If you haven’t had a chance to see what may be the best film of the year—that’s right, I said it!—and were worried that you were about to miss your opportunity, fret not: Film Forum has extended its run of Claire Denis’s gorgeous, sublime drama about fathers, daughters, diasporas, train conductors, Ozu homages and how to best seduce someone with a Commodores song. (That’d be “Nightshift,” for those of you playing along at home.) But don’t think that this moving ode to the process of leaving the nest will be around forever. We strongly recommend you check it out ASAP. And by the way, the next round is on you. 35 Shots of Rum screens today at 1:15, 3:30, 5:40, 7:50 and 9:50pm.

Let’s say you leave your uptown office for a quick bite to eat. You bop down to the corner deli and grab a Reuben—they make really great Reubens, by the way; also, try the matzo ball soup, it’s stunning—and head back to work. When you walk in, every single one of your colleagues has been shot dead. Really, what choice do you have but to go underground and take refuge with Faye Dunaway? Sydney Pollack’s 1975 nail-biter is a classic example of Nixon-era paranoia and CIA-spooks-run-wild shenanigans stuffed into a sausage skin of a star vehicle, yet it never sacrifices intelligence or thrills in the name of displaying Robert Redford’s pretty-boy puss. As an intelligence-agency analyst left out in the cold, the Blond One is forced to avoid Max von Sydow’s Nordic assassin (just beat him at a game of chess, Bob) and find out who’s sold him down the river; you’ll be pleasantly surprised how well the Horror City grit of ’70s Gotham suits him. The movie is the last entry in BAM’s Tribute to Redford, and it screens at 6:50 and 9:30pm.

Derided by the U.K. press upon its release (four months before they would get a gander at prodigal son Alfred Hitchcock’s similar proto-slasher film, Psycho), Michael Powell’s curdled 1960 horror masterpiece takes cinephilia to a whole new level. The “hero”—played by Carl Boehm—works in a film studio during the day; at night he prowls the street with a 16mm camera and makes snuff flicks. It’s sleazy, salacious and creepy as hell, and the estimable English director watched his career go up in flames thanks to the reception this perverse portrait of homicidal obsession inspired; it wasn’t until Martin Scorsese procured an uncut print and screened it during the 1979 New York Film Festival that American critics realized what a brilliant work this auteur had created. “All this filming…it isn’t healthy,” a character tells the psychologically damaged protagonist. You said a mouthful there, sister. The movie plays as part of Film Forum’s “Brit Noir” series; it screens at 3:30, 5:30, 7:30 and 9:30pm.

Documentarian Ross McElwee has never been shy about mining his life for compelling film fodder (his 1986 lookin’-for-love magnum opus, Sherman’s March, is a great example of first-person vérité done right). For this 2003 self-portraiture, the director delved deep into his Southern roots—specifically, his kin’s storied history with Big Tobacco. This being a McElwee movie, of course, there’s also a fair amount of tangential detours, personal anecdotes and peripheral material involving Michael Curtiz’s 1950 plantation melodrama, Bright Leaf (big up, Gary Cooper!). This intriguing history-lesson-cum-family-album plays as part of Film Society at Lincoln Center’s tribute to First Run Features; it screens at 4:15 and 8:45pm.

Boaz Rein-Buskila has been having this same dream for years: a pack of rabid mutts, all bright yellow eyes and bared teeth, barking under a window. It goes back to the former Israeli soldier’s time in Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon War, where he served with filmmaker Ari Folman. “Don’t these things haunt you?” Rein-Buskila asks his comrade. “That’s not stored in my system,” the director replies, though that’s technically not true; the bad memories are there, they just need to brought to the surface. Part documentary and part free-form exorcism, Folman’s Oscar-nominated journey through his—and his country’s—checkered past explores the psychic trauma inflicted on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict. That each of the incidents is rendered in animation that appears to have been lifted from an old, out-of-sync Johnny Quest episode makes it all the more surreal and hallucinatory. If you missed this 2008 ciritical favorite, you owe to it yourself to check it out tonight at Socrates Sculpture Park; the outdoor screening starts at sundown.

Sandwiched between two era-defining, career-eclipsing gangster flicks, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 thriller is more than just a breather between winning Oscars; this ode to paranoia is a pitch-perfect encapsulation of both the nauseaous vibe of Nixon’s Amerikkka and the artistic vitality of New Hollywood’s darker impulses. Gene Hackman’s wiretap expert, Harry Caul, is content to go about his business with a detached, demure professionalism. Then he overhears something fishy—is someone planning a murder?—and he decides to get personally involved. Bad move, Harry. Showing as part of BAM Rose Cinema’s tribute to John Cazale (have a look at our appreciaton; the late actor plays Hackman’s socially clammy assistant), this intriguing character study never makes a false move. Everything from Hackman’s tiny tics to Walter Murch’s spooky sound design emphasizes a psychological unraveling on a micro and macro level. Seen in light of today’s surveillance culture, Coppola’s tiny masterpiece couldn’t seem more prescient. The film screens at 7pm, and is preceded by Richard Shepard’s brief 2008 portrait of Cazale, I Knew It Was You.

“Down there I sell whiskey and cards,” purrs Joan Crawford’s saloon-runnin’, gunslingin’, tough-talkin’ woman of the West. “All you can buy up these stairs is a bullet in the head. Now which do you want?” Arguably the crown jewel in Film Forum’s in-progress Nick Ray retrospective, this 1954 gender-bent oater puts the opera in horse opera; even when characters are whispering threats or murmuring sweet nothings to each other; there’s the sense that things could boil over at any second. Camp hysterics meet metaphorical meanings (the mob-rules mentality of the movie’s posse is thinly veiled critique of Senator McCarthy’s witch hunts), along with some truly delicious dialogue and the director’s signature intensity. It’s a favorite of both Martin Scorsese and Jean-Luc Godard; it’ll soon be one of yours, pardner. The movie screens today at 1:10, 3:20 and 10pm; for info on the rest of the series, check out Film Forum’s site.

There have been several notable film adaptations of Shakespeare’s “Scottish play” (gotta avoid that pesky curse!), but few have been as bloody or as burdened by backstory as this stunning 1971 version from Roman Polanski. The director was out of town in the summer of ’69 when the Manson gang murdered his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate; the sheer amount of brutal violence and gore on display in his first posttrauma project suggests nothing so much an exorcism. There’s nary a drop of the milk of human kindness to be found, with Jon Finch’s titular tortured soul and Francesca Annis’s spot-obsessed spouse practically marinating in dread. But with all due respect to Orson Welles, you arguably won’t find a more cinematic take on the play, and the chance to see the daggers in men’s smiles on the Film Society of Lincoln Center screen isn’t one to pass up. Go out, out, Bard-loving moviegoers!

“The stuff dreams are made of,” mutters sleuth-for-hire Sam Spade, referencing the titular black statue that’s had everyone in a tizzy. He might as well be talking about the movie itself: John Huston’s 1941 adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s pulp detective novel is the kind of movie that classic-film fanatics fantasize about in their deepest REM sleep. Humphrey Bogart’s trench-coated-tough-guy take on Hammett’s antihero is the definition of a ’40s private dick, Mary Astor redefines the notion of the double-crossing femme fatale, and the supporting cast—Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook Jr., Ward Bond—make for one helluva character-actor rogue’s gallery. Head over to Brooklyn Bridge Park tonight and check it out.

Long before the Dude abided or Anton Chigurh perfected his whole I’m-flipping-the-coin-Friendo shtick, Joel and Ethan Coen gave the world this gloriously goofy 1987 comedy about an ex-con (Nicolas Cage, pre–action hero) who kidnaps a baby for his bio-clocks-a-tickin’ wife (Holly Hunter). Not just any infant, mind you, but one of the quintuplets born to a wealthy furniture magnate. If you’re like us, you can probably quote this neoclassic by heart (”We released ourselves on our recognizance…we felt the institution no longer had anything to offer us”) and know every Tex Avery–esque gag by heart. But the chance to see this with a crowd, under the stars and on a lovely summer evening as part of the Movies with a View series, should not be passed up. Turn to the right!

French director Louis Malle could be wildly uneven: Skim through his back catalog and you’ll find several foreign-film staples (Elevator to the Gallows; Au Revoir, Les Enfants), the odd WTF? comedy (his undeniably brilliant Absurdist goof Zazie dans le Metro), metatheatrical adaptations (Vanya on 42nd Street) and an occasional cringeworthy clunker (Pretty Baby). But this 1990 take on the familial drama—one with several tips of the hat to Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game to boot—is a keeper, and simply a joy to behold. May 1968 is in full swing, Paris is beset by student riots, and in a large, sprawling house in the country, several grown-up siblings fight over their mother’s estate. It’s screening as part of the French Institute Alliance François’s tribute to Michel Piccoli (he plays the eldest son, who’s been running the clan’s vineyard into the ground); showtimes are at 4 and 7:30pm.

Is it a coincidence that the two best things I’ve seen since slouching into Park City are essentially one-man shows, with one-word titles that end with -son and that center on raging psychopaths? (Actually, one of the gentlemen in question is more of a reformed madman, but we’ll get to that in a bit.) Does this say something about me? Should I be consulting a therapist and working through some buried issues? In any case, these respective portraits—one a biopic, the other a documentary—have stood out in what’s been a year of few valleys (Paper Heart notwithstanding) and even fewer peaks. But here are two men, each the human equivalent of a clenched fist, staring into the camera and chilling you to the marrow. They each took me to hell and back, left me trembling and made me grateful for the trips.

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Remember when you bought a Blu-ray player, and prayed to your respective god(s) that Criterion would jump on the Blu bandwagon? Then do you remember how the company that set the standard for how films should be presented in home-entertainment formats announced that its first wave of Blu-ray titles would be coming out in November? And how you jumped for joy, nearly landing on your cats (names: Orson and Truffaut) and you bounded over to your calendar to circle the dates—11/18 and 11/21? 

Then remember how you heard they’d been postponed, and you wept, and your cats laughed at you in their sneering, mocking feline way? (Memo to self: Kill those damned cats.) And—why, just this morning!—you saw that circled date on your calendar, and the wounds opened anew?

Well, there’s no need to fret, as Criterion has announced new dates for its initial Blu-ray offerings. The first four titles—The Third Man, Bottle Rocket, Chungking Express and The Man Who Fell to Earth—will now be released on December 16; a fifth title, Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, will hit shelves on January 9, 2009. (There was originally another addition to the Criterion Blu brothers—Gregory Nava’s El Norte—but neither the press release nor the company’s website mentions a new date. We’re assuming details for that particular disc are still TBD.) So yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and that jolly old elf may bring you a Third Man disc for the holidays that looks better than anything you’ve ever seen before. Just so long as he doesn’t bring you a cuckoo clock instead…

Oh, and for those of us who haven’t quite got around to investing in a Blu-ray player yet, there’s still good news on the Criterion front: It’s having a 40-percent-off sale right now on select titles from its back catalog when you order directly from the site. If you’ve been waiting to nab that Berlin Alexanderplatz box set for under a gajillion dollars, now’s your chance.

Imagine that scholars had come across a dusty, misplaced satchel filled with manuscripts by William Shakespeare. Inside were a few plays that were already part of the Western literary canon (Macbeth, King Lear) and some of the Bard’s lauded but lesser gems (Titus Andronicus, As You Like It). But stuffed in between these known works were writings that had long been absent from the public eye and were rarely discussed even by ardent fanatics. Perhaps the only remaining copies of these vintage pieces had been left to rot in a vault, but here were documents that were in decent enough shape to be completely restored to their former glory (or at least as close as you could get). Maybe they weren’t all masterpieces, but even the standard—and substandard—works informed and commented indirectly on the classics. You’d be one giant step closer to evaluating the artist’s catalog by a better, bigger-picture standard.

And then imagine someone made this incredible find consumer-friendly and put it on the market in time for the holidays.
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The highlight of my workday usually happens somewhere between 10:30 and 11:30am, when my cubiclemate Joshua Rothkopf (pictured above) bounds into the office, caffeinated and wielding a power tool, and starts waxing about whatever new horror flick he’s seen recently. It usually starts like this: “Dude, you really need to see Final Destination 3. It’s a totally significant comment on the cultural shift toward….” [Cut to me rolling my eyes and sipping my espresso, dainty pinky extended.] By the end of his lecture, however, I’m either calling up Moviefone to order tickets, or filling up my Netflix queue with any number of titles he’s just name-dropped. He’s that good. (Read Rothkopf’s recent feature on the current wave of nouveau horror if you don’t believe me.) Read more »