The Criterion Collection

Classic French auteurs dot the repertory house landscape this week, from early sound-cinema legends Réné Clair and Sacha Guitry to New Wave dam-breakers Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Let’s start at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where Guitry’s The Story of a Cheat (August 23 and 25) and Clair’s Under the Roofs of Paris (August 25 and 26) get rare big-screen showcases. Skipping ahead in time, we arrive in the early fifties, when Jacques Tati debuted the iconic title character of M. Hulot’s Holiday, playing at the Keene State College Film Society theater in Keene, New Hampshire (August 20–26), New York’s Symphony Space (August 21), and the Austin Paramount Theatre (August 24–25). The Paramount also catches up with Godard’s Breathless (August 20–22), which races across the screens at the Nashville Belcourt Theatre (August 20–26) and at London’s BFI Southbank (August 20–31), as well.

A different kind of New Waver, Eric Rohmer, continues to be celebrated at New York’s Walter Reade Theater (My Night at Maud’s, August 20–24; The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne’s Career, August 21; La collectionneuse [pictured] August 22; Love in the Afternoon, August 24; Claire’s Knee, August 25), as well as at Cambridge’s Harvard Film Archive (My Night at Maud’s, August 20; Claire’s Knee, August 21). Meanwhile, the second part of a summer Truffaut series comes to a close at the AFI Silver in Silver Springs, but not before giving The Last Metro its due (August 20, 22, and 25).

Of course, aficionados of other national cinemas can pick and choose from a crop of terrific big-screen Criterion titles too. There are selections from Canada (David Cronenberg’s squishy Videodrome at San Francisco’s Castro Theater on August 26); England (Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts on August 20 and 21; Roman Polanski’s London-set Repulsion at Pittsburgh’s Regent Square Theater on August 22); Germany (Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire at New York’s Anthology Film Archives, August 21 and 22); Iran (Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-up at Philadelphia’s International House on August 21); Jamaica (Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come in a new 35 mm print at Cambridge’s Brattle Theatre, August 20–22); and the U.S. (Lubitsch’s The Love Parade at New York’s MoMA on August 20, and his The Smiling Lieutnenant and Monte Carlo on August 21 and 22, respectively, at Lausanne’s Swiss Cinematheque; Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts on August 26; Bob Rafelson’s gritty Five Easy Pieces at BFI Southbank, August 20–26).

And to Japanese cinema fans: no, you haven’t been forgotten. Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House bares its teeth at Vancouver’s Pacific Cinematheque (August 20 –22); Los Angeles’s UCLA Film and Television Archive keeps going Kurosawa crazy—with Ikiru (August 20) and Throne of Blood (August 22)—as does the Viz Theater in San Francisco’s Japantown, which presents Seven Samurai (August 20–22), Rashomon (August 21–25), Yojimbo(August 23–31), and Sanjuro (August 25–30); the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley (Ran, August 21 and 22); the AFI Silver (Kagemusha on August 21, 22, and 26; and Madadayo on August 23 and 24); and the George Eastman House’s Dryden Theatre in Rochester (Madadayo on August 26).