Goings On: Heists, Nestler, and More

New York.Edgar Wright Presents Heist Society is a BAMcinématek series running from Tuesday through July 23 and, over at the BAM blog, Wright’s got ultra-brief introductions to each and every one of the twenty-two films—including Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978), a “taut, zero-fat thriller with Ryan O’Neal and Bruce Dern playing cat and mouse through downtown LA’s concrete jungle.” Screens on Friday, two days after Wright’s own Baby Driver opens in theaters.

A Vision of Resistance: Peter Nestler is on at the Film Society of Lincoln Center through Wednesday. “In his native Germany,” writes Jeremy Polacek for Hyperallergic, “Nestler has been celebrated by the likes of Jean-Marie Straub, Harun Farocki, and Hartmut Bitomsky, but neither their acclaim nor the increasing distinction of his work in documentary cinema—nuanced, yet exacting observations of politics, labor, oppression, and fascism that set him apart from his contemporaries not only in Germany, but much of the documentary scene of the post-war period—was previously enough to get his films much play, certainly not the sort he is currently enjoying.”

In the Notebook, Christopher Small adds that “in a lifetime of making films alone and later with his wife Zsóka, [Nestler’s] central preoccupation with the colonization of the present by the tyrannies of the past stretched beyond the specific time-period in which it emerged—the young Federal Republic of the late 1950s and early 1960s—and persisted through era after era, region after region, conflict after conflict, struggle after struggle.”

Los Angeles. “Watching Bob Hoskins walk through the airport in John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday [1980] is one of those pleasures in cinema that doesn’t happen enough these days,” writes Kim Morgan. “He really could be gloriously terrifying.” Wednesday and Thursday at the New Beverly.

The exhibition Center Stage: African American Women in Silent Race Films will be on view at the California African American Museum from Wednesday through October 15.

Oakland. On Wednesday and Thursday, Deborah Stratman will present O’er the Land (2009) along with selections from Canyon Cinema’s collection at Pro Arts Gallery. Via Experimental Cinema.

Chicago.Cine-File has a fine new site for its Cine-List.

Austin. The Film Society presents Kiss Me Deadly (1955) this afternoon and programmer Lars Nilsen has written up a Robert Aldrich primer. Meantime, Emily McCullar tours the newly revamped AFS Cinema for Texas Monthly.

Toronto. With Something in the Air: The Cinema of Olivier Assayas on at the TIFF Cinematheque through August 20, the TIFF Review has posted a playlist from Kieran Grant, a piece from Alicia Fletcher on the character of Irma Vep as played by Musidora and Maggie Cheung, and an excerpt from Assayas’s memoir A Post-May Adolescence.

Paris. The Andrei Tarkovsky retrospective at the Cinémathèque française runs from Wednesday through July 12.

Florence.Bill Viola: Electronic Renaissance, an exhibition on view at the Palazzo Strozzi through July 23, places video by Viola “alongside Renaissance works by the likes of Jacopo Pontormo, Michelangelo, and Paolo Uccello. The juxtapositions are anything but casual,” writes Ingrid D. Rowland for the New York Review of Books.

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