Metrograph

Wednesday, 30 October 1991

A sprawling and intimate evocation of the Taiwan of Yang’s teenage years: the outset of the 1960s, a period defined by street gang activity, the political repression of the Kuomintang military government, and the ubiquity of American pop culture. A Brighter Summer Day takes its inspiration from the story of the country’s first juvenile homicide, with Chang Chen’s brooding outsider just one figure in Yang’s bustling tapestry, regarded in seemingly serene long takes that bristle with repressed emotion.

A Brighter Summer Day was restored in 2009 by the Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Central Motion Picture Corporation, and the Edward Yang Estate. Scan performed at Digimax laboratories in Taipei. Restoration funded by Armani, Cartier, Qatar Airways, and Qatar Museum Authority.

Distributor: Janus Films

Monday, 14 August 2017

Inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1876 short story of the same title, Loznitsa’s A Gentle Creature is a harrowing, headlong plunge into the charnel house that is contemporary Russian bureaucracy. The film follows its unnamed protagonist (Vasilina Makovtseva) as she negotiates an underworld economy that thrives around the corruption-corroded prison where her husband is incarcerated. An absurdist, carnivalesque depiction of a place where all that one touches wounds, where law is arbitrary and justice elusive, and where the concept of “civil society” is only a distant memory cherished by a few.

Distributor: The Festival Agency

Thursday, 22 February 1979

Forty years after emerging from the bush with his psychotropic, hallucinatory vision of the Vietnam War cribbed from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and lent phantasmagorical vividness by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, and 18 after presenting his longer-by-49-minutes Apocalypse Now: Redux, Coppola went upriver one more time on the hunt for his elusive masterwork. The result, whose runtime lands midway between that of the original Apocalypse and its first revision—excising the PT boat crew’s ugly romp with stranded Playboy Playmates, retaining their languid stopover at a French plantation stuck outside of time—is what Coppola calls his definitive version, a film that endeavors not so much to “explain” the appalling American adventure in southeast Asia as to embody the feeling of a ghastly hangover after two imperialist sprees.

Distributor: Rialto Pictures

Wednesday, 06 August 2025

For the latest iteration of Atlantic Watch—a series of exclusive feature-film, television-series, and documentary screenings hosted by The Atlantic—Metrograph and The Atlantic present the New York premiere of National Geographic’s new documentary portrait of the Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer Lynsey Addario, Love+War, followed by a post-screening conversation with Addario and the film’s director, Chai Vasarhelyi.

"The Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer Lynsey Addario has risked her life to capture the stark realities of war—in places including the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. From National Geographic Documentary Films and the Academy Award® winning filmmakers E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, Love+War reveals Addario’s ascent in the male-dominated world of conflict photography. But her work comes at a steep personal cost—each assignment means stepping into danger and leaving behind her husband and two young sons. Behind the camera, Addario is torn between her unwavering commitment to the essential work of journalism and the powerful, competing demands of motherhood, grappling with what it truly means to follow your passion when it threatens everything you love." —National Geographic Films

Sunday, 23 August 1998

Tommy Brown (DMX) and his best friend Sincere (Nas) are gangsters who have learned how to make a good living as infamous and ruthless criminals and shot-callers in the hood, respected by many but feared by all. Able to move out of Queens, where they were raised, and relocate to an upscale section of Manhattan, the pair would seem to have it made, but both soon realize that their lives are headed toward a dead end. As the police are closing in on them and new players are looking for a come up, will their reign last?

Distributor: Lionsgate

Wednesday, 31 July 1974

Though it was Days of Heaven that won him plaudits, the first American film shot by Néstor Almendros was a rather lesser-known masterwork, Monte Hellman’s Roger Corman–produced adaptation of Charles Willeford’s 1962 novel of the same name, following Frank Mansfield (a superlative Warren Oates) on his odyssey to earn the Cockfighter of the Year award—and, as a reward, lift his self-imposed vow of silence. Of his first outing in the States, in sticky rural Georgia, Almendros would write: “Far away from the equilibrium of the French countryside I found myself facing the rather tacky but extraordinarily photogenic image of contemporary America: motels, billboards, gas stations, cafeterias, etc., to say nothing of those small Roman circuses, the cock pits.”

Distributor: AGFA

Saturday, 14 August 1971

An outraged Pauline Kael called it a “fascist masterpiece” in The New Yorker, Warner Brothers called it a cash cow, and audiences around the world called it a helluva wild ride, besotted with an entirely new breed of urban antihero, Clint Eastwood’s laconic SFPD Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan, a cool, majestically quiffed customer endeavoring to keep the streets of San Fran safe from Zodiac-inspired serial killer sniper “Scorpio,” his efforts stymied at every turn by a system that seems designed to coddle creeps and criminals, leaving Harry with only his trusty Smith & Wesson Model 29 to rely on. Often imitated—not least by the four sequels it spawned—but rarely equaled, Siegel’s seething signature work is nothing short of a masterclass in crisp, steady-handed action filmmaking.

Distributor: Warner Bros.

Monday, 29 October 1990

On the heels of his Batman bonanza, Burton offered up this Tampa Bay–set modern-day fable of the title’s blade-fingered mechanical man (Johnny Depp), adopted into the suburban home of a family whose daughter (Winona Ryder) becomes the object of his gradually-requited affections. Innocent Edward inadvertently brings trouble to the neighborhood and, finally, the gift of snow on Christmas, in a film that includes the final performance by Vincent Price, and keen insight into pubescent mortification.

Distributor: Walt Disney Studios/20th Century

Sunday, 12 December 1993

Art and life become inextricably entwined in Chen’s gorgeously arrayed triumph of costume and production design, an epic spanning 50 years of 20th-century Chinese history in the life of a troupe of Peking opera actors based on the 1985 Lilian Lee novel, and a landmark of Fifth Generation Mainland cinema, notable for being the first Chinese film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Cheung stars as the orphaned Dieyi, trained to play dan (female roles), his unrequited adoration of frequent male co-star Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) remaining a constant through the disruptions of war and political turmoil, up until the film’s startling, cathartic climax.

The restoration of Farewell My Concubine was completed in 2023 and was scanned on 4K DPX using the original 35mm negative and 1.85 ratio, taking great care to maintain the grain texture of the original print.

Distributor: Film Movement

Saturday, 26 December 1987

Shot quickly in and around Paris during a production break on Rohmer’s Le Rayon Vert, this breezy, witty film traces the exploits of two young women—one an ethnology student from the city, the other an unsophisticated aspiring artist from the country. Reinette and Mirabelle (played by Joëlle Miquel and Jessica Forde) become instant friends upon meeting in the first of four vignettes that make up the film (“The Blue Hour”), and in their first two days together, they decide to become roommates in Paris. Throughout the three remaining stories, they encounter many of the inevitable characters of a modern city: the impossible waiter (“The Waiter”), the Metro-station hustler (“The Beggar, the Kleptomaniac and the Hustler”), and the snooty gallery owner (“Selling the Painting”). A Metrograph Pictures release

Monday, 31 July 2000

Based on Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel of the same name, Frears’s adaptation remains remarkably faithful to its source while moving the setting from north London to Chicago, where monologue-prone compulsive list-maker protagonist Rob Gordon (John Cusack) spends his working hours matching knowledge of musical esoterica with employees Jack Black and Todd Louiso and his downtime analyzing his history of failure in relationships by reconnecting with the women who’ve qualified for his countdown of Top Five Worst Breakups. “Movies this wry and likable hardly ever get made… Savors the rhythms of these lives, sees how pop music is a soundtrack for everyone’s autobiography… and causes us to leave the theater quite unreasonably happy.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Distributor: Walt Disney Studios/20th Century

Monday, 31 July 1978

Schroeder, whose documentary work tends to focus on unusual obsessives (Charles Bukowski, Idi Amin, terrorist defense lawyer Jacques Vergès), here trains his camera on the eponymous lowland ape and her constant companion from 1972 onwards, animal psychologist and sign language instructor Francine “Penny” Patterson who, while teaching Koko to speak through her hands, the narration suggests is on a mission to make her “the first White American Protestant gorilla.” “Handsomely photographed by Néstor Almendros… Mr. Schroeder makes a point of approaching both his subjects, Penny and Koko, as a foreigner… A good deal of time is devoted to the very American habits of pretty, blond Penny, and her manner of passing them on to the gorilla… Funny, provocative.” —The New York Times

Distributor: Janus Films

Wednesday, 23 August 1967

The third entry in Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales series, in which cinematographer Néstor Almendros takes magnificent advantage of the glorious natural light of the French Riviera, is a deceptively lovely film about less-than-lovely behavior, an ironic study of male acquisitiveness and priggish high-handedness in which two friends, a fastidious painter, Daniel (Pommereulle), and a dilettante art dealer, Adrien (Patrick Bauchau), find themselves sharing a summer house near Saint-Tropez with a third occupant, a young woman named Haydée Politoff, who winds up in the middle of their psychological gamesmanship. Written in collaboration with its three leads, this gold-hued depiction of moral rot may be the film in which Rohmer’s mature style first appears fully formed.

Distributor: Janus Films

Monday, 21 July 1969

It’s trouble in paradise when lovers Alain Delon and Romy Schneider’s poolside idyll at a St. Tropez villa is interrupted by the arrival of her ex, Maurice Ronet, and his rapidly maturing daughter, Jane Birkin. Beautiful people, ravishing landscapes, and quite a bit of ugly behavior add up to make one of the most cherished of French thrillers, where no amount of time in the water will serve to wash this quartet clean. “Icily erotic! Seething passion and emotional chaos lie beneath the symbolically placid surface of the villa’s swimming pool, which becomes the site for both seduction and violent revenge.”—Dave Kehr, The New York Times

Distributor: Rialto Pictures

Friday, 31 July 1998

Neon Genesis Evangelion creator Anno’s live-action feature debut, based on a novel by Ryū Murakami, the stylistically exuberant Love & Pop centers on Tokyo schoolgirl Hiromi (Asumi Miwa) and her three friends, all of whom have begun earning extra spending cash by going on dates with older men for pay. Over the course of a single summer day spent in the streets, shops, and love hotels of Shibuya, Hiromi tries to hustle her way to ¥128,000 before the mall closes in hopes of getting her hands on a topaz ring that’s caught her eye. A cutting commentary on acquisitiveness run amok, and a prescient look at coming of age in Japan at the precipice of a new, pixel-drenched century, shot almost entirely on consumer-grade handheld digital cameras.

Distributor: GKIDS

Monday, 14 August 1972

A companion piece to Visconti’s The Leopard in its depiction of aristocracy in decline as well as a prequel of sorts to his The Damned, describing the conditions that allowed for the consolidation of Prussian power over a newly unified German Empire that set the stage for the Third Reich, Visconti’s opulent epic features Helmut Berger as the increasingly unhinged and isolated King Ludwig II, driven to folly by his unrequited passion for his cousin, Empress Elisabeth of Austria (Schneider, reprising her starmaking Sissi role in a very different cinematic context), and his fondness for emptying his kingdom’s coffers to build fairy-tale castles and subsidize Richard Wagner’s career. A favorite film of Schneider’s and a very personal one for Visconti, a distant relative of the late King and an infamous chain-smoker who gave Berger, as the monarch in later life, tar-black teeth resembling his own.

Distributor: AGFA

Friday, 14 August 1981

Morrissey bid a bitter goodbye to Hollywood, where he’d relocated for some time with hopes of becoming a studio filmmaker, with this caustically comic send-up of the city’s burgeoning derelict-chic hardcore punk scene, starring Patrick Schoene as a masochistic agent of the East German Stasi who arrives in Los Angeles with the intention of rendezvousing with Jane Fonda, only to be plunged into the lower depths of the City of Angels when “adopted” by a community of grubby, garrulous gleaners squatting in an abandoned Masonic Temple. A savage satire of American decadence that, thanks to Morrissey’s obvious affection for his degenerate stars, might just as easily be taken as a celebration of the same.

35mm print courtesy of the Paul Morrissey Films Trust

Distributor: Vinegar Syndrome

Introduction by writer Nick Pinkerton on Saturday, September 6th

Thursday, 09 January 1997

The first independent film released in post-Handover Hong Kong, Chan’s atmospheric shoestring-budget character study is a rough-and-ready piece of work shot on grainy leftover 35mm short ends in the city’s overcrowded subsidized housing projects. The result is a tough, pessimistic film, a portrait of a city on the brink that follows the drifting of high-school dropout and wannabe Triad tough Autumn Moon (Sam Lee, in a star-making role, opposite a largely nonprofessional cast), who sees little hope for his future or that of his home as a newly created Special Administrative Region within China. A raw, groundbreaking drama and portrait of nihilistic youth in the same vein as Rebel Without a Cause, My Own Private Idaho, and The Doom Generation, the film poses questions that remain burningly relevant as tumult engulfs Hong Kong.

Distributor: Metrograph Pictures

Saturday, 21 June 1986

Inspired by Frank Ripploh’s Taxi zum Klo, Van Sant’s smudgy black-and-white debut, planted firmly on the cracked concrete of the filmmaker’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, prophesied and broke ground for the ’90s New Queer Cinema, while also anticipating its filmmaker’s career-long exploration of issues concerning gay life, class, and race. White liquor store clerk Walt (Tim Streeter), living on the city’s tattered fringes, seeks erotic ecstasy in the arms of the undocumented Mexican teenagers who hang around his shop—but any attempt at honest connection with his objects of desire is necessarily complicated by the barriers of language, money, and more. As achingly honest and as uncomfortable a film as Van Sant ever made, addressing the myriad complexions that arise when love and lust face gaping divides.

Distributor: Janus Films

Thursday, 25 October 2018

After Nicolas Cage’s pacific, reclusive life with his girlfriend Mandy is interrupted by the arrival of members of an apocalyptic cannibalistic cult, the Children of the New Dawn, he’ll have to pay a visit to his old pal, Caruthers (Duke), to pick up his trusty crossbow, sights set on revenge. Duke provides a moment of authority and gravity, just before this strikingly styled early ‘80s-set instant cult classic plunges into madness courtesy of Cage at his most frantic, feral, and fatally fierce.

Distributor: IFC Films

Thursday, 20 December 2001

A stylish and seductive submersion into the techno-scored neon nightlife of Taipei, Hou’s much-misunderstood marvel stars Shu Qi (The Assassin) as an aimless bar hostess drifting away from her blowhard boyfriend and towards Jack Kao’s suave, sensitive gangster. Structured as a flashback to the then-present from the then-future of 2011, it’s a transfixing trance-out of a movie, drenched in club lights, ecstatic endorphin-rush exhilaration, and a nagging undercurrent of ennui. Hou and longtime cinematographer Lee here break from their familiar pattern of elegantly composed long shot long takes to create something both more intimate and hectic, a film whose shallow-focus images, jittery camerawork, and cramped locations evoke both the claustrophobic character of Taiwan’s capital city and, in Lee’s words, “the feeling of youth.”

Saturday, 14 April 1984

Brazilian diva Marília Pêra, fresh from her international breakthrough in Héctor Babenco’s Pixote, is the queenly matriarch of a dope-dealing dynasty in Morrissey’s marvelous, grimly funny Alphabet City melodrama, concerning a turf war between rival drug-slinging families in a bombed-out Loisaida, escalating from tough talk to gunplay in the hallowed aisles of the Menudo store. Crooked cops, shooting galleries, an East Village that looks as uninhabitable as the surface of the moon, and Richard Ulacia, as Pêra’s hulking lunkhead son, giving a positively Frankensteinian performance… This bad boy’s got it all!

35mm print courtesy of Peter Conheim/Cinema Preservation Alliance

Distributor: Vinegar Syndrome

Sunday, 10 February 1974

Coming-of-age, Eustache-style: the director followed up The Mother and the Whore with an intimate drama based on his childhood, about a boy’s awkward, provincial adolescence in the south of France. This unsentimental, elegantly somber, visually driven film about sexual self-discovery and the passage of time was gorgeously photographed by the legendary Nestor Almendros. Eustache’s only other feature-length narrative film other than The Mother and the Whore, it owns a rightful place next to that film as a true masterpiece.

Distributor: Janus Films

Thursday, 07 March 2024

Wenger’s acidically funny, consistently unpredictable feature debut is a bittersweet satire starring Albrecht Schuch (All Quiet on the Western Front), in a role taking full advantage of his gift for physical comedy and capacity for pathos. As Matthias, the CEO and public face of Vienna-based rent-a-friend agency My Companion, his commitment to being the perfect professional shapeshifter, malleable to the needs of his clients, begins to take a toll on his relationship with girlfriend Sophia (Julia Franz Richter) and, eventually, his own psychic integrity. A stinging send-up of a hustle-driven contemporary culture that preaches micromanaged self-optimization and the reduction of interpersonal relationships to “emotional labor,” made with a scrupulous eye for the telling detail and an unfaltering sense of compassion.

An Oscilloscope Laboratories release.

Q&A with director Bernhard Wenger for select screenings

Monday, 31 July 1978

Rohmer, best known as the doyen of French naturalism, veered about as far as you could get from his signature style with this adaptation of Chrétien de Troyes’s 12th-century Arthurian romance Perceval, the Story of the Grail, in which Fabrice Luchini’s Perceval crosses a deliberately artificial landscape of cardboard castles and fiberglass rivers, all built in the Epinay Studios near Paris, in search of the Cup of Christ, his journey periodically described by a singing chorus. Of his work on this extremely visually distinctive project, cinematographer Néstor Almendros would later write: “There was not a glimmer of natural light, and everything had to be reconstructed, or rather invented… [Rohmer] preferred lighting without shadows: in medieval miniatures there are only colors and shapes, and medieval artists were unaware of the notion of light, volume and perspective.”

Distributor: Les Films du Losange

Thursday, 29 October 1981

Easily the most harrowing divorce drama ever made, Zuławski’s one-of-a-kind genre pastiche has spy Sam Neill returning to his Berlin home from a mission abroad to discover that wife Isabelle Adjani wants suddenly to split up. Launching an investigation into the reasons for her ever-more-alarming behavior, he discovers a truth more sinister (and nauseating) than his wildest suspicions, as Zuławski’s highly-choreographed cinematic delirium and Andrzej Korzyński’s pulsating score push things light years past over-the-top. Adjani won a César for her performance, one of the most grueling ever caught on film, though later reflected that the palpable ordeal she put herself through on the movie was nearly enough to make her leave acting behind.

Distributor: Metrograph Pictures

Friday, 22 April 1988

Morrissey’s loose, energetic, very sexy comedy has male ingénue Sasha Mitchell as Spike, a none too bright young Italian American prizefighter who’s run out of his neighborhood for chasing after the daughter of mafia boss Ernest Borgnine and taking up with the ravishing Talisa Soto in the Red Hook slums. A strutting, street-level snapshot of late ’80s New York set to the slinky beat of contemporary Italian pop tunes from the likes of Pupo and Ricchi e Poveri, its action taking us from Fortunato Brothers bakery to McCarren Park to the Borgnine character’s mob manor (actually in Ditmas Park), with a few stops along Manhattan Avenue for good measure.

Distributor: Fun City Editions

Introduction by writer Nick Pinkerton on Friday, September 5th

Thursday, 06 August 2009

Made in spite of a five-year ban on filmmaking imposed on its director by the People’s Republic of China’s State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television following the 2006 release of his Summer Palace, Ye’s Spring Fever, shot clandestinely in Nanjing on digital video, is a moody, visceral, at times downright lyrical plunge into the eastern city as seen in smoggy daytime and steamy night, concerned with two overlapping love triangles: a married man, Wang (Wu Wei), is discovered to be having an affair with another man, Jiang (Qin Hao), by a private detective hired by Wang’s wife and, after the affair breaks off, Jiang drifts into a lust-drenched menage with the ostensibly straight gumshoe, Luo (Chen Sicheng), who blew the whistle on he and Wang, as well as Luo’s girlfriend (Tan Zhuo). A compelling, artfully disheveled film about the messy compulsions of the heart.

Distributor: The Festival Agency

Wednesday, 30 December 2015

Defined by a delicious tension between spectacular subject matter and a distanced, elliptical directorial approach, by its short bursts of action and long expanses of stillness, The Assassin is the first foray into wuxia territory by Taiwanese master Hou, one of his generation’s most acclaimed and accomplished filmmakers. In Hou’s hands the story of Shu Qi’s hitwoman, steeling herself for a mission to eliminate her onetime betrothed, a corrupt official (Chang Chen, exuding taciturn gravitas) for whom she has lingering feelings, becomes one of the most voluptuous, entrancing martial arts pictures ever made, a film of at times delirious emotional intensity, thanks in no small part to its magnetic leads.

Distributor: Well Go USA

Sunday, 15 September 1974

After spotting self-taught outsider artist Bruno S. in a documentary about street musicians, Herzog was determined to work with him, and proceeded to cast this troubled man with zero acting experience who’d been raised in mental institutions as the lead in two of his films. In the first of them, he appears as the mysterious Kaspar Hauser, a young man who, after a life of unexplained confinement, is set free into early 19th-century civilization with a vocabulary of only a few words and a letter in hand. Hauser becomes something of a local freakshow before a professor, Georg Friedrich Daumer (Walter Ladengast), takes him under his wing to attempt to socialize him. Closely based on the details of the story of the real-life foundling Hauser, who died in 1833, Herzog’s film is an affecting, distinctive drama, and Bruno S., 41 playing at least half that, is a revelation of wide-eyed, wounded innocence.

Distributor: AGFA

Wednesday, 26 May 1999

Von Trier’s only feature made under the Dogme 95 “Vows of Chastity,” The Idiots centers on a Danish commune whose members aim to disrupt bourgeois society by spontaneously feigning physical or mental disabilities in public—including a new recruit (Bodil Jørgensen) motivated by a secret sorrow. Previously censored upon release, this darkly comic and ultimately devastating film is now presented restored and uncut, as a highly provocative work which contemplates the very value of provocation.

Distributor: MUBI

Wednesday, 27 October 2004

After hinting at his Jacques Cousteau obsession in 1998’s Rushmore, Anderson dove into it head-first in this mordant, magical comedy about egomaniacal, Campari-swilling celebrity oceanographer Zissou (Bill Murray), leading the crew of the good ship Belafonte—including Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Anjelica Huston, and Seu Jorge—on a search-and-destroy mission to find the (possibly fictitious) Jaguar Shark allegedly responsible for the death of his partner. A bone dry comedy about the briny depths, merging the spirits of Cousteau and Tati.

Distributor: Walt Disney Studios/20th Century

Thursday, 14 August 1958

Two decades before he hit the Bay Area with Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, Siegel made another shot-on-location chef-d’oeuvre of San Francisco crime cinema, a tough, tense, nasty little number about two hit men—gleeful psychopath Eli Wallach and effete, speechifying mentor Robert Keith—leaving a trail of bodies across the city… and the cops trying to catch up with them. A slow-burn tour de force that reaches dizzying heights with a bungled drug drop at Sutro’s Museum and a pedal-to-the-metal high-speed pursuit onto a then-incomplete Embarcadero Freeway, the whole shebang memorably described by Chicago Reader critic Dave Kehr as a “study in pathological relativism.”

Distributor: Sony Pictures Entertainment

Friday, 05 February 1999

Keanu Reeves’s cubicle drone/hacker Neo gets a rude awakening, discovering that the real world he knows is a shared hallucination and that humankind are being harvested for bioelectricity by their machine overlords. A watershed movie, not only for the popularization of Hong Kong “wire fu” fighting techniques imported by choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, but for the flexible red pill and blue pill metaphor it introduced, adopted by paranoiacs of all political affiliations.

“Are we in a simulation? Conceived and executed better than anything like it, before or since.” —Neil deGrasse Tyson

Distributor: Park Circus

Post-screening discussion with Neil deGrasse Tyson on Sunday, September 7th

Tuesday, 14 August 1962

Welles’s fever dream adaptation of Franz Kafka’s posthumously published 1925 novel of the same name opens with the director narrating the author’s parable “Before the Law” over pinscreen scenes created by artists Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker, then proceeds to maintain the established air of ravishing, sinister strangeness for nearly two hours, with Anthony Perkins’s writhing, beleaguered bureaucrat Josef K. persecuted and pursued through menacingly looming locales in an Expressionistic cityscape stitched together from a melange of locations in Dubrovnik, Milan, Rome, and Paris’s then-abandoned Gare d’Orsay. Adding to his distress are a trio of sexually aggressive women, played by Jeanne Moreau, Elsa Martinelli, and Schneider, superb in her first English-language role as the hot-to-trot nurse/secretary attending to K.’s legal representative, the Advocate, played by Welles himself. One of the great black-and-white films of the 1960s, and one of the great films, full stop.

Distributor: Rialto Pictures

Wednesday, 14 August 2024

“Prolific Mexican Canadian filmmaker Nicolás Pereda has an incredible talent for upending expectations. Through fractured narratives, his films weave together both the real and imagined. Working with a stable of regular collaborators, which includes Luisa Pardo and Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez (founding members of the Mexican theatre collective Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol), Pereda often draws biographical elements from his cast—their apartments, their clothing, their physicality, and even their lived lives—allowing his characters to become the actors themselves. Continuing with this deeply nuanced approach to filmmaking, Pereda’s 10th feature, Lázaro at Night (screening here in its New York theatrical premiere), explores the everyday lives of three once-young, aspiring writers and actors, as they simultaneously audition for a role in a small movie. As their aspirations evolve, so do the film’s formal devices—using sound as a way to expand the world outside the frame, or, in an even more radical shift, taking us from the everyday to the fantastical. In turn, as we dislodge from what we think we know the film to be, this repositioning reveals something to us about the roles we play; not just in cinema, but in our actual lives.” —Jason Evans, This Long Century

Q&A with filmmaker Nicolás Pereda moderated by This Long Century founder Jason Evans on Friday, September 5th