The Criterion Collection

The historic Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles pays tribute this week to a French New Wave godfather with the series The Film Lover: A François Truffaut Retrospective. The selections include his iconic debut, The 400 Blows (December 2), which both introduced the world to Jean-Pierre Léaud and captured him in cinema’s most famous freeze-frame; the gloriously uninhibited ménage-a-trois tale Jules and Jim (December 3); the gentle noir starring Charles Aznavour Shoot the Piano Player (December 4); and the French occupation drama The Last Metro, with Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu (December 4).

A hop, skip, and a jump over at the Aero Theatre, another French master is getting his due: Jacques Tati, with his mammoth 70 mm masterwork Playtime (December 8). Tati stumbles into a couple of other theaters this week too: that bank-breakingly big comedy is also playing at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis (December 7), while M. Hulot’s Holiday sojourns at the University of Wisconsin – Madison Cinematheque (December 4). And other films by iconic figures of French cinema abound in North American theaters this week: Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game shoots and scores at the Metro Cinema Society in Edmonton (December 3, 4, 6, and 7); the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., gets surreal with Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet (December 4); Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear makes viewers grip their seats at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (December 8); and Louis Malle’s The Fire Within burns brightly at Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley (December 8).

Otherwise, the Criterion-collected big-screen choices in this first week of December constitute an eclectic banquet of films from all over the world. Total Balalaika Show, the Finnish and Russian concert extravaganza directed by Aki Kaurismäki and featuring the Leningrad Cowboys, rocks out at New York’s IFC Center (December 2). The somber Austrian thriller Revanche, by Götz Spielmann unsettles and provokes at the Battelle Film Club in Richland, Washington (December 2). From Germany: the visionary science fiction World on a Wire by Rainer Werner Fassbinder future shocks viewers at the Winnipeg Film Group’s Cinematheque (December 2–4) and International House Philadelphia (December 8), and the landmark silent People on Sunday by Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer at Film Streams in Omaha (December 6). The Spanish masterpiece Cría cuervos . . . by Carlos Saura turns up as part of a conference on European films from 1975 at the Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut (December 2). And there are a couple of U.K.-set cult classics: Terry Gilliam’s Brazil at the Trylon in Minneapolis (December 2–4) and Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I at the Albuquerque Southwest Film Center (December 2–4).

A healthy selection of titles from the greatest Japanese directors of all time dot the landscape: Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (December 3) and Ran at the CSUN Cinematheque in Northridge, California (December 8); Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill at the Seattle Art Museum (December 4); Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff at the Pickford Film Center in Bellingham, Washington (December 6); Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (December 7 and 8); and Kon Ichikawa’s The Makioka Sisters at the Honolulu Academy of Arts (December 8). The Czech New Wave classic Closely Watched Trains pulls into the State Theatre in Modesto, California (December 6). And there’s a crop of American titles too: Alfred Hitchcock’s Oscar-winning Rebecca at Cinestudio in Hartford (December 4–6); Gus Van Sant’s queer cinema benchmark Mala Noche at the North West Film Center in Portland, Oregon (December 5); Otto Preminger’s incendiary courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (December 6); Josef von Sternberg’s glossy, Marlene Dietrich­–starring historical drama The Scarlet Empress at 92Y Tribeca in New York (December 7); and Preston Sturges’s madcap Sullivan’s Travels at George Eastman House’s Dryden Theater in Rochester, New York (December 7).

Things are just as wide-ranging around the rest of the world. In France: Lyon’s Institut Lumière goes into lockdown with Jacques Becker’s Le trou (December 2 and 4); the Cinémathèque française in Paris loves the Austrian Fritz Lang (M, December 2; The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, December 7), as well as the French Tati (Playtime, December 3) and the Portuguese Pedro Costa (Colossal Youth, December 8), and the same city’s Forum des images hits the London streets for Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (December 7) and David Lean’s Oliver Twist (December 7). Berlin’s Kino Arsenal honors Polish auteur Andrzej Wajda with his Danton (December 2), Kanal (December 3), A Generation (December 3), and Ashes and Diamonds (December 5). It’s all about Italian cinema at Brussels’s Belgian Cinematek, with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or The 120 Days of Solitude (December 2, 7, and 8), Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (December 2), and Luchino Visconti’s Le notti bianche (December 7 and 8)—plus a dash of French New Wave with Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (December 8). The Filmpodium in Zurich laughs with Gregory La Cava’s American screwball comedy My Man Godfrey (December 3) and then cries with Carl Th. Dreyer’s Danish spiritual film Ordet (December 7). The Austrian Film Museum in Vienna goes American southern gothic with Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (December 4). And the Cinemateca Portuguesa in Lisbon shows two quintessential works from world-class maestros: Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (December 3) and Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits (December 6).

Down under, Dreyer looms large with The Passion of Joan of Arc at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane (December 3) and Henri-Georges Clouzot comes out of the shadows at the Melbourne Cinematheque with Le Corbeau (December 7). Meanwhile, American master Robert Altman receives a retrospective way out in South Korea at the Cinematheque-Seoul Art Cinema, including Short Cuts (December 4), and Renoir takes a bow at the Hong Kong Film Archive with The Rules of the Game (December 4).