The Criterion Collection

We open this week’s guide to Criterion titles playing in theaters around the world with Claude Chabrol’s wickedly entertaining 1959 character drama Les cousins, which is coming out for the first time in Blu-ray and DVD special editions this September. A penetrating, Parisian take on the fable of the city mouse and the country mouse, this tale about the power games between a good-natured bumpkin (Gérard Blain) and his urban bohemian cousin (Jean-Claude Brialy) was Chabrol’s second film as director, following his years as a critic for Cahiers du cinéma. And since this and his debut from a year earlier, Le beau Serge (also out in September), predated even the first films of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, they are particularly fascinating as the first stirrings of the French New Wave. Moviegoers in St. Louis this week are lucky to be able to catch Les cousins on the big screen July 24 at Cinema St. Louis as part of the Webster University Film Series.

Moviegoers looking for more selections from that golden art-house age of the fifties and sixties are in luck elsewhere across the United States this week as well. Out in Los Angeles, viewers can take their pick of classic Polanski or Kurosawa at the New Beverly Cinema, with Knife in the Water on July 22 and 23, and Yojimbo on July 24 and 25, respectively (those in the mood for Malick instead can also come back on July 27 and 28 for Days of Heaven); not far away, Cinefamily offers Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (in a double feature with Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty, July 22); and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art entices with Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (July 23). Yasujiro Ozu’s Early Summer comes just a tad late to Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive (July 24); Robert Bresson’s devastating Diary of a Country Priest (July 23) settles in for a spell at the Detroit Film Theatre (July 23); Bergman’s iconic The Seventh Seal brings the gothic to Tarrytown Music Hall (July 23); and Buñuel’s The Milky Way drifts into New York’s Rubin Museum of Art (July 22).

More classic selections abound, coast to coast. New York is a pleasure center for Kurosawa lovers with Ran at the IFC Center (July 22–24) and The Hidden Fortress (July 23) and Stray Dog (July 24) at Symphony Space, which also makes space for Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (July 23) and The Great Dictator (July 24). Also in Manhattan, Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve has a few tricks up its sleeve for viewers at the Bryant Park Summer Film Festival (July 25). Upstate, in Annandale-on-Hudson, Bard College’s Jim Ottaway Jr. Film Center offers the silent witches' brew Häxan (July 24), and the Dryden Theatre at George Eastman House in Rochester opts for the diabolical Orson Welles’s pseudo-doc F for Fake (July 26). Kon Ichikawa’s lovely family saga The Makioka Sisters unfolds at the Theatre N at Nemours in Wilmington, Delaware. The Great Dictator dares viewers to laugh at two Pennsylvania theaters: the Doylestown County Theater (July 26) and the Ambler Theater (July 28). Kaneto Shindo’s eerie Onibaba stalks the Cleveland Institute of Art (July 22 and 23), and Ozu’s masterful comic silent I Was Born, But . . . scampers into the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus (July 28). Jean Cocteau’s sumptuous Beauty and the Beast enchants the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor (July 24 and 26); and Robert Flaherty’s landmark work of nonfiction, Nanook of the North (July 23), chills at DocFilms Chicago.

Down in Austin, The Last Picture Show flickers at the Paramount (July 28); in Albuquerque, Modern Times finds a post at the KiMo Theatre (July 23); Kubrick’s Spartacus storms into San Francisco’s Castro Theatre, with Kirk Douglas in tow for a special Q&A (July 24). Also in the city by the bay, Shohei Imamura’s Vengeance Is Mine slays ’em at the VIZ Cinema (July 24), and Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop mows ’em down at the Roxie Theater (July 25 and 27). And the University of California-Irvine takes a ride with Abbas Kiarostami’s Palme d’Or winner Taste of Cherry (July 28).

Now for a weeklong voyage around the rest of the movie-going world: up in Toronto, the TIFF Lightbox pulls up a barstool for John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (July 22) and then rides away with Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (July 28). In Paris, the Cinémathèque française also showcases De Sica with Umberto D. (July 28), and pays tribute to Italian director Francesco Rosi as well, with Salvatore Giuliano (July 22) and Hands over the City (July 23), and the Forum des images makes ’em laugh with Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty (July 22), a film that also makes an appearance at the Australian Cinémathèque at Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane on July 23 and 27, as does Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire (July 22 and 27) and Georges Franju’s brilliant short film Blood of the Beasts (July 24), which is available on Criterion’s DVD special edition of Eyes Without a Face. Terry Gilliam is in the spotlight in Poland when the ERA New Horizons Festival in Wroclaw honors him with a sidebar program, showing Time Bandits (July 22) and Brazil (July 23, 25, and 27). Zurich’s Filmpodium uncorks Casque d’or by Jacques Becker (July 22). The Eye Film Institute Netherlands in Amsterdam is born to be wild with Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (July 22 and 23). The Arnolfini in Bristol is ready for Alain Resnais (Hiroshima mon amour, July 23 and 24), as is London’s BFI Southbank with its ongoing Last Year at Marienbad showcase and a selection of Resnais shorts, including Night and Fog (July 23)—the lineup at BFI this week also includes the not-too-shabby The Night of the Hunter (July 25 and 26), Au hasard Balthazar (July 27), and Vivre sa vie (July 28).

The Jerusalem Cinematheque brings out the Bergman with Smiles of a Summer Night (July 24) and Torment (July 25), which features the Swedish legend’s first produced screenplay; Filmhouse in Edinburgh blasts off with Robert Day’s delirious First Man into Space (July 25); the Belgian Cinematek in Brussels finds Sacha Guitry at his most risqué with Désire (July 27); and the Vaincity Theatre in Vancouver takes audiences through a magic portal with Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (July 27).