The Criterion Collection

Lucky West Coasters can swoon to Rock Hudson on the big screen this coming week. Two magnificent melodramas from Douglas Sirk, All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind, will be splashed across screens at, respectively, Seattle’s Metro Landmark Theatre and San Francisco’s Castro Theater, both on Wednesday, September 1.

They’re just two of a handful of eye-popping color classics available from Criterion that will be playing theatrically over the next seven days. Moviegoers in Paris and London hankering for vivid Technicolor are in luck: the Cinémathèque française in Paris screens the sparkling comedy Heaven Can Wait on August 29 as part of a continuing Ernst Lubitsch series; the BFI Southbank in London will be showing a new digital restoration of Visconti’s lustrous The Leopard (pictured), starting August 27 and running all the way through September 29; then, as part of its Deborah Kerr retrospective, BFI will also present Powell and Pressburger’s dazzling tongue-in-cheek epic The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp on September 1.

There’s a lot more happening on that side of the Atlantic: Tarkovsky’s Solaris is at the Arnolfini in Bristol, England, on August 27; the Belgian Cinematek in Brussels offers some Cassavetes—The Killing of a Chinese Bookie on August 27 and Opening Night on August 29—as well as Fellini’s Amarcord (August 29 and 31) and Lang’s M (September 1); the Cinémathèque française’s three-week Homage to Catherine Breillat kicks off with Fat Girl (August 30); Berlin’s Kino Arsenal enchants patrons with the heavenly Wings of Desire (August 31); Vienna’s Austrian Film Museum hits the gas on its new series Auto-Kino with Fellini’s La Strada (September 1); and the Swiss Cinematheque in Lausanne is itching for the open road too, presenting Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider on September 2.

All you American cinephiles, we haven’t forgotten you. Moving from east to west: we have Chaplin’s Modern Times at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (August 28); G. W. Pabst’s Brecht and Weill adaptation The Threepenny Opera at Cambridge’s Brattle Theatre (August 28); more early sound masterpieces in New York—Dreyer’s eerie Vampyr at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (September 2) and René Clair’s Under the Roofs of Paris at the Museum of Modern Art (August 27); a whole mess of Rohmer’s Moral Tales at New York’s Walter Reade Theater—The Bakery Girl of Monceau (August 27), Suzanne’s Career (August 27), Claire’s Knee (August 27 and 31), My Night at Maud’s and La collectionneuse (August 27), Love in the Afternoon (August 28 and 31); also on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Tati times two at Symphony Space—Playtime (August 28) and M. Hulot’s Holiday (August 29); Assayas’s lyrical Summer Hours, just in time, on September 2, at Guild Hall in East Hampton, New York; and Godard’s freewheeling Band of Outsiders at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York (August 28 and 30).

Pushing on: there’s Breathless at the Midtown Cinema in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (August 27–September 2) and at the Riviera Theatre in Three Rivers, Michigan (August 27 and 28); Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket at the Detroit Main Art (August 27 and 28); Easy Rider at the Minneapolis Trylon Cinema (August 27–29); Obayashi’s haywire horror show House at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts (August 27–29); quadruple Kurosawa at the Viz Cinema in San Francisco’s Japantown—Sanjuro (August 27, 29, and 30), Yojimbo (August 27, 28, and 31), Throne of Blood (August 28–September 2), and The Hidden Fortress (August 28–September 2), and one each at Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive (Madadayo, August 29) and UCLA’s Film and Television Archive in Los Angeles (The Idiot, August 29); and let’s close things with Bergman’s summer frolic Smiles of a Summer Night at California State University’s Armer Theater in Northridge, Los Angeles (September 2).