The Criterion Collection

At this time of year, one often thinks of regeneration, rebirth—life! Not Geoff Andrew, who has programmed a series that begins this week at London’s BFI Southbank titled The Long Goodbye, which concerns—you guessed it—representations of death in cinema. Andrew mounted the program because, as he writes in the notes for it, he finds it “strange that the cinema—itself able to record time’s passing and thus to document the inexorable progress towards their own demise of all those caught on camera—has so seldom dealt properly with death.” Yet the films on view in the three-week series, which include such Criterion titles as Bigger Than Life and Ikiru, treat the subject with “rare, unsentimental honesty.” This week, you can catch two very different films that touch on the end of life: Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (January 9), pictured above, and Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow (January 11). (On the lighter side, BFI is also screening Charade, on January 8—though that crime caper is not entirely death-free, come to think of it.)

Moving on in 2011’s first guide to Criterion movies writ large on screens around the world: things are only marginally merrier at Paris’s Forum des images, whose La fabrique du temps series, preoccupied with aging and the inexorable passage of time, hurries on toward its end. This week, the Forum has Antonioni’s L’eclisse (January 8), Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire (January 9), and Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (January 12). It’s slightly more spirited up the street, perhaps: the Cinémathèque française has Cocteau’s fantasy Beauty and the Beast (January 8), Kobayashi’s ghost story anthology Kwaidan (January 12), and two from Alfred Hitchcock: Rebecca (January 9) and The 39 Steps (January 13).

On to the rest of this week’s European cinematheques: Over in Brussels, the Belgian Cinematek highlights two very different auteurs, Sidney Lumet and Yasujiro Ozu, with The Fugitive Kind (January 7) and Good Morning (January 8 and 11). In Lausanne, the Swiss Cinematheque serves up Naked Lunch (January 13). The Filmpodium in Zurich shows Naked (January 7) and The Lady Eve (January 9) as part of Mike Leigh and Barbara Stanwyck retrospectives, respectively. The Cineteca di Bologna wraps up a John Huston celebration with two screenings of Wise Blood (January 12 and 13). Edinburgh’s Filmhouse Cinema tears open The Seventh Seal (January 12). And the Cinemateca Portuguesa in Lisbon offers an embarrassment of auteurist riches: Godard’s Contempt (January 8), Akerman’s News from Home (January 10), Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (January 10), Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty (January 11), Renoir’s The River (January 12), Bergman’s The Magic Flute (January 13), and Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (January 13). And before heading back to North America, let’s check in with the Cinemateca Uruguaya down in Montevideo, where a Wim Wenders series is running: his Ozu documentary Tokyo-ga, which is available on Criterion’s edition of Late Spring, is showing January 7, and Wings of Desire swoops down on January 8. And on January 11, the Cinemateca begins a weeklong run of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s sublime Still Walking.

Back up in the states, moving from west to east: Los Angeles briefly becomes Tativille when M. Hulot’s Holiday screens at the Skirball Cultural Center (January 11); and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art hits the road with Five Easy Pieces (January 7) and Easy Rider (January 8). Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (January 7) and Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes and The 39 Steps delight at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre. The Minneapolis’s Trylon starts its engines with Monte Hellmann’s Two-Lane Blacktop (January 7–9). Tati’s Mon oncle stumbles beautifully across the screen at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre (January 7–13). The Nashville Belcourt makes way for melodrama with Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (January 8–10). Raleigh’s Cinema Inc. testifies for Tarkovsky with Ivan’s Childhood (January 9). The Pittsburgh Regent Square Theater cheers itself up with Chaplin’s Modern Times (January 11). New York’s Museum of Modern Art opens up Pandora’s Box (January 7), and the same city’s Anthology Film Archives gets back to movie basics with a little Eisenstein, showing Ivan the Terrible parts I and II (January 9). Plus, the ReRun Gastropub Theater in Brooklyn is hosting a special Criterion-presented preview screening of Samuel Fuller’s The Naked Kiss, projected on Blu-ray (January 12). And Antoine Doinel runs all the way to the end of Cape Cod for a screening of The 400 Blows at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater (January 13).

Finally, a quick nod to our neighbors to the north. Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox has a bounty of Bertolucci in a retrospective that includes his debut feature, La commare secca (January 13); the gives viewers the ghostly Ugetsu (January 8); and Wings of Desire floats in to the Winnipeg Film Group’s Cinematheque (January 12 and 13).