The Criterion Collection

We announced just last week that Claire Denis’ intense drama White Material—set in contemporary Africa, and starring a ferocious Isabelle Huppert—will be joining the Criterion Collection in April. And since U.S. viewers may still have a chance to see this visually dynamic film (pictured) on the big screen this week (it’s out in first run from IFC Films), we felt it was the perfect thing with which to kick off this week’s guide to Criterion titles in theaters. White Material is booked for weeklong runs at the Louisville, Kentucky, Village 8; the St. Anthony Main Theatre in Minneapolis; Bow Tie Cinemas in New Haven, Connecticut; Osio Cinemas in Monterey, California; and the Magic Theatre in Nevada City, California (all January 21–27). Or catch it at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio (January 21 and 22); the Mississippi Film Institute in Jackson (January 21 and 22); or the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge (January 23).

From contemporary French cinema to classic nouvelle vague: the Roxie Theater in San Francisco is paying tribute to twin titans Truffaut and Godard with the series Bringing Up Léaud, featuring The 400 Blows (January 21), Made in U.S.A (January 22), Masculin féminin (January 23), Stolen Kisses (showing with Antoine et Colette, January 24), Bed and Board (January 25), and Love on the Run (January 26). Then, sticking to the Gallic theme, we find Rohmer’s La collectionneuse (January 25 and 26) and Varda’s Le bonheur (January 26) at the Swiss Cinematheque in Lausanne; Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman at the Jerusalem Cinematheque (January 22); Carné’s Le jour se lève (January 22) and Guitry’s The Story of a Cheat (January 23 and 27) at the Forum des images in Paris; and we end up back with Truffaut, whose Shoot the Piano Player is showing at Emory University’s Department of Film and Media Studies in Atlanta.

Ozu is almost as popular as French cinema this week. There are pillow shots and tatami mats galore at Vienna’s Austrian Film Museum, which is running a massive retrospective of the beloved Japanese filmmaker’s work. The series goes through the first week of February; this week’s selections run the gamut from silent masterworks to late color classics: The End of Summer (January 21), Floating Weeds (January 22), Late Spring (January 22), Tokyo Chorus (January 22), Tokyo Story (January 23), and A Story of Floating Weeds (January 27). Meanwhile, Ozu’s lyrical last feature, An Autumn Afternoon drifts across screens at the Cinemateca Portuguesa in Lisbon (January 22), and Tokyo Story and Late Spring bloom at Brussels’s Belgian Cinematek (on January 25 and 27, respectively). Aficionados of Japanese cinema elsewhere are in luck as well: Nobuo Nakagawa’s hellish horror film Jigoku roars into the Japan Society in New York (January 21); Kurosawa’s Ikiru swings by London’s BFI Southbank (January 21); and Hiroshi Teshigahara’s surreal love story Woman in the Dunes nestles into the Belgian Cinematek (January 22 and 26).

Let’s survey the rest of what’s playing in the U.S.: Pasolini’s Mamma Roma gets a weeklong run at New York’s Film Forum; the circus is coming to Hamilton, New York, when Fellini’s La strada plays in Colgate University’s Friday Film Night series (January 21); Stagecoach kicks off a John Ford series at the Indiana University Cinema in Bloomington (January 21); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art hits the trail as well, though with a different kind of road movie—Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (January 21); viewers in New York who’d like some more, please, can view a restored print of David Lean’s Oliver Twist at Museum of the Moving Image (January 22); Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success scorches the screen at the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Cinematheque (January 22); the seminal doc Nanook of the North provides cold comfort at New York’s Anthology Film Archives (January 23); the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley takes a magic carpet ride with The Thief of Bagdad (January 26); the International House in Philadelphia doubles over for Buñuel with both Viridiana and The Phantom of Liberty (January 26); audiences at the Cinema Arts Centre of Huntington, New York, can figure out what’s real and what’s not in Orson Welles’s F for Fake (January 27), with the help of guest speaker Michael Atkinson; and Polanski’s suspenseful debut Knife in the Water sets anchor at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles (January 27).

Turning again to international screens: London’s BFI Southbank surveys the dark side of both American suburbia and Edwardian England with Bigger Than Life (January 21) and Maurice (January 23); the Filmpodium in Zurich makes a date with Barbara Stanwyck with The Lady Eve (January 21), and a slightly less fun one with David Thewliss with Mike Leigh’s Naked (January 21); things are just as stark at the Swiss Cinematheque in Lausanne with David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (January 21); the Cinemateca Portuguesa in Lisbon shows its good taste with Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (January 21), Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s The Most Dangerous Game (January 25), and Dreyer’s Vampyr, which is showing with Jean Painlevé’s classic underwater short The Seahorse (January 25); the Cinémathèque française in Paris boasts Bellocchio, with Fists in the Pocket (January 22), and highlights Hitchcock, with Notorious (January 26); and finally, our friendly neighbors to the north in Toronto can revel in the visual magnificence of Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor on the big screen at the TIFF Bell Lightbox (January 23).