and rabble-rousing dandy Gabriele D’Annunzio, accompanied by a few thousand shock troops, occupied the city of Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) and installed himself as Duce of the short-lived Italian Regency of Carnaro, in the process providing inspiration for the young Benito Mussolini. Combining brazenly anachronistic re-enactments that enlist residents of contemporary Rijeka and a wealth of archival material courtesy of the Duce’s publicity team, Bezinović—a native of the city—exposes the pomp, puffery, and pageantry that lays at the root of the fascist project. A cuttingly comic, constantly inventive view on what Pier Paolo Pasolini called D’Annunzio’s “narcissistic escapade,” with much to tell us about buffoonery on the world stage today.
Distributor: Icarus Films
Q&A with director Igor Bezinović moderated by writer Nick Newman (The Film Stage) on Friday, April 10th
Q&A with director Igor Bezinović moderated by film critic Richard Brody on Saturday, April 11th (2:00pm screening)
Introduction by director Igor Bezinović on Saturday, April 11th (5:15pm screening)
Wednesday, 12 March 1975
Born and raised in Ethiopia before relocating to the United States for his studies, where, at UCLA, he would become associated with the LA Rebellion school of Black filmmakers, Gerima returned to his homeland, then riven by the civil war that had seen the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie, to produce this shoestring, Godardian epic on black-and-white 16mm, cast entirely with Amharic-speaking nonprofessionals, about the simmering tensions between a peasant family and the feudal Lord who battens on their labor, as has been done since time immemorial. Winner of the Grand Prize at Locarno, and the film that “not only put Ethiopia on the film-making map but, with lines like ‘Is there anywhere in the world where there are no flies or Europeans?’, turned African cinema white hot.” [Sight & Sound]
Distributor: Sankofa
Sunday, 29 July 2018
Science fiction as done by Claire Denis is science fiction unlike anything you’ve ever seen, a bold experiment to the outer limits of genre, where no woman has gone before. Robert Pattinson, in a performance of quiet intensity and gravitas, is first encountered living alone with an infant on a spaceship adrift in the dark of space. Flashing back from this somber, beguiling opening, Denis introduces us to the former crew of this prison ship, on which Pattinson’s stubbornly celibate Monte is among the condemned guinea pigs at the disposal of Binoche’s diabolical filicide “Dr. Dibs”—inspired, per Denis, by Medea of Greek tragedy—who busies herself with attempting to prove that a child can be conceived and born in outer space between sessions in the ship’s “fuck box.” Troublingly erotic, intensely physical and headily philosophical, Denis’s first fully English-language film is a work of mastery and melancholy, a film following a voyage into the unknown that is itself exactly that.
Friday, 05 May 1978
Among Fassbinder’s most emotionally brutalizing films—and that’s saying something!—is the devastating story of a spiralling working-class transsexual, Elvira (Volker Spengler), struggling to make sense of her life after being callously cast aside by the man (Gottfried John) she’d devoted herself to completely. A blighted, beautiful, raw depiction of suffering in extremis—a key scene plays out amidst the gory mire of an abbatoir—and a deeply personal work from Fassbinder, still reeling from the recent suicide of lover Armin Meier when shooting it, and here credited as writer, director, producer, cinematographer, and co-editor. “Elegiac and complex… The most elegant release of grief transfigured into film, embodying its indiscriminate effects.” —Film Comment
Distributor: Janus Films
Sunday, 28 January 1973
By turns naturalistic and audaciously surreal, Mambéty’s postcolonialist picaresque follows a pair of young lovers—dandyish cowherd Mory and student Anta (Magaye and Mareme Niang) who dream of abandoning their lives in Dakar for the promise of Paris. Moving freely between pastoral idyll and jagged, dissonant modernism, Touki Bouki is a film of contrast and collision, depicting a world in which poverty exists cheek-and-jowl with the conspicuous consumption of a new, cosmopolite postcolonial upper crust, while endemic corruption remains a constant between the old guard and the new. Having already made a splash at the Carthage Film Festival, winning the Silver Tanit for his 1970 Badou Boy, Mambéty was launched on the world stage with his debut feature, awarded by Cannes and the Moscow International Film Festival, though it would be 20 years until his next.
Distributor: Janus
Restored in 2008 by The World Cinema Foundation at Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata in association with the family of Djibril Diop Mambéty. Restoration funding provided by Armani, Cartier, Qatar Airways and Qatar Museum Authority.
Extended introduction by filmmaker and curator Mohamed Challouf and Senegalese artists Assane Sy and Ahmad Cissé, co-founders of Jollof Films' pan-African cinema clubon Friday, April 17th
Thursday, 12 March 2026
As part of The Whole Shebang: Celebrating Ken and Flo Jacobs, a city-wide, 14-venue expanded cinema(s) festival saluting the vast legacies of experimental film pioneers and perennial New Yorkers Ken (1933-2025) and Flo (1941-2025) Jacobs, Metrograph presents a program of shorts born of Ken’s career-long love affair with the Lower East Side, captured with a Bell & Howell 16mm camera in its years as a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in the 1950s, and in the 21st century seen through digitally manipulated abstractions.
The Pushcarts Leave Eternity Street (2010, 13 mins)
Orchard Street (1955, 13 mins)
Baud'lairian Capers (1962, 30 mins)
Jonas Mekas in Kodachrome Days (2009, 4 mins)
Writhing City (2023, 26 mins)
Special thanks to Andrew Lampert, Nisi Ariana, and Azazel and Diaz Jacobs
Saturday, 12 March 1988
An adolescent girl and her younger brother leave their village in Greece behind to hitchhike and hop trains in hopes of picking up the scent of the absent father they’ve never met, having little to go on beyond a conviction that he may have emigrated to Germany, while a chance encounter with a young man called Orestis, touring with a troupe of traveling actors before his compulsory military service, offers a measure of comfort and companionship in a terribly inhospitable world. “It’s a movie wondrously wrought, heart-breakingly beautiful. It conveys, with stunning impact, part of the alienation of the whole postwar era: the death of the past, the steady erosion of optimism, the loss of the consolations of family, religion, tradition and political idealism.”—The Los Angeles Times
Distributor: Theo Angelopoulos Film Productions
Wednesday, 26 March 2008
In Martel’s beguiling, critically lauded, structurally splintered psychological thriller, poised, posh professional Veroníca (María Onetto) becomes increasingly unhinged after being involved in what may or may not have been a hit-and-run incident in rural Argentina. Martel’s genius for developing tension through the fine observation of behavioral eccentricities, the construction of unusual aural landscapes, and radical composition of screen space—achieved here with DP Bárbara Álvarez—has never been so evident as in this, her third feature. Daring, disorienting, and entirely original, like Martel’s work in total, it shows us that cinema is still being invented. Presented, in a new 4K restoration, by Martel in person, who will also be on-hand for a post-screening Q&A.
Restoration carried out from the 4K scan of the original 35mm camera negative, a first-generation internegative, and the original digital sound mix. Reference elements included a duplicate negative and a vintage 35mm release print. Restoration produced by Rei Pictures, with the support of The Museum of Modern Art and the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Additional support and organization by Strand Releasing USA. Carried out at Cubic Restoration in Buenos Aires.
A STRAND RELEASING Release
Q&A with director Lucrecia Martel on Saturday, April 25th
Monday, 12 December 1966
A provincial French city plays Atlantic City and Anna Karina (in her last film with Godard) plays a trench-coated woman searching for her boyfriend, Richard, in JLG’s cockeyed deconstruction of American noir tropes, its cast rounded out by Marianne Faithfull, and Jean-Pierre Léaud, the latter giving a masterclass in slapstick as a loitering tough guy with the unlikely sobriquet Donald Siegel (no relation to the Hollywood genre specialist of the same name). Very loosely based on Donald Westlake’s The Jugger—to the dismay of Westlake—this Pop Art-styled pastiche embodies its director’s conflicting love of American pop culture and hatred of America as a political entity. “Not the celluloid holy grail, but it’s close enough.”—J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
Distributor: Rialto
Saturday, 26 March 1977
“Borscht Belt sketch-comedy porn. A thinly plotted ‘loop carrier’ assembled largely from leftover scenes from The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976) and Barbara Broadcast (1977), Maraschino Cherry sees Metzger make good on his stated aspiration to imbue sex films with Jewish humor. It was also Metzger’s last outing as Henry Paris; after all, as one character puts it, ‘We all have our crosses to schlep.’” —Rob King, series curator, film historian and author of Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger
Introduction by Rob King and Ashley West, writer and founder of The Rialto Report on Saturday, April 25th
Monday, 27 August 2001
Beginning its life as an aborted TV pilot concerning blonde aspiring actress Betty Elms (Naomi Watts, transcendent) and an amnesiac brunette (Laura Harring) who stumbles into her, Mulholland Dr. would be reborn as a strange, sorrowful, and maddeningly mysterious film noir-inflected feature, following the duo on a sleuthing journey that leads them through Hollywood, to the enigmatic night club Silencio, and a series of unnerving incidents and transformations. Heartbreaking, hilarious, and terrifying by turns, and always on the razor’s edge of the inexplicable.
Thursday, 20 March 1975
The first feature film produced in Cameroon, Muna moto—the title is Duala for “the child of the other”—focuses on a young couple, Ngando and Ndomé, who, despite the fact that Ndomé is carrying her lover’s child, cannot be married because of Ngando’s inability to pay the necessary dowry, leaving hapless Ndomé to be snapped up by Ngando’s uncle, desirous of the heir his three sterile wives have thus far failed to provide him, and leading Ngando to take desperate measures. Winner of the Silver Tanit at the Carthage Film Festival, Pipa’s film would go on to win further plaudits abroad, and announce the emergence of an unapologetically brash, rabble-rousing new voice in Central African cinema.
Distributor: Janus Films
Introduction by filmmaker and curator Mohamed Challouf on Saturday, April 18th
Thursday, 20 March 1975
“A porno based on a prank. The 1969 bestseller Naked Came the Stranger was a sex-in-the-suburbs potboiler attributed to ‘Penelope Ashe’ but actually written by 24 Newsday journalists. In this X-rated adaptation, Metzger takes the hoax as a sly analog for his own Henry Paris subterfuge, resulting in perhaps his most playfully self-conscious film: a freewheeling spree of winking nods and cinematic games.” —Rob King, series curator, film historian and author of Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger
Introduction by Rob King and Ashley West, writer and founder of The Rialto Report, on Saturday, April 18th
Wednesday, 20 March 1985
Kieślowski’s first collaboration with both composer Zbigniew Preisner and co-screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz was made in the immediate aftermath of the repression of Lech Wałęsa’s Solidarity trade union via martial law in 1981, a keeningly sorrowful work in which the ghost of a deceased lawyer, Antek (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), observes helplessly the plight of his last client, a worker imprisoned for political activities (Artur Barciś), now receiving questionable consul from one of Antek’s former colleagues (Aleksander Bardini), as well as the ever-deepening mourning of his widow, Ula (Grażyna Szapołowska). Perhaps Kieślowski’s most overtly political film, No End was subject on its release to attacks from the Communist authorities, the Catholic church, and Solidarity representatives… If we are to measure the greatness of a film by the stature of its enemies, it must be very great indeed.
Distributor: Janus Films
Introduction by Rafał Syska, film historian, Professor at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, museum curator and former Director of the National Centre for Film Culture in Łódz
Monday, 25 March 2019
Zhu winnowed down some 800 hours of live-streaming footage for her third feature, winner of the prestigious Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, a kaleidoscopic view of self-documenting streamers in the People’s Republic of China—among them factory workers, street artists, and one severe burn victim—and the vast, unseen virtual audiences for whom they perform their lives for payment in attention and, occasionally, cash. Avoiding both techno-utopian boosterism and Luddite pessimism, Zhu’s found-footage symphony explores the complexities and contradictions of China’s short-lived streaming boom, already curtailed by government surveillance by the time of its completion.
A clip from Being Human (Christopher Kulendran Thomas, 2019, 10 mins)
Present.Perfect. (Shengze Zhu, 2019, 124 mins)
Introduction by artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas on Saturday, April 25th
Sunday, 30 March 2025
As he mulls over the budget for his new film, director-gangster Clem sends his artist cronies after an old comrade rumoured to be a leaker. Prismatic Ground closes out its sixth edition with the new film by iconoclastic underground cinema auteur Isiah Medina; a boldly dialectical consideration of racism, aesthetics and filmmaking in the 21st century. "The truth is even if we lose in the history of life, we will never lose in the history of thought.
Q&A with director Isiah Medina on Sunday, May 3rd
Thursday, 26 March 1970
A landmark of the emerging African cinema at the moment of European colonial disinvestment, Mauritanian Hondo’s Soleil Ô is a gripping, intimate narrative of the diasporic experience. An unnamed African laborer (Robert Liensol) happily heads for a better life in Paris, only to discover the colonial mindset is alive, well, and suffocating. Speaking of the struggle he faced making the movie, Hondo said, “I decided to make films to bring some Black faces to the lily-white French screens, which have been ignoring us and the Black contribution to the world for years.”
Distributor: Janus Films
Thursday, 20 March 1975
“I am thrilled to have the Tahar Cheriaa series complemented by a special screening of five short films that could not be left out of this tribute for my friend Tahar Cheriaa; just like the features in the program, they are indispensable treasures of African cinematic memory.” —Mohamed Challouf, director of Tahar Cheriaa: Under the Shadow of the Baobab, and film curator
A program of shorts particularly cherished by Cheriaa through the years. Featuring Lionel Ngakane’s Jemima & Johnny, winner of the Silver Tanit at the 1970 Carthage Film Festival, about the friendship of a Jamaican girl and a white boy in a Notting Hill, London, riven with racial tension; Golden Tanit–winner Idrissa Ouedraogo’s The Bowls, documenting the painstaking craftsmanship of the titular wooden vessels in a Mossi village in Burkina Faso; Moustapha Alassane’s Bon Voyage, Sim, an animated political satire about the President of a Republic of Toads and his downfall; and two films from pioneering Egyptian documentarian Attiyat Al-Abnudi: Mud Horse, in which Al-Abnudi turns her camera on her country’s poor; and The Sandwich, which observes the secret lives of children in a rural village on the Nile Delta routinely passed through by trains carrying sightseeing tourists.
Jemima & Johnny (Lionel Ngakane, 1966, 29 mins)
The Bowls (Idrissa Ouedraogo, 1983, 11 mins)
Bon Voyage, Sim (Moustapha Alassane, 1966, 5 mins)
Mud Horse (Husaan Al Teen) (Attiyat Al-Abnudi, 1971, 12 mins)
Sandwich (Attiyat Al-Abnudi, 1975, 12 mins)
Q&A with filmmaker and curator Mohamed Challouf moderated by Jordan Coty Eloundou Ndongo, Princeton University PhD Student, on Saturday, April 18th
Thursday, 20 March 2014
The extraordinary life of Tahar Cheriaa, the father of Pan-African cinema and founder of Africa’s first film festival, Carthage Film Festival (JCC), is documented in Challouf’s Under the Shadow of the Baobab—the title a reference to the “Baobab Group,” consisting of filmmakers, like Ousmane Sembène, Med Hondo, and Haile Gerima, whom the JCC helped to launch into the wider world. The compelling tale—deftly cut by longtime Sembène collaborator Kahéna Attia—of a band of cineastes and cinephiles hailing from all corners of Africa working in concert to challenge the stranglehold held on the continent’s screens by films (and business interests) from abroad, inspired by Cheriaa’s conviction that “whoever controls distribution controls cinema.”
Q&A with Director and Film Curator Mohamed Challouf moderated by Alia Ayman, writer curator and co-founder of Zawya on Friday, April 17th
Tuesday, 12 May 1998
The Coen’s cult comedy par excellence is the rare film not to contain a single unmemorable character or performance, from John Goodman’s John Milius-inspired gun nut Walter Sobchak to John Turturro’s snake-hipped sex offender Jesus Quintana to, of course, Jeff Bridges’s bathrobe-clad, White Russian-swilling hippie holdover Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski, whose troubles begin when a crew of German nihilists soil his carpet as punishment for a debt that he didn’t, in fact, incur. A surreal, screamingly funny, and endlessly quotable odyssey through greater Los Angeles on the eve of Operation Desert Storm, and one of the quintessential American films of the 1990s.
Distributor: Universal
Wednesday, 30 October 1991
The film that introduced Kieślowski to an international audience, metaphysical mystery The Double Life of Véronique features an extraordinary Irène Jacob in a double role, playing Weronika, a soprano in a Polish choir, and Véronique, a French music teacher. The two doppelgangers encounter one another only once, but they are bonded by a much deeper synchronicity, which finds expression in Zbigniew Preisner’s superlative score and Slawomir Idziak’s exquisite cinematography.
Distributor: Janus Films
Introduction by Richard Peña, Professor Emeritus, Columbia University, and Director Emeritus, NYFF, on Saturday, April 18th
Q&A with actor Irène Jacob on Saturday, April 25th
Friday, 20 March 1998
The most expensive film ever made in the PRC when it took home the Technical Prize at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, inspired by the attempted assassination in the third century BC of Ying Zheng, first Emperor of a unified China, by folk hero Jing Ke, Chen’s opulent historical romance stars Zhang Fengyi as the would-be dynasty-toppler, Li Xuejian as the targeted tyrant, and Li, at her most radiantly resplendent and quietly commanding, as the royal concubine who begins as a willing pawn of her liege but then, taken with dashing conspirator Jing, moves to aid the plot against the throne in earnest. Shot over three years with a literal army of extras in meticulous period costume and no digital sleight of hand available to sweeten or otherwise falsify the image, Chen’s epic is closer to the world of Cecil B. DeMille than to the pixelized megaproductions of today.
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Saturday, 11 October 2008
Taking inspiration from Sergio Leone’s 1966 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, an undisputed high watermark of the spaghetti western, Kim crafted this kimchi western par excellence, bringing together bandit Lee Byung-hun, thief Song Kang-ho, and bounty hunter Jung Woo-sung in the hostile deserts of Manchuria c. 1939, double-crossing one another—and, occasionally, warily, working together—as they vie for possession of a treasure map urgently sought by the Imperial Japanese Army. A rollicking, jaunty mixture of madcap knockabout comedy, jaw-dropping stunt work, and kinetic camera choreography, chock full of hair’s breadth escapes, over-the-top set pieces, and an abiding air of goofily grinning goodwill.
CJ Entertainment
Friday, 12 March 2004
Originally made to play as part of the triptych omnibus film Eros, then expanded by Wong into this short feature, The Hand stars Chang Chen as Zhang, a meek dressmaker’s assistant plying his trade in 1960s Hong Kong, and Gong Li—also seen in Wong’s 2046 of the same year—as the enigmatic Miss Hua, a regular client who casts a spell over the mild-mannered Zhang, becoming over time something like his muse. A sultry study in muted longing and a film that revels in the discreet eroticism and shared intimacy of measuring and cutting couture to custom fit for an adored model; when Zhang tells Miss Hua, in hushed tones, “I became a tailor because of you,” one has no difficulty believing in and sympathizing with the totality of his infatuation.
Distributor: Janus Films
Sunday, 26 March 1972
One of Robert Redford’s more unjustly underappreciated star turns of the 1970s comes in this adaptation of Westlake’s 1970 novel of the same name, which introduced (one of) the author’s signature creations, New York City–based master thief and obsessive micromanager John Dortmunder, and in time provided Redford a part that would allow the Golden Boy to show off his comic chops. Hired to heist the Sahara Stone, an African diamond on display in the Brooklyn Museum, for repatriation—a seemingly simple job that will prove anything but—Dortmunder puts together a team that includes George Segal, Ron Leibman, and Paul Sand, dreaming up increasingly baroque schemes as he and his crew chase the elusive object of desire all over the city. (And if that doesn’t sell ya, we’ll throw in a slinky-funky Quincy Jones soundtrack to boot!)
Distributor: Walt Disney Studios/20th Century
Tuesday, 26 March 1974
An astonishing, and fierily partisan, record of an uprising in southern Oman’s Dhofar governorate by a Marxist-Leninist guerilla force who held out for almost 14 years against the UK-backed Sultanate, the result of Srour and her crew braving the incoming shells of the Royal Air Force so as to bear firsthand witness to events on the ground and hear the protagonists of the ongoing struggle speaking for themselves. Tahar Cheriaa, then holder of a position at the French Agence de Coopération Culturelle et Technique (Agency of Cultural and Technical Cooperation), was instrumental in helping Srour line up funding to finish editing her film, which had finished shooting in 1971; when it debuted at Cannes three years later, it became the first feature directed by a woman from the Arab world to do so.
Distributor: Several Futures
Wednesday, 26 March 1975
“The Image is a meticulous exercise in threshold states, its characters tarrying at the borders of taboo. Like Naked Came the Stranger, it adapts a famously pseudonymous text: here, the S&M novel L’Image (1956). Unlike Naked, though, The Image was the only film Metzger released under his own name during his ‘Henry Paris’ period, in effect turning the pseudonym game inside out.” —Rob King, series curator, film historian and author of Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger
Distributor: Muscle Distribution
Introduction by Rob King and Ashley West, writer and founder of The Rialto Report on Friday, April 24th
Tuesday, 30 October 1973
Elliott Gould plays a distinctly low-key and somewhat bumbling version of Raymond Chandler’s gumshoe Philip Marlowe in Altman’s singular private dick movie, which updates the source material to a smog-and-pot-hazy 1970s Los Angeles. A mystery involving a missing friend, a sadistic gangster, and a Hemingway-esque novelist (Sterling Hayden) draws Marlowe into a tangle of double-crosses, towards a revelation that will make him reconsider his nonchalant motto: “It’s okay with me.”
Distributor: Park Circus
Thursday, 20 March 1986
The Czechoslovak affinity for emphasizing the most disturbing elements of classic children’s tales—see also: Jan Švankmajer’s Alice—is very much in evidence in Barta’s bleak retelling of the traditional German yarn, which is, after all, concerned with something like a mass extinction event. With a visual vocabulary that draws from medieval Flemish painting, Cubism, and German Expressionism, Barta plunges us into a grotesque rattletrap world of wood and metal puppets existing side by side with real live vermin and “communicating” in a nonsense tongue. An indelibly strange, profoundly pessimistic work. Screens with Barta’s The Vanished World of Gloves, a brief history of the cinema as illustrated by the titular garments.
The Pied Piper (Jiří Barta, 1986, 53 mins)
The Vanished World of Gloves (Jiří Barta, 1982, 16 mins)
THE PIED PIPER and THE VANISHED WORLD OF GLOVES restored by Deaf Crocodile Films in collaboration with Krátký Film Praha and The Comeback Company.
Introduction by filmmaker Daria Kascheeva on Saturday, April 18th
Friday, 26 March 1976
Starry-eyed idealism runs smack into a wall of practical complexities and human stubbornness in Kieślowski’s first film to receive a direct to cinema release, in which a well-liked Party factotum, Stefan (Franciszek Pieczka), returns to the provincial town where he’d lived years previous with an assignment to supervise the construction of a chemical plant and ambitions to build it as a worker’s paradise, only to have the castles he’s building in the sky besieged by disenfranchised locals who resent such high-handed incursion and the inevitable blighting of the environment. A dive into the thickets of Polish bureaucracy in the Communist era, lent an unmistakable veracity thanks to the director’s apprenticeship in documentary.
Distributor: Janus Films
Wednesday, 10 July 1963
The third film in Bergman’s Faith Trilogy stars Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom as Ester and Anna, two estranged sisters, one prim, the other a voluptuary, who, along with Ester’s young son Johan, take rooms in an otherwise vacant hotel in an unnamed Central European country—the local language is understood by neither of the women, and left untranslated for the viewer—that appears to be the battlefield for some mysterious conflict. A ragged howl in a barren world, imbued with a magisterial bleakness by cinematographer Sven Nykvist, whose handling of Johan’s wandering the hotel’s empty corridors seems an obvious influence on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Wednesday, 20 March 1968
“Built out of Violette Leduc’s taboo-breaking prose, Therese and Isabelle is Metzger’s elegant exploration of the relation of past and present, word and image in the erotic imaginary. The film binds itself tightly to Leduc’s 1966 text, letting voiceover shoulder what the camera doesn’t show. Desire here becomes a problem of translation, between what can be seen and what can be said, between what lasts in memory and what gets left behind.” —Rob King, series curator, film historian and author of Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger
Introduction by Rob King and Ashley West, writer and founder of The Rialto Report, on Sunday, April 19th
Friday, 26 March 2004
To’s often irreverent, always cinematographically exuberant homage to Japanese master Akira Kurosawa highlights a very Japanese martial art rarely focused on in kung fu-crazy Hong Kong cinema: namely, judo. Former champ Sze-to Bo (Louis Koo), now a washed-up, debt-saddled drunk who keeps his reasons for leaving the sport behind at the height of his powers a closely guarded secret, is lured back to prove himself anew by aspiring songbird Cherrie Ying and up-and-coming fighter Aaron Kwok, with longtime rival Tony Leung Ka-fai the last item on Bo’s busy dance card. A personal favorite of To’s and, in its absence of constantly discharging firearms and other signatures, something of an outlier in his filmography.
Distributor: Janus Films
Wednesday, 26 March 2025
Based on two manga by Yoshiharu Tsuge, who rose to underground celebrity thanks to his surrealist tales published in the pages of the bastion of Japanese avant-garde cartooning, Garo, Miyake’s bifurcated live-action feature observes (and draws parallels and contrasts from) a summertime meet-cute between Nagisa and Natsuo (Yuumi Kawai and Mansaku Takada) and a snowbound winter encounter between screenwriter Li and innkeeper Ben-zō (Shim Eun-kyung and Shinichi Tsutsumi). Winner of the Golden Leopard at last year’s Locarno Film Festival, hailed “a true masterpiece” by Shiguéhiko Hasumi, Japan’s greatest living film critic, Two Seasons, Two Strangers is at one and the same time as simple as its straightforward title suggests and immensely, exhilaratingly complex.
Distributor: Several Futures
Q&A with director Sho Miyake on Friday, April 24th and Saturday, April 25th
Tuesday, 12 March 1963
Shot in an Abkhazian town along the Black Sea coast, Barnet’s bittersweet final film concerns Pavel Pavlovich (Vasili Merkuryev), an aging scientist who retreats to the remote countryside for a convalescent vacation in the hopes of reawakening his youthful passion for painting, only to be pulled into the various petty trials and troubles of the townspeople. Dismissed by critics and ignored by audiences upon its initial release, but now embraced by Barnet scholars as a covert self-portrait from the artist in his twilight, Whistle Stop is one of the greatest swan songs of studio-era cinema.
Introduction by programmer Edo Cho on Sunday, April 12th