Other Goings On

In New York, Musclefest opens tomorrow at the Roxy Cinema and runs through Sunday. For AnOther Magazine, Elizabeth Purchell, the founder of Muscle Distribution, points out several highlights of this “four-night celebration of deep-cut restorations and underground trans and queer cinema.”

The festival will open with the New York premiere of Louise Weard’s Castration Movie Chapter iii. Junior Ghosts—Premorphic Drift; a fragmentary passage. “Weard has created a cinematic extended universe,” writes Rachel Pronger for Sight and Sound, “a parallel world in which artists, incels, sex workers, and cult leaders collide in genre-hopping exchanges that range from cringe comedy to social satire to full-on horror-movie nightmare.”

The Rockaway Film Festival opens today and spotlights the work of Peter Hutton, Heiny Srour, and Caveh Zahedi, among many others. John Wilson will be there to talk about his Sundance hit, The History of Concrete, and musical and theatrical performances will be a lively part of the festivities as well.

Starting Friday, František Vláčil’s Marketa Lazarová (1967) returns to the big screen with a weeklong at Film at Lincoln Center. “Most films lay out a journey for us, take us for a ride, exhilarate or charm us, but give us some idea of where we are going,” wrote Tom Gunning in 2013. “Marketa Lazarová sweeps us up in a sort of rapture before we even get our feet on the ground.”

Also on Friday, Metrograph will launch surveys of work by Hong Kong “creative engine” Tsui Hark and cinematographer Darius Khondji. And on Saturday and Sunday, Asia Society will screen “five landmark films that reveal the fertile exchange between contemporary art and Chinese cinema from the late 1980s through the turn of the twenty-first century.”

Mel Brooks turned 100 this summer, and to celebrate, the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles will screen twenty of his favorite films from tomorrow through November 1. “The lineup spans nearly nine decades of Brooks’s own lifetime,” notes Josh Rottenberg in the Los Angeles Times, and Brooks tells him that putting together the list of titles “reminded me about why I first fell in love with the art of film.”

On Friday, Mezzanine and This Friday will copresent a screening of Chantal Akerman’s Histoires d’Amérique (1989) at 2220 Arts + Archives. Programmer Micah Gottlieb calls the film a “singular attempt to capture the essence of the modern American Jewish diaspora in all its hangdog melancholy and anecdotal bliss.”

Presented by the San Francisco Cinematheque, the Crossroads Film Festival (Friday through Sunday) is “a Bay Area sampler quilt of artist-made film and video,” writes Elise Schierbeek for Screen Slate. “The festival is a special occasion for eclecticism, remix, and craft. Crossroads’s dedicated quilt-maker is artistic director Steve Polta, who once again offers the city a visual feast of contemporary international avant-garde moving images that will include eight works screened on 16 mm. The programs are intuitive, bringing together themes related to alchemy, haunting, and automatism.”

Starting tomorrow, Alice Diop will be at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive through September 13 as BAMPFA presents a retrospective running through September 18. And on Saturday, BAMPFA will launch two more retrospectives, Jean-Luc Godard’s Early Films (through November 19) and Martin Scorsese Pictures (through June 2027).

In London, the BFI is launching seasons dedicated to the work of Claude Chabrol,Sarah Maldoror, and Harry Dean Stanton, and from Saturday through October 22, the Garden Cinema will present a series of landmark films that made the Czechoslovak New Wave one of the most enduring movements of the 1960s.

Christoph Hochhäusler will be at the Arsenal in Berlin tomorrow and Friday as a retrospective of his work runs through September 24 in conjunction with an exhibition opening at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein on September 10. On view through November 8, the exhibition presents storyboards, on-set photographs, film posters, and issues of Revolver, the film magazine Hochhäusler cofounded in 1998.

From today through October 22, the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna is presenting a five-film tribute to Michael Mann, “one of Hollywood's last great auteurist filmmakers.” And the Melbourne Cinémathèque is showcasing the work of Mario Bava, “the Diabolical Magician of Cinecittà,” through September 16.