The Criterion Collection

Cinema’s preeminent provocateur of the cerebrally grotesque is getting a career retrospective at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image. The three-week David Cronenberg series begins this week with a live conversation with the director and screenings of some of his kinkiest classics, including the psychosexual tale of twin trouble Dead Ringers (January 21) and that pulpy piece of techno-terror Videodrome (January 22). Check back in the coming weeks for more Cronenberg classics, from Scanners to The Fly to Naked Lunch.

Out in Los Angeles, it’s more New Wave than New Flesh. Cinefamily is honoring Jean-Luc Godard to coincide with a run of his latest work, Film socialisme. This week, you can catch six of his greatest sixties films: Breathless (January 20), A Woman Is a Woman (January 21), Vivre sa vie (January 23), Contempt (January 24), Pierrot le fou (January 25), and Masculin féminin (January 26). Luis Buñuel is also the toast of that town, at both the Aero Theatre (Belle de jour, January 20; Diary of a Chambermaid, January 20; The Exterminating Angel, January 21) and the Egyptian Theatre (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Viridiana, both January 22). Striking a more realistic note, Peter Davis’s Oscar-winning documentary Hearts and Minds also shows at the Aero (January 25). Plus, Kubrick’s Paths of Glory digs in at the UCLA Film and Television Archive (January 25). Up in Berkeley, the Pacific Film Archive offers two grim French masterworks, Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (January 21) and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (January 21). And in San Francisco, Red Desert aches at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (January 21 and 22), and Don Siegel’s The Killers (January 21) and Preston Sturges’s Unfaithfully Yours (January 24) light up the Castro Theatre. And staying on the West Coast, the Seattle Art Museum steals away with François Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses (January 26).

Working our way back east across the USA: The Wages of Fear drives to Chicago’s Music Box Theatre (January 20); Pietro Germi’s Seduced and Abandoned runs frantically to the Italian Culture Institute of Chicago (January 24); Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout treks to Bloomington’s Indiana University Cinema (January 20); Alexander Korda’s Rembrandt brings shadows and light to the Detroit Film Theatre (January 21); Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly explodes at Ciné in Athens, Georgia (January 25); Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite makes mischief at International House Philadelphia (January 26); Carol Reed’s The Third Man makes viewers a little cuckoo at Pittsburgh’s Regent Square Theater (January 22); Aki Kaurismäki’s The Match Factory Girl kills ’em without moving a muscle at George Eastman House’s Dryden Theatre in Rochester, New York (January 24); Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis meditates at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (January 20); and the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge triples your Bresson pleasure (and pain) with Pickpocket (January 20 and 22), Diary of a Country Priest (January 21), and Les dames du Bois de Bologne (January 21). Meanwhile, up in Toronto, Man Bites Dog howls at TIFF Lightbox (January 21).

In the United Kingdom, Vigo’s sui generis masterpiece L’Atalante majorly resurfaces, with both an extended run at London’s BFI Southbank, starting today and continuing through March 1, and at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh (January 20–26). The Institut de l’image in Aix-en-Provence is still celebrating Maurice Pialat with À nos amours (January 21 and 26) and L’enfance nue (January 24). Stockholm’s Swedish Film Institute projects Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (January 21) and Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night (January 25). Zurich’s Filmpodium travels to Europa with Lars von Trier (January 23 and 25) and has Great Expectations by David Lean (January 26). The Institut Lumière in Lyon gets dark with Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (January 25). Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (January 21), Louis Malle’s The Lovers (January 21 and 24), and Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (January 23) get slots at Brussels’s Belgian Cinematek. And elsewhere: For All Mankind (January 21) takes one giant step at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, and let’s wave good-bye with the Metropolis Empire Sofil in Beirut, which has Shoot the Piano Player (January 20) and Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (January 22).