The Criterion Collection

New York–area Eric Rohmer fans will have a lot to chat about this coming week: The Sign of Rohmer, the most complete North American retrospective of the French director’s work in more than a decade, begins August 18 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater. And heading up this outpouring of relationship sketches and historical dramas will be one of Rohmer’s very best, the sparkling 1969 hit My Night at Maud’s, in a weeklong run from the series’ opening day to August 24.

Simultaneously, romances from an artist of a different sort will be honored across the Atlantic, as a major retrospective of Ernst Lubitsch begins August 18 at the Swiss Cinematheque in Lausanne. First up is a tuneful trio of the German-born Hollywood director's groundbreaking early musicals, The Love Parade (August 18), Monte Carlo (August 19), and The Smiling Lieutenant (August 19). (New Yorkers can also take a ride on The Love Parade this week, as the Museum of Modern Art is showing it from August 18 to 20.)

On a less frothy tip, Berlin’s Kino Arsenal continues its Wim Wenders series, presenting some of the glorious usual suspects, Wings of Desire (August 17) and Paris, Texas (August 19), but also something a little less known, the director’s feature-length Ozu tribute, Tokyo-Ga (August 13), which is available from Criterion as a supplement on the special edition DVD of Ozu’s Late Spring.

Tokyo-Ga isn’t the only off-the-beaten-path Criterion treasure that’s screening somewhere this week: Lausanne’s Swiss Cinematheque patrons can breathe in René Clément’s vivid Émile Zola adaptation Gervaise (August 15 and 16); the Plaza Theatre in El Paso, Texas, blasts off with Seijun Suzuki’s Youth of the Beast as part of its continuing Plaza Classic Film Festival (August 13); the appropriately named Madcap Theatres in Tempe, Arizona, sets up House, Obayashi’s tirelessly nutty horror show (August 13 and 14); Kurosawa’s early, female-driven political saga No Regrets for Our Youth plays at Los Angeles’s UCLA Film and Television Archive (August 13); Abbas Kiarostami’s brilliant fiction-documentary whatsit Close-up graces Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (August 13 and 15); Guy Maddin’s wonderfully oddball thingamajig Brand Upon the Brain! lights up Cambridge’s historic Brattle Theater (August 19); and the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York, gets down and dirty with Takumi Furukawa’s double-and-triple-cross-bearing Cruel Gun Story (August 19).

What’s left? Oh, nothing but masterpieces, those building blocks of any cinematic education. Godard’s Breathless sprints from August 13 to August 19 at Portland, Oregon’s Cinema21, and also makes an appearance at the El Paso Plaza Theatre, along with Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (also at Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive on August 17), and Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes—the last of which also flits across the screen at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (August 15). Back in Lausanne, viewers can march along with Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (August 16 and 17), and in Columbus, Ohio, they can take a ride with De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves at the Wexner Center (August 19) . Kurosawa benchmarks abound as well: Ikiru (Nashville’s Belcourt Theatre, August 14–16); The Lower Depths (Silver Springs’ AFI Silver (August 14-17); Kagemusha (Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive, August 16); Yojimbo (Ottawa’s Bytowne Cinema, August 16–17); Red Beard and Drunken Angel (Los Angeles’s UCLA Film and Television Archive, August 15 and 18); and Dodes’ka-den (Rochester, New York’s George Eastman House, August 19).

But let’s exit on an irreverent note with a couple of midnight showings: Wes Anderson’s wonderfully wiseass Rushmore at the Landmark Inwood in Dallas (August 13), and Richard Linklater’s tokin’ comedy, Dazed and Confused, at the Minneapolis Uptown Theatre (August 13–14).