The Criterion Collection

Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, Givenchy gowns, Henry Mancini music, the City of Light—movies don’t really get much swoonier than Stanley Donen’s comic romantic caper Charade. And those elegant pleasures are even more splendid on the big screen, as lucky viewers can see this week at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (February 7) and the Mayan Theatre in Denver (February 8). Paris is also the setting for a handful of other Criterion titles on the big screen this week across North America, including Louis Malle’s quintessentially zany Zazie dans le métro, with its vertiginous views from the Eiffel Tower, at Keene State College’s Putnam Arts Lecture Hall in Keene, New Hampshire (February 3–9); Jean-Pierre Melville’s much darker Army of Shadows which opens with German soldiers goose-stepping down the Champs-Élysées, at the Salt Lake Film Society (February 3); Robert Bresson takes audiences on a tour of Paris’s streets, subways, and train stations in his brilliant Pickpocket, playing at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco (February 8), along with the more fantastical French classic Beauty and the Beast (February 9); and Luis Buñuel’s afternoon delight Belle de jour seduces at the Calgary Cinematheque (February 4 and 9). (As for Paris itself, viewers at the Forum des images there can take a trip to the British countryside with Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I, on February 8.)

Take a tour of the world with other Criterion titles in theaters across North America in the coming week. Ithaca’s Cornell Cinema travels to Hong Kong with Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (February 3) and In the Mood for Love (February 8) and to Wes Anderson’s wacky American world with Rushmore (February 3 and 4) and The Royal Tenenbaums (February 9), which is also playing at Doc Films Chicago (February 3 and 5). There’s more oddball Americana with Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude at the Reston Town Center 13, Reston, Virginia (February 4 and 5). Omaha’s Film Streams surveys poor, rural Northern England with Ken Loach’s Kes (February 4, 5, and 9), while Cambridge’s Harvard Film Archive travels to Glasgow for Lynne Ramsay’s similarly themed coming-of-age story Ratcatcher (February 4). New Mexico comes to New England when Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth strikes at the Railroad Square Cinema in Waterville, Maine (February 4 and 5), while the Strand Theatre in the same state’s Rockland ships off to Guadalcanal for Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (February 4). And the Enzian Theater in Maitland, Florida, goes to the British ballet with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (February 4).

Audiences at Baltimore’s Charles Theater can barrel on down to South America for a nonrelaxing getaway with Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (February 4, 6, and 9), and those at the Cinematheque of Daytona in Daytona Beach, Florida, can jet to Rio de Janeiro for an exotic vacation with Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus (February 5). Torontonians can opt for a different kind of tourist destination, Alcatraz, with Michael Bay’s The Rock at TIFF Lightbox (February 4). New Yorkers who want a complete break from the real world can leap into Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits at the Walter Reade Theater (February 4) or David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch at Museum of the Moving Image (February 5). Viewers at the Hopkins Center for the Arts in Hanover, New Hampshire, can voyage into the future with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World on a Wire (February 5), while those at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago can travel to the French countryside with Bresson’s Mouchette (February 5 and 6). Los Angeles’s Aero Theatre goes back in time to medieval Sweden for Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (February 6). And Dickensian London descends on Silver Spring, Maryland, in the form of David Lean’s Great Expectations (February 7) and Oliver Twist (February 9) at the AFI Silver. Audiences at the Pickford Film Center in Bellingham, Washington, can ogle Osaka in Kon Ichikawa’s gorgeous The Makioka Sisters (February 7 and 8). George Eastman House’s Dryden Theatre in Rochester, New York, flies over Berlin with Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (February 7). And a seedy California nightclub is the setting for John Cassavetes’s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, playing at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco (February 9).

Meanwhile, way over in Beirut, the Empire Metropolis Sofil kicks off a Bergman retrospective. This week’s selections include Marie Nyreröd’s intimate documentary conversation with the master filmmaker, Bergman Island (February 3), plus Sawdust and Tinsel (February 4), Wild Strawberries (February 5), The Seventh Seal (February 5), The Silence (February 6), Cries and Whispers (February 8), and The Magic Flute (February 9). And throughout Europe, other cinematic heavy hitters are out in full force: Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria smiles through tears at the Centro Galego de Artes da Imaxe in Galicia, Spain (February 3). The Swedish Film Institute in Stockholm bobs for Buñuel with The Milky Way (February 4) and Diary of a Chambermaid (February 5). Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante keeps drifting along at London’s BFI Southbank, plus Lean’s Oliver Twist picks a pocket or two (February 4) there. Lausanne’s Swiss Cinematheque offers Charles Chaplin’s dark-toned laugh riot The Great Dictator (February 4), Nagisa Oshima’s never funny In the Realms of the Senses (February 5), and Benjamin Christensen’s witches’ brew Häxan (February 7). Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (February 4) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (February 9) darken the skies over Brussels’s Belgian Cinematek. And G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box is opened at the Cineteca di Bologna (February 9).