The Criterion Collection

This Labor Day weekend, many art-house cinemas and film museums are hitting the open road just like the rest of us. The all-American yearning for that wide highway of possibilities is writ large this week on screens across the country—and is vast enough to make it all the way to Europe. Our weekly map to Criterion titles that may be playing at a theater near you begins with two days of Bob Rafelson’s gritty Five Easy Pieces, featuring Jack Nicholson as an icon of commitment phobia en route to nowhere, at Columbus, Ohio’s Wexner Center for the Arts (September 3 and 4). Sixties and seventies American alienation also turns up in Detroit and Seattle (Dazed and Confused is playing at the Landmark theaters the Main Art, September 3–5, and the Metro, September 8, respectively), and Vienna, where Dennis Hopper’s cataclysmic crowd-pleaser Easy Rider (September 3) and Monte Hellman’s restrained race movie Two-Lane Blacktop (September 4), starring an elegantly laconic James Taylor, will screen as part of the Austrian Film Museum’s Auto-Kino series.

Theatergoing fans of American cinema can also travel even further back in time, to the 1930s. Get caught in the gears of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times all over again, at the AFI Silver in Silver Springs, Maryland (September 3–9), and at Cinefamily in Los Angeles (in a September 3 double feature with another technology comedy, Jacques Tati’s Playtime); serve yourself a helping of Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey at San Francisco’s Castro Theater (September 3); or whisk yourself away to Ernst Lubitsch’s sparklingly comic mileu at the Cinémathèque française in Paris (Monte Carlo, September 3; One Hour With You and Trouble in Paradise, September 4) and the Swiss Cinematheque in Lausanne (One Hour with You, September 3 and 5).

It’s not all about the Yanks: some of our best British flicks are also popping up. London’s BFI Southbank presents Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (September 3) and Black Narcissus (September 5) as part of a Deborah Kerr tribute; Powell’s crazy-colorful codirectorial effort The Thief of Bagdad flies off on a nearly two-week run at the Omaha Film Streams (September 4–16); and the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley rouses audiences with Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (September 9), featured in its Shakespeare on Screen series.

There’s more, of course: Obayashi’s House continues its North American onslaught at San Francisco’s Red Vic Movie House (September 3–5) and the Phoenixville Colonial Theatre (September 3); Kurosawa’s Ran launches into a weeklong run (starting September 3) at the Seattle Varsity, and his Stray Dog and Rashomon can be caught September 5 at the Phoenixville Colonial, while his more obscure The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail hits the AFI Silver on September 4 and 5; Fellini’s I vitelloni shows up at the BFI Southbank for its Nino Rota retro (September 5 and 8); Tati’s Trafic zooms into New York’s Symphony Space (September 5) and his Mon oncle trots at a more leisurely clip to the same city’s Film Forum, where it’ll stay for a two-week run (September 8­–16); two very different road-trip movies motor to the Austrian Film Museum—Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (September 5) and Godard’s Pierrot le fou (September 8); Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl, which itself climaxes with an unforgettable car ride, hits the Cinémathèque française on September 8; and, finally, The Seventh Seal—ending with the ultimate trip—dances its way to California State University’s Cinema Armer Theater in Northridge, California (September 9).