The Criterion Collection

This week, the hallowed Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang is being honored by New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center with a complete retrospective of his work at the Walter Reade Theater. A Rational Mind: The Films of Edward Yang will include the director’s rarely screened films A Brighter Summer Day (in a new restoration), A Confucian Confusion, In Our Time, Mahjong, Taipei Story, That Day on the Beach, The Terrorizers, and The Winter of 1905. And there’s also Yang’s lovely and lyrical final film, the moving family epic Yi Yi, playing on November 25 and 27. We can’t think of a more appropriate selection for Thanksgiving week than this feast of a film, which follows a year in the life of a Taipei family, and which gave us the precocious eight-year-old character Yang-Yang, who looks at the world with a mix of wonder and bafflement. Also playing at the Walter Reade is another moving study of the difficulties of childhood, Ken Loach’s Kes (November 29).

Also this week, the North American repertory theater circuit is stuffed with goodies that are also in the Criterion Collection. Two terrific double features await viewers in Los Angeles: on November 29 and 30, the New Beverly Cinema goes Nicolas Roeg with both Walkabout and The Man Who Fell to Earth; and on November 30, the UCLA Film and Television Archive has a Jack Nicholson–Bob Rafelson twofer with Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens. Luis Buñuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid cleans house at Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive (November 27). The Northwest Film Center in Portland, Oregon, eases into some Sergei Eisenstein with Ivan the Terrible, parts I and II (November 30), and Alexander Nevsky (December 1). A hush falls over the Loft Cinema in Tucson for Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (November 30). Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I lazes about the Southwest Film Center in Albuquerque (December 1). The Man Who Fell to Earth beams back down, this time at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (November 25–27). Doc Films in Chicago sees red for Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le cercle rouge (November 29). And the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville serves up a father you wouldn’t want to spend Thanksgiving with in Nicholas Ray’s domestic shocker Bigger Than Life (November 26 and 27).

Viewers in Detroit tired from turkey can zone out to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles at the Detroit Film Theatre (November 26). Larisa Shepitko’s extraordinary World War II drama The Ascent rises at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio (November 29), while The Man Who Fell to Earth falls again at the Carolina Theatre in Durham, North Carolina (November 25–28). Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard dances the night away at the Charles Theater in Baltimore (November 26 and 28), and Carlos Saura’s El amor brujo flamencos into flames at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (November 27). In upstate New York, Götz Spielmann’s Revanche unsettles viewers at the Market Arcade Film and Arts Centre in Buffalo (November 29), and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World on a Wire trips them out at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington (November 30). Down in the New York City, the Museum of Modern Art goes to the underworld with Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (November 25); Brooklyn’s BAMCinematek travels to outer space with Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (November 26 and 27); and Film Forum races through time with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressbuger’s slightly surreal epic The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (November 25–December 1). The Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge lives on the edge with Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (November 26 and 28). And Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox has a little escapism with Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (November 26) and Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (November 27).

Finally, a cornucopia of Criterion titles are playing on screens around the world. Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water slices through the Jerusalem Cinematheque (November 25). Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour offers a bad romance at Berlin’s Kino Arsenal (November 25). Max Ophuls’s Le plaisir (November 26), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (November 26 and December 1), Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (November 27 and 30), Allan King’s Come On Children (November 28), Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (November 29), and Federico Fellini’s I vitelloni (November 30) come to Brussels’s Belgian Cinematek. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (November 26) and The Passion of Joan of Arc (November 30) get close up and personal at Vienna’s Austrian Film Museum. Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse casts its spell at Paris’s Cinémathèque française (November 26). Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise steals hearts at Zurich’s Filmpodium (November 27). Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante sails and Clouzot’s Quai des orfèvres slinks off to the Cineteca di Bologna (November 27 and 28). London’s BFI Southbank rides off with Godard’s Pierrot le fou (November 28) and goes backstage with Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise (playing through the end of December). The Leopard prowls through the Forum des images in Paris (November 30). Melville’s Bob le flambeur plays a good game at Edinburgh’s Filmhouse (November 30). And Clouzot’s Diabolique and Quai des orfèvres creep down to the Melbourne Cinematheque (both November 30).