Ring in the new year with the freshness and invigorating energy of the French New Wave, or follow the advice of Jean-Luc Godard and discover the Hollywood director he called “the most intelligent man in contemporary cinema,” Joseph L. Mankiewicz. For a blast from the indie past, turn the clock back three decades and revisit the Sundance Film Festival’s lineup from 1992, a watershed year for edgy, low-budget filmmaking. There’s plenty more to come each week, including streaming premieres, documentaries, double features, and Saturday matinees!

TOP STORIES
PREMIERING JANUARY 1

Featuring hours of archival interviews with Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Agnès Varda, and more

Presentation, or Charlotte and Her Steak (1951), Les horizons morts (1951), Crazeologie (1954), Le coup du berger (1956), Le sabotier du Val de Loire (1956), All the Boys Are Called Patrick (1957), Une histoire d’eau (1958), Véronique and Her Dunce (1958), Du côté de la côte (1958), L’opéra-Mouffe (1958), Ars (1959), Charlotte et son Jules (1959), Antoine and Colette (1962), Les fiancés du pont Macdonald (1962), La luxure (1962), La Jetée (1963), The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963), Nadja in Paris (1964), A Modern Coed (1966), Uncle Yanco (1968)

Crafter of some of the most literate and sophisticated films of Hollywood’s golden age, writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz left behind a body of work that stands apart for its cutting intelligence, acerbic wit, and unsparing insights into human nature. The rare studio-era director who also scripted many of his films, he had a gift for acid-tongued dialogue that made favorites like A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve into enduring, endlessly quotable classics of cultured cattiness. He also had an iconoclast’s penchant for tackling taboo subjects, bringing passion and complexity to his treatments of racism (No Way Out) and McCarthyism (People Will Talk). Contributing defining works to nearly every genre—from romance (The Ghost and Mrs. Muir) to musicals (Guys and Dolls) to historical epics (Cleopatra, whose infamously arduous production drove the filmmaker to collapse)—Mankiewicz proved that intellect and entertainment could go hand in hand.

FEATURING: Dragonwyck (1946), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), House of Strangers (1949), A Letter to Three Wives (1949), No Way Out (1950), All About Eve (1950), People Will Talk (1951), 5 Fingers (1952), Guys and Dolls (1955), The Quiet American (1958), Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), Cleopatra (1963), There Was a Crooked Man . . .  (1970)

Featuring a new introduction by Sundance festival director emeritus John Cooper and John Nein, senior programmer and director of strategic initiatives

Featuring Pharos of Chaos**, a 1983 documentary portrait of Hayden

EXCLUSIVE STREAMING PREMIERES

A rare road movie from England, Christopher Petit’s mesmerizing debut feature has taken its place as a cult classic and one of the most singular films of the 1970s. Robert (David Beames), the film’s enigmatic protagonist, embarks on a road trip from London to Bristol to investigate the recent death of his brother. As Robert drives west, the radio newscasts he hears and the strangers he meets address the dire political and economic state of late-seventies Britain. A remarkable collection of art rock, punk, and new wave—David Bowie, Devo, Kraftwerk, Robert Fripp, Ian Dury, and more—soundtracks Robert’s journey, and the austere urban and rural landscapes he passes through are strikingly rendered in black and white by cinematographer Martin Shäfer (a frequent Wim Wenders collaborator). Petit deftly melds these stylistic, narrative, and documentary elements, resulting in an experience that is eerie, reflective, and hypnotic all at once.

This spellbinding narrative feature debut from Maya Da-Rin is an entrancing, enigmatic meditation on the material, spiritual, and dream lives of Brazil’s Indigenous people. Justino (Regis Myrupu, winner of the Best Actor prize at the Locarno Film Festival) is a forty-five-year-old member of the Desana people who works as a security guard at a cargo port in Manaus, an industrial city surrounded by the Amazon rainforest. Since the death of his wife, his main company is his youngest daughter (Rosa Peixoto), a nurse who will soon be leaving him to study medicine in Brasilia. As the days go by, Justino is overcome by a strong, unexplained fever. During the day, he fights to stay awake at work. At night, a mysterious creature follows his footsteps. Torn between the oppression of life in the city and the distance of his native village, Justino can no longer endure an existence without place.

CRITERION EDITIONS
PREMIERING JANUARY 1

Kate Beckinsale and Chloë Sevigny star in Whit Stillman’s affectionate yet unsentimental look back at the early-eighties Manhattan party scene.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Stillman, Sevigny, and Chris Eigeman; deleted scenes; an audio recording of Stillman reading from his book The Last Days of Disco, with Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards; and more.

Bette Davis delivers writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s stiletto-sharp dialogue with unforgettable relish in the the most devastatingly witty film ever made about the ruthlessness of show business.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Two audio commentaries, a feature-length documentary about Mankiewicz, television appearances by Davis and Gary Merrill, an interview with costume historian Larry McQueen, and more.

One of the all-time great heist films offers an uncommonly naturalistic, detailed view of a seamy criminal underworld.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by film historian Drew Casper; a documentary about actor Sterling Hayden; interviews with director John Huston, film noir historian Eddie Muller and cinematographer John Bailey; and more.

Stanley Kubrick displays his trademark visual precision and gratifying sense of irony in a cold-blooded noir classic, presented with its predecessor, Killer’s Kiss.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with producer James B. Harris and actor Sterling Hayden, a program with author Robert Polito on writer Jim Thompson, and an appreciation of Killer’s Kiss featuring critic Geoffrey O’Brien.

THREE DIMENSIONS

Featuring an introduction by film historian Donald Bogle and programmer Bruce Goldstein

WOMEN FILMMAKERS

An artful blend of fiction and reality gives rich expression to a young Bangkok sex worker’s innermost hopes, dreams, and feelings.

Richard Hell, Nick Zedd, Johnny Thunders, and Dee Dee Ramone are among the counterculture mainstays who populate Rachel Amodeo’s grimily poetic time capsule of life on the margins of the East Village in the early nineties.

Iranian American writer-director-actor Desiree Akhavan has been hailed for her bold depictions of female sexuality and queer identity, both in her two feature films and in her acclaimed television series The Bisexual. Brash yet empathetic, Akhavan explores the journey of a young queer woman who is concealing her sexuality from her conservative Iranian family in Appropriate Behavior, and brings nuance and humor to a coming-of-age story about the horrors of conversion therapy in The Miseducation of Cameron Post.

FEATURING: Appropriate Behavior (2014), The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)

More women filmmakers featured in this month’s programming: Documentaries by Lee Grant, Documentaries by Maya Da-Rin, Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Le bonheur (1965), Les créatures (1966), Du côté de la côte (1958), L’opéra-Mouffe (1958), Les fiancés du pont Macdonald (1962), Uncle Yanco (1968), Danzón (1991), Finding Christa (1991), The Inland Sea (1991), Shoot for the Contents (1991), Gas Food Lodging (1992), Poison Ivy (1992), The Fever (2019), What We Left Unfinished (2019)

TRUE STORIES

Though Lee Grant is widely known to audiences as a lauded, Academy Award–winning actor, she has also carved out an equally accomplished career as a trailblazing documentary filmmaker. Unafraid to tackle tough, often controversial subjects—the fight for workers’ rights in The Willmar 8, Reagan-era economic inequality in the Oscar-winning Down and Out in America, and the transgender experience in the groundbreaking What Sex Am I?—Grant brings a courageous compassion and unflinching honesty to stories that still feel powerfully urgent.

Preserved and curated by Taylor A. Purdee.

FEATURING: ​​The Willmar 8 (1981), When Women Kill (1983), What Sex Am I? (1985), Down and Out in America (1986), Battered (1989), A Father . . . A Son . . . Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2005)

Presented alongside the streaming premiere of Brazilian filmmaker and visual artist Maya Da-Rin’s mesmerizing narrative feature debut The Fever, these richly sensorial nonfiction works capture the ebb and flow of life along the triple-border region where Brazil, Colombia, and Peru meet. With a mix of ethnographic observation and dreamy impressionism, Da-Rin’s documentaries Margin and Lands meditate on the landscapes, people, and intertwining cultures that comprise this unique, ever-changing urban island in the midst of the Amazon.

FEATURING: Margin (2007), Lands (2009)

Mariam Ghani’s study of Afghanistan’s Communist-era film industry is a probing and engrossing case study in censorship, authoritarianism, and political art.

Gadfly documentarian Michael Moore’s scathingly funny debut rewrote the rules of activist filmmaking with its idiosyncratic, rousingly entertaining blend of puckish humor and firebrand populism.

This fascinating portrait of the too-brief life and extraordinary art of enigmatic photographer Francesca Woodman expands the frame to take in her brilliant family.

More documentaries featured in this month’s programming: Chronicle of a Summer (1961), A Brief History of Time (1991), Color Adjustment (1991), Finding Christa (1991), The Inland Sea (1991), Intimate Stranger (1991), Shoot for the Contents (1991), Brother’s Keeper (1992), Incident at Oglala (1992), My Crasy Life (1992), Where Are We? Our Trip Through America (1992), Antarctica: A Year on Ice (2013)

VINTAGE BINGE-WATCHING

The undisputed master of the silent-era espionage serial, Louis Feuillade (Fantômas) crafted films with labyrinthine plots and unforgettable characters that influenced countless generations of filmmakers. Comprised of ten episodes and clocking in at nearly seven hours in duration, Les Vampires is an unqualified masterpiece. It follows journalist Philippe Guérande (Édouard Mathé) in his efforts to expose a vast criminal organization known as the Vampires. Joined by a comical sidekick, Mazamette (Marcel Lévesque), and often competing against a rival gang lord (Fernand Herrmann), Guérande dethrones a succession of the Vampires’ Grand Masters. But most evasive of all is the Vampires’ muse, a seductive assassin who performs her job with deadly grace: Irma Vep, played by the unforgettable Musidora.

SATURDAY MATINEES

Fantastical sets, imaginative contraptions, and infectious songs come together in this whimsical musical adventure.

Deborah Kerr is the governess who attempts to reach out to a lonely and troubled teenage girl in this superlative adaptation of the acclaimed play.

James Stewart delights in this lighthearted classic about a quixotic man whose best friend is a six-foot-three white bunny rabbit that only he can see.

An independent-minded widow and the spirit of a cantankerous sea captain form an unlikely bond in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s beloved, sublimely atmospheric romantic fantasy.

This visually stunning journey to the end of the world captures both the grandeur of nature and everyday life among the hardy and devoted people who live there year-round.

DOUBLE FEATURES

Fasten your seatbelts for a pair of white-knuckle road trips through treacherous terrain.

Two communities are transformed by ambitious dam-construction projects in these elegiac explorations of the tension between tradition and progress.

The violent, passionate world of bullfighting provides the backdrop to these visceral, provocative looks at lives poised on the perpetual edge of death.

The star power of Randolph Scott and James Stewart and the auteur punch of André De Toth and Anthony Mann are on display in two of the finest westerns of the 1950s.

SHORT-FILM PROGRAMS

Blink and you could miss a murder in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic study of voyeurism and an innovative homage.

The mundane is rendered miraculous in these richly impressionistic evocations of the inner worlds of young boys grappling with questions of sexuality, identity, and religion.

A pair of refugees transcend their difficult histories while settling in a quiet Italian town in this triumphant portrait, featuring stunning, color-drenched cinematography.

Two men embark on perilous quests to be reunited with the women they love in these searing journeys through oft-unseen layers of Egyptian and Filipino society.