Restored and Rediscovered, Year Two

On Thursday, a new restoration, the dazzling result of a multiyear collaboration between The Film Foundation, Warner Bros., and TCM, will open the second edition of Restored and Rediscovered, the festival of film preservation running at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York, through May 22. One of this year’s highlights will be Friday’s conversation with James Ivory following a screening of Roseland (1977).

Writing for Foreign Policy last summer, Jordan Hoffman called Roseland “a curious gem set in a vast Manhattan ballroom frequented by ghosts of a different era.” This “marvelous movie” is “essentially three short films in a shared setting with a vision of 1970s New York attuned to disappearing styles and behaviors . . . In addition to spectacular performances from older actors such as Teresa Wright, Lou Jacobi, and Lila Skala, there’s also a great turn from a young Christopher Walken as a gigolo.” Roseland “features the Merchant Ivory hallmark of melancholy characters in an exquisite setting, yearning to connect.”

Over the past few months, we’ve celebrated a few of the new restorations in the Restored and Rediscovered 2025 lineup, beginning with the revival last December of Lino Brocka’s disquieting Bona (1980), featuring Filipina superstar Nora Aunor, who passed away just a few weeks ago. When Rialto Pictures revived Jean-Luc Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman (1961) back in March, we noted that Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri called it “a fantasy, a comedy, a musical, and a tragedy all at once.”

Frank Borzage’s transporting 7th Heaven (1927) opened MoMA’s To Save and Project in January, and on Sunday, the Women’s Film Preservation Fund will take attendees back again to the silent era with The Affair at Raynor’s (1912)—an episode from What Happened to Mary, the first movie serial produced in the U.S.—and Just Around the Corner (1921), one of only two films directed by pioneering screenwriter Frances Marion.

From the dawn of the sound era and the discombobulating imaginations of Max and Dave Fleischer comes a program of Saturday morning cartoons featuring Betty Boop, Popeye, and Superman. 3D Film Archive founder Bob Furmanek will present Jack Arnold’s newly remastered stereoscopic noir The Glass Web (1953), starring Edward G. Robinson.

Geographically, curator Monica Castillo’s selection reaches farther afield as it moves ahead chronologically. Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1965) “heralded a dynamic new approach to folkloric material, transforming a village Romeo-and-Juliet story from nineteenth-century Ukraine by means of a swirling camera and the bold use of primary colors,” writes Ian Christie.

Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) “proved a defining force in what would come to be known as the Australian New Wave,” writes Megan Abbott. The story of a cluster of girls who disappear while on an outing at the turn of the twentieth century is “deliciously ripe for Freudian (and Jungian) interpretation.” Weir “focuses on the sensate, the pleasures and dangers made flesh, repeatedly using his camera to pull back every curtain, to lift every petticoat, to unfurl every corset.”

Chantal Akerman’s “effervescent and bittersweet shopping-mall romance” Golden Eighties (1986) is an “ode to the musicals of Vincente Minnelli and Jacques Demy [that] is practically a soap opera compared to the quiet, sober Jeanne Dielman,” writes Beatrice Loayza. In 2022, the New Yorker’s Richard Brody found that Akerman “links erotic crises to political ones via choreography; she sets crowds of colorfully clad customers and employees in motion as they mouth the songs’ droll, bouncy lyrics (which Akerman wrote), balanced blithely between calamity and apocalypse.”

Moving into the 1990s, we head back to the U.S. In Jim McKay’s Girls Town (1996), four friends (Lili Taylor, Bruklin Harris, Aunjanue Ellis, and Anna Grace) are about to wrap up their senior year in high school when one of them rattles the other three to their cores. Reviewing this “remarkable” film in the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas noted that its “unique denseness and richness grew out of an improvisational workshop . . . The result is that the rhythm of the actors’ dialogue and their interactions with one another key the tempo of the film, which in turns creates a sense of eavesdropping on life that few films achieve.”

Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation (1999) “transcends its modest methods, leaping between genres and time periods with the aid of little more than some costume changes, a bevy of archival photographs, and techniques informed as much by silent film as by the informal, relaxed indies of its time,” writes Jake Cole at Slant. “Following and spiritually linking the fates of two separate couples (both played by John Earl Jelks and Michelle A. Banks) in 1910 and 1990 Chicago,” Compensation “sketches an image of Black history at once ever-shifting and frustratingly locked into cycles of pain and perseverance.”

Recently rescued by Milestone Films, Charles Burnett’s The Annihilation of Fish (1999) stars the late James Earl Jones as a Jamaican immigrant wrestling with an invisible demon and Lynn Redgrave as a woman determined to marry the long-dead composer Giacomo Puccini. “For admirers of Killer of Sheep (1977) or To Sleep With Anger (1990), it may come as a surprise that The Annihilation of Fish follows the familiar arc of the nineties romantic comedy, complete with a meet-cute of sorts, scenes of domestic entanglement, and the gradual softening of hostiles into affection,” writes Macaella Gray in the Brooklyn Rail. “Yet in Burnett’s hands, the film becomes a decidedly inverse variety: in place of the archetypal bright eyed-lovers, it stages an interracial romance between two late-in-life seniors.” And in the end, “the film refuses to abandon love.”