Goings On: Bujold, Tsangari, and More

Nicholas Bell calls The Beguiling Bujold, the series of films starring Geneviève Bujold running at the Quad in New York through Wednesday, “a cherry-picked bushel of cinematic delights featuring a bevy of renowned international auteurs,” among them, Alain Resnais, “who cast her as the female lead in The War is Over (1966) starring Yves Montand.” Bell’s posted three new reviews at Ioncinema, all of them of films by Alan Rudolph featuring Bujold:

• The “most intriguing,” he argues, is Choose Me (1984). “Rudolph’s highly stylized and often unpredictable ensembles often felt like a mixture of Robert Altman (who produced some of his 1990s work, like the celebrated Afterglow) and a John Sayles or even Walter Hill (certainly Streets of Fire feels aligned with the same fantastical spirit of Rudolph’s pronounced mise-en-scene).”
• In Trouble in Mind (1985), Bujold “is cast once again as a sort of lynchpin upon which the fictional universe revolves.”
• The Moderns (1988) is “a high-minded, sometimes amusing attempt to examine the potent ex-pat community of 1920s Paris wherein figures like Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Alice B. Toklas, and many more proliferated the literary and artistic zeitgeist.”

For more on The Moderns, listen to Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at the Cinephiliacs.

More Goings On

New York.The Elephant in the Room: The Films of Alan Clarke is on at Anthology Film Archives through August 20. “At least a dozen of his films qualify as classics of British cinema,” writes Rumsey Taylor for the New York Times, “and his influence can be measured in the number of actors whose careers he elevated: Gary Oldman, Ray Winstone, Tim Roth and David Thewlis all worked with Clarke early on, delivering menacing, incendiary performances. (Another of his stars was David Bowie, in the 1982 film Baal.) Clarke was highly regarded by filmmakers and actors alike. I asked a few—Ken Loach, Paul Greengrass, Harmony Korine and Mr. Roth—to explain why.”

Also at Anthology is a digital restoration of Jack O’Connell’s Revolution (1968), screening tomorrow and Sunday. “It is a prize artifact,” writes J. Hoberman in the NYT. “While images of hippies and be-ins may be overfamiliar, an 87-minute immersion in countercultural exuberance can still be disorienting. In its blithe sense of social breakdown, Revolution would make an excellent double bill with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead—the yin to the yang of the period’s most evocative American movie.”

And from tonight through August 22, Anthology “looks back at the not-at-all-long-ago moment when unsightly variants of standard-definition digital video were blown up to 35 millimeter for theatrical release, creating an aesthetic noticeably different from that of the digitally shot and projected movies of today,” as Ben Kenigsberg writes in the NYT.

The title of the series is Screen Slate Presents: This is Mini DV (On 35mm) and, at Screen Slate, Jon Dieringer notes that they’ve chosen “to open tonight with [Thomas Vinterberg’s] The Celebration [1998] and [Jeff Tremaine’s] Jackass: The Movie [2002] to showcase the historical, aesthetic, and popular range of features shot on DV. . . . Jackass is hugely popular with Screen Slate’s contributors—so much that we put together a limited edition Jackass Reader situating the collective in a variety of cultural contexts, including reflections of class, masculinity, early cinema, skateboard culture and performance art.”

The Metrograph’s series On Fire Island opens today and runs through the weekend. At the Film Stage, Joshua Encinias previews Frank Perry’s Last Summer (1969) and Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances (1986).

Rahul Jain’s “mesmerizing new documentary” Machines (2016) is at Film Forum through Tuesday. Kanishka Raja for BOMB: “As we watch hundreds of meters of fabric being singed, scoured, bleached, dyed, and prepared for printing, dozens of flatbed and rotary screens dutifully marking designated patterns and the numbing repetitive acts of industrial scale production performed ceaselessly, the emotional weight of what it takes to bring our $6.99 H&M tank tops and $24.99 Pier 1 bedspreads to market begins to resonate with excruciating clarity.”

Los Angeles. François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962) “remains one of the French New Wave’s most sublime achievements, and its fleetness of foot can still take your breath away,” writes Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times. On Monday, Cinefamily and the French Film and TV Office present a screening in memory of Jeanne Moreau.

Mario Bava: Poet of Love and Death is on at the Egyptian from Wednesday through August 20.

Chicago. On Wednesday, the Chicago Film Society presents a 35 mm print of Alan Arkin’s Little Murders (1971) along with a Betty Boop cartoon.

Austin. Brandon Harris has a new book out, Making Rent in Bed-Stuy: A Memoir of Trying to Make It in New York City, and on Wednesday, he’ll introduce the Film Society’s screening of Hal Ashby’s The Landlord (1970).

Boston. “The Brattle Theatre’s yearlong celebration of Women in Cinema takes a pleasantly unexpected detour this weekend with a collection of six ‘80s comedies from female directors.” Writing for WBUR, Sean Burns focuses on Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) and Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982).

Toronto. “This weekend,” writes Chandler Levack, introducing a conversation for the TIFF Review, “Denys Arcand is coming to TIFF where three of his films (Réjeanne Padovani,Jesus of Montreal, and The Decline of the American Empire) will screen as part of the organization’s ongoing Canada on Screen programming. Arcand, (who is in pre-production for his next feature, Le triomphe de l'argent), is a natural storyteller and it ends up being the rare interview where you spend most of it laughing.”

London. From Tuesday through August 27, Close-Up presents a series of films by Ousmane Sembène.

Salzburg. A new theatrical production of Frank Wedekind's Lulu directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari (Attenberg,Chevalier) will be presented from Thursday through August 28 during the Salzburger Festspiele.

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