Bleak Week 2025

While there’s some overlap between the eight lineups, each city will offer its own unique highlights. Fifty-five films will be presented in LA alone, “and we probably cut another fifty titles from our initial list,” Cinematheque senior film programmer Chris LeMaire tells Olsen. “We’re never going to run out because many of the greatest films deal with the human condition, which naturally leads to some difficult truths.”

Angelenos will find the Criterion Mobile Closet just outside the Aero Theatre on Friday and Saturday, and on the inside, Claire Denis will be taking questions about 35 Shots of Rum (2008) on Wednesday and White Material (2009) and Bastards (2013) on Friday. Denis will be at the Egyptian Theatre on Thursday, talking about Trouble Every Day (2001) with Barry Jenkins, and on Saturday, discussing Beau travail (1999) and High Life (2018).

The Cinematheque is hosting similar semi-retrospectives dedicated to the work of Jon Jost and Philippe Grandrieux. “Influenced by the writings of Georges Bataille and Giorgio Agamben, Grandrieux’s haptic filmmaking has inspired the likes of Denis Villeneuve and Brady Corbet,” notes Le Cinéma Club, and as it happens, the Cinematheque is also paying tribute to Corbet and Mona Fastvold with screenings of his The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and Vox Lux (2018) and her The World to Come (2020).

Costa-Gavras will be at the Egyptian this evening to discuss The Confession (1970) and Missing (1982). Starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek, Missing is based on the disappearance of American journalist Charles Horman in the aftermath of the U.S.-backed Chilean coup of 1973, a case that Stephen Volk has recently revisited in the Nation.

The ’70s at their grungiest are captured by Uli Edel in Christiane F. (1981), with Natja Brunckhorst as a fourteen-year-old David Bowie–obsessed junkie crashing in West Berlin’s Zoo Station. On Tuesday, Sean Baker will introduce the U.S. premiere of the new 4K restoration heading to Film at Lincoln Center in New York on June 20.

Bleak Week LA features the west coast premieres of new restorations of René Clément’s Forbidden Games (1952), Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I (1987), and Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (1997). Friday sees a fiftieth-anniversary screening of Lino Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Light (1975), whose “gritty realism occurs alongside poised stylization,” as José B. Capino observes.

One of the Week’s major events will be the projection of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943) from a nitrate print. The story of a young woman suspected of witchery in the seventeenth century, Day of Wrath was shot during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, and for Jonathan Rosenbaum, “it clearly registers as one of the great Resistance films.”

Rosenbaum will be at the Music Box Theatre on Saturday to introduce Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow (1973), “a low-key character study, a downbeat ode to the downtrodden, an elegy for the American dream gone sour,” as Budd Wilkins describes it at Slant. Starring Al Pacino and the late Gene Hackman as drifters heading to Pittsburgh from California, Scarecrow “embraces sprawl of both the narrative and geographical variety with freewheeling abandon.”

As part of its tribute to Hackman—we’re currently celebrating him, too, on the Criterion Channel—Music Box will also screen a 35 mm IB Technicolor print of Michael Ritchie’s Prime Cut (1972), featuring one of Stephanie Zacharek’s “favorite Hackman villains,” Mary Ann, a “conniving country-boy crime boss.” Mary Ann “runs a heartland meat-packing plant as a coverup for his deeply unsavory human-trafficking business; he has no qualms about chopping up his enemies and stuffing their pulverized remains into sausage casing.” That’s bleak.

Also screening on 35 mm are Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man (2009), Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (2008), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Albert and Allen Hughes’s Dead Presidents (1995), and Agustí Villaronga’s debut feature, In a Glass Cage (1986), the story of a sadomasochistic relationship between a former Nazi doctor (Günter Meisner) and a mysterious male nurse (David Sust). “A somber mixture of suspense, grim humor, and baroque perversity, it builds to a frightening conclusion,” wrote Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader nearly forty years ago.

Bleak Week at the Hollywood Theatre opens with a 35 mm print of Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972). Agnes (Harriet Andersson) is dying, and her sisters, Maria (Liv Ullmann) and Karin (Ingrid Thulin), have come to wait it out with her. For Andrew Haigh (All of Us Strangers), “Cries and Whispers sums up what it means to be human—the moment when Agnes screams out in agony to her sisters as they stand by her deathbed ‘Can anyone help me?’ and of course they can’t, or they won’t. Holy fuck.”

Also screening in 35 mm are Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000), which won the Palme d’Or and the Best Actress Award for Björk in Cannes, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1976), “one of the handful of genuinely disturbing movies ever made,” as John Powers has written. “A cinematic ground zero, Salò confirms the cruel meaninglessness of everything human . . . With such a bleak work for his artistic testament, it’s small wonder that many people saw Pasolini’s own murder as Salò’s real life climax.”

The Trylon Cinema’s program opens with Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter and will wrap with a 35 mm print of Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960), the #1 film on the Criterion Top 10 from Frederick Elmes, the cinematographer best known for his work with David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch: “Its images still haunt me.”

In between, the Trylon will screen Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985), which Pietro Marcello (Martin Eden, Scarlet) has called “probably the most important film ever made about war”; Dogra Magra (1988), the final film from Toshio Matsumoto (Funeral Parade of Roses); The Panic in Needle Park (1971), the movie Jerry Schatzberg made with Al Pacino before Scarecrow; Jeff Kanew’s Natural Enemies (1979), starring Hal Holbrook as a man who intends to kill his wife (Louise Fletcher), their children, and then himself; and Mick Jackson’s Threads (1984), a depiction of nuclear winter that shook television viewers on both sides of the Atlantic.

“It wasn’t until I saw Threads that I found that something on screen could make me break out in a cold, shivering sweat and keep me in that condition for twenty minutes, followed by weeks of depression and anxiety,” wrote the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw in 2014. “Threads had flooded my body with the diabolic opposite of adrenaline.”

The guest list is long at the Paris Theater. Kathleen Turner will be on hand for a screening of Danny DeVito’s dark comedy The War of the Roses (1989), and John Turturro will talk about his work with Joel and Ethan Coen on Miller’s Crossing (1990), which Glenn Kenny calls “a terse and lyrical fable of violence, loyalty, and existential unease that draws on the hard-boiled fiction of Dashiell Hammett.”

Kenneth Lonergan will take part in a Q&A following a screening of his almost unbearably painful Manchester by the Sea (2016), and Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold, fresh from their appearances in LA, will talk about their collaboration on Vox Lux. Todd Solondz will close out Bleak Week NYC when he takes part in a conversation following a screening of a new restoration of Happiness (1998), which sees its New York premiere on Friday at IFC Center.

“It’s glib to say that Happiness is black comedy, even though it’s true,” writes novelist and screenwriter Bruce Wagner (Wild Palms). “Too easy to say the film is about people yearning to connect, though of course that would be true as well. It’s much more than that. For me, like all his films, Happiness is a hard-core, marathon partita, an extended commedia dell’arte of droll, nuanced errors, terrors, and consequences—a dream in which the dreamers suffer ‘day and night, night and day’ through a hellish Cole Porter loop. They suffer because they’re winners and losers, too sensitive, blighted, arrogant, sadistic, dumb, lustful, self-obsessed, isolated, vacant, and tormented; infirm, dying, or disabled; too talented, too beautiful—too human.”

Siobhan Fallon Hogan will open Bleak Week at the Coolidge Corner Theatre when she discusses her work with Lars von Trier on Dancer in the Dark and Dogville (2003). Reviewing Dogville for the Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote: “For passion, originality, and sustained chutzpah, this austere allegory of failed Christian charity and Old Testament payback is von Trier’s strongest movie—a masterpiece, in fact.”

On June 10, the Coolidge will present a Lynne Ramsay double feature, Ratcatcher (1999) and We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011). “Ramsay’s is a cinema where the drama lives not in the exposition or dialogue but in the innumerable small audiovisual details that carry suggestion and meaning,” writes Girish Shambu. “Little wonder that her formative interest as an artist was photography.”

The lineup also features two films by Michael Haneke, Funny Games (2007)—the English-language version starring Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, and Brady Corbet—and The White Ribbon (2009), which won the Palme d’Or. Meantime, Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective begins rolling out across the UK this Friday.

The Texas Theatre raises its Bleak Week curtain with The Turin Horse (2011) on 35 mm. Béla Tarr’s final feature is the culmination of his collaboration with novelist László Krasznahorkai, “a writing relationship that seemingly consists of mutually reinforcing each other’s sense of the end,” as Nick Pinkerton wrote in the Voice. “Tarr and Krasznahorkai point to entropy as the major agent in history; with The Turin Horse, a last testament movie that mocks the idea of enduring testaments, they have finally burned themselves cold.”

Also screening on 35 mm are Salò and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008), and the Week will wrap in Dallas with Killer of Sheep (1977). “There are no raging explosions,” writes Danielle Amir Jackson of Charles Burnett’s debut feature, “no epic battles; one man goes to work, confronts his despair, and decides to live.”

On May 1, the Prince Charles Cinema was designated as an Asset of Community Value, and “though this recognition is a huge honor, the fight continues to secure a long term lease that will enable us to invest in our future development and continue to bring the best of what we do to Leicester Place.” What they’ll be doing at noon on a Sunday is opening its Bleak Week program with Andrew Haigh’s introduction to a screening of Martin Rosen’s Watership Down (1978).

Gerard Jones has noted that this classic animated feature is “a children’s movie of the classic shape. A group of lovable characters are forced into a perilous journey, come up against a terrifying enemy, win an unexpected ally, and join together for a triumph against all odds. Its tone is earnest and muted, its rhythms gentle, its setting an English countryside of watercolor hedgerows and meadows colored by flute and oboe. There’s violence in it, some blood, some pain, some brief but stabbing suspense. What’s most haunting about it, though, is also what sets it apart from nearly everything of its type: its sweet, sad wisdom about the nature of life in the shadow of death.”

While the Prince Charles will screen films by F. W. Murnau (The Last Laugh, 1924), Robert Altman (Images, 1972), Andrzej Zulawski (The Devil, 1972), William Friedkin (Sorcerer, 1977), Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves, 1996), John Hillcoat (The Proposition, 2005), Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, 2007), David Lynch (Twin Peaks: Season 3, Episode 8, 2017), and David Cronenberg (The Shrouds, 2024), the home team will be well represented. Mike Leigh, for example, is a natural fit with Bleak Moments (1971) and Naked (1993).

June 17 will see the world premiere of a new 4K restoration of Alan Clarke’s Scum (1979). “A ferocious exposé of life in Britain’s notorious borstals, or youth detention centers, the movie tells you much that you probably already know about incarcerated young men, their vicious pecking orders and the corrupt authorities overseeing their rehabilitation,” wrote Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times a few years ago. “But it tells it with scalding wit and coolly riveting style, in the visual equivalent of spare, brilliant prose that occasionally bleeds (and bleeds and bleeds) into poetry.”

Further showcasing British talent, the program also features Ken Loach’s Kes (1969), Mike Hodges’s Get Carter (1971), Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996), Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth (1997), Steve McQueen’s Shame (2011), Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur (2011), Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant (2013), Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014), and Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun (2022). There are also hard-hitting films set on the Isles directed by outsiders: Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971), Richard Fleischer’s 10 Rillington Place (1971), Jimmy T. Murakami’s When the Wind Blows (1986), and Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006).

On June 20, the Prince Charles will present a Bleak Week–themed mystery movie. Londoners know the rules: “No Clues. No Hints. No Refunds.” The programmers warn that “despair is the name of the game with this one, so if you’re not prepared for a melancholic night at the movies then we suggest picking something else.” But why not “give in to the temptation and let a little mystery misery into your life”?