The Criterion Collection

This week, we begin with what is surely the most poignant repertory film series going on at the moment. Though it has a rather nondescript title, Celebrating Classic Cinema: Curator and Audience Favorites, organized for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art by Ian Birnie, is a major retrospective. The museum’s film curator since 1996 (and a friend of the Criterion Collection), Birnie will soon be leaving his post, and this is his swan song series. Unsurprisingly, Celebrating Classic Cinema includes a dazzling lineup of films, spanning nine decades. The ground rules for Birnie’s selections, which are intended to reflect the tradition of programming at LACMA, were only that the titles be narrative features, that they have played at LACMA one or more times in the past, and that they have been well attended. This week’s picks include a few Criterion titles: Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! (July 8), Max Ophuls’s The Earrings of Madame de . . . (July 9), and Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura (July 9). So if you’re in LA, pay your respects to Birnie, and see a great film in the process. (For more information about Birnie’s exit, you can read Kenneth Turan’s excellent Los Angeles Times tribute to the man and this program.)

Angelenos in the mood for seeing other classics in movie theaters have even more options this week. The Aero Theatre has two awesomely auteurist doubleheaders: Jacques Tati’s M. Hulot’s Holiday and Mon oncle (July 9), and Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Through a Glass Darkly (July 10). The Nuart has the new 35th anniversary restored print of Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (July 8–11), with two of the film’s stars, Buck Henry and Candy Clark, on hand to speak, on July 9 and 11, respectively. And Cinefamily travels back in time with Chris Marker’s iconic science-fiction short La Jetée (July 13).

The rest of California is bustling with big-screen gems as well: the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley projects Bernardo Bertolucci’s La commare secca (July 8) and Mikio Naruse’s When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (July 9); the VIZ Cinema in San Francisco celebrates the Akira Kurosawa–Toshiro Mifune connection with Red Beard (July 9) and Scandal (July 10); and the Crest Theatre in Sacramento gets in the game with Seven Samurai (July 10), while saving some screen space for a more recent Japanese treasure, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s magnificent family drama Still Walking (July 9).

Heading east: the Pickford Film Center brings a Beantown bust to Bellingham, Washington, with The Friends of Eddie Coyle (July 14); Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse wheels out a Rolling Roadshow presentation of Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket (July 9)—this one, appropriately, will be playing at a Days’ Inn; St. Louis’s Webster University Film Series puts on a show with François Truffaut’s The Last Metro (July 14); the University of Wisconsin Cinematheque in Madison presents Jean-Paul Belmondo as the world’s dishiest man of the cloth in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Léon Morin, Priest (July 8); Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times turns the screws at the Tivoli Theatre in Downers Grove, Illinois (July 11); DocFilms Chicago has its own form of icecapades with Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (July 9); Dazed and Confused lights up at Keystone Art Cinema in Indianapolis (July 8 and 9); the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, goes back to the Japanese sixties for Kurosawa’s cutting Yojimbo (July 8 and 9) and Kanteo Shindo’s shocking Onibaba (July 14); Kon Ichikawa’s The Makioka Sisters floats along for a week at the Mos’Art Theatre in Lake Park, Florida (July 8–14); and the Dryden Theatre at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, gets real—well, kind of—with Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-up (July 12).

In New York City: the Museum of Modern Art covers the cinematic landscape with Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (July 8), Les Blank’s Werner Herzog documentary Burden of Dreams (July 9), and Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (July 13 and 14); the IFC Center has one of Kurosawa’s great unheralded titles, The Lower Depths (July 8–10), while Symphony Space has two of his biggest hits—Seven Samurai (July 10) and High and Low (July 13); and the New York Public Library’s mid-Manhattan branch takes patrons to the underworld with a special screening of Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus (July 10). The Bijou Theater in Bridgeport, Connecticut, chooses Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (July 13). And the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge has two of cinema’s smartest takes on decadence: Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (July 8–10) and Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (July 14).

Up in Canada, the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto continues its Federico Fellini series with La strada (July 9) and Juliet of the Spirits (July 13), and kicks off another one, on Cassavetes, with A Woman Under the Influence (July 14); and the Vancouver Vaincity Theatre goes on the road with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (July 8 and 9). Over in Europe: The BFI Southbank in London begins a monthlong run of Alain Resnais’s eternal puzzler Last Year at Marienbad (July 8–August 4). Also in the UK, the Warwick Arts Centre in Coventry gives viewers a chance to see Carlos Saura’s exquisite Cría cuervos . . . (July 11 and 12). The Paris Cinema International Film Festival continues with Luis Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty (July 8 and 9) and Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses (July 8 and 11), and in the same city, the Forum des images mercilessly tickles audiences’ funny bones with Pietro Germi’s Divorce Italian Style (July 10). The Eye Film Institute Netherlands in Amsterdam takes off with Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (July 8–14). Zurich’s Filmpodium offers battles of the pen, as in John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (July 8), and of the sword, with Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (July 12). Brussels’s Belgian Cinematek strips noir down to basics with Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (July 10). Berlin’s Kino Arsenal does right by Jean Vigo with À propos de Nice (July 11) and Spike Lee with Do the Right Thing (July 12 and 13). And Wim Wenders’s aching look at America, Paris, Texas (July 14), sings its melancholy tune at the Cinemateca Portuguesa in Lisbon.

Finally, getting really far-flung, the Cinemateca Uruguaya in Montevideo goes crazy for both Saura’s rhythmic tale of obsession Carmen (July 9) and Nobuhiko Obayashi’s out-of-control horror comedy House (July 9). And the Australian Cinematheque at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane continues an ongoing series on surrealism with three films by Luis Buñuel—Simon of the Desert (July 8), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (July 9), and The Exterminating Angel (July 9)—and a survey of Jean Painlevé titles (July 8), including such underwater odysseys as The Sea Horse, The Vampire, and The Love Life of the Octopus.