Cinematheque Film Schedule

United States | 1962 | John Ford

John Wayne, James Stewart, and Lee Marvin star in this great John Ford western—a poignant, melancholy account of the taming of the Old West. The movie revolves around three men: a tenderfoot Eastern lawyer (Stewart), an outlaw who terrorizes him (Marvin), and a grizzled, gun-toting rancher who befriends him (Wayne). With Vera Miles, John Carradine, Woody Strode, Lee Van Cleef, et al. The film will be introduced on Friday night by Cleveland Institute of Art...

Denmark | 2012 | Mads Matthiesen

An imposing but painfully shy 38-year-old Danish bodybuilder (Kim Kold) who lives at home with his mom and has never experienced love travels to Thailand to find a bride. This sweet, disarming film is one of the year’s most pleasant (and acclaimed) surprises. As the man of steel with a heart of cotton candy, Kim Kold “gives what may be the performance of the year” (Time Out Film Guide ).

France, Germany | 1981 | Andrzej Zulawski

Short of over 40 minutes when first released in the U.S. (and banned outright for a number of years in Britain), this bloody, over-the-top exercise in Grand Guignol stars Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani as a married couple going through a traumatic break-up. Arguments and furniture-smashing soon give way to self-mutilation, killings, and sex with doppelgangers and with a tentacled monster created by Oscar-winning F/X master Carlo Rambaldi (E.T., Alien), who died in August. Adjani...

United States | 1962 | John Frankenheimer

This exciting Cold War thriller tells a paranoid story of political extremists in Washington (what a concept!) and a decorated Korean War hero who’s been brainwashed into becoming an assassin. Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, and a villainous Angela Lansbury star. “Daring, funny, and far-out…May be the most sophisticated political thriller ever made in Hollywood.” –Pauline Kael.

USSR | 1977 | Aleksei Guerman

In 1942 a Soviet Army officer and writer on a 20-day leave from the front travels to his hometown of Tashkent. Witnessing the effects of war on the general populace along the way, he meets up in Tashkent with his ex-wife and strikes up a new romance with another woman. He also observes the production of a film version of his wartime memoirs, taking special note of the disconnect between his lived reality and the...

Czech Republic, France, Japan | 2009/12 | Jirí Barta, Vivian Schilling

Next to Jan Švankmajer, Jirí Barta is the foremost stop-motion animator working in the Czech Republic today. And that’s saying a lot, because the Czechs have excelled at grown-up puppet films and grotesque object animation for decades. Having shown a number of Barta’s movies over the years, the Cinematheque returns to the Capitol Theatre tonight to present his first feature film in two decades—a twisted Toy Story that’s perfect for the sick-of-Christmas season. Toys in...

USSR | 1986 | Aleksei Guerman

The funny-sad-heroic life of a 1930s provincial police investigator is fondly remembered in this acclaimed memory piece set in a young, optimistic Soviet Union shortly before Stalin’s Great Purge. It’s one of Aleksei Guerman’s greatest movies (as well as one of the most revered Russian films of the past 25 years); Guerman adapted a novel by his writer father, Yuri.

Australia | 1971 | Ted Kotcheff

This re-discovered and newly restored “Ozploitation” classic follows an Australian teacher on his way to Sydney for Christmas break who spends one night in a brutal Outback small town. Succumbing to local traditions, the teacher begins drinking and gambling with the rough, uncouth townspeople. Pretty soon he is at their mercy—trapped in a remote, morally bankrupt desert town where macho rituals of womanizing, fighting, and hunting test one’s manhood. Eventually the educator’s civilized exterior falls...

Sweden | 2010 | Daniel Espinosa

This hit Swedish crime thriller, which has spawned two Swedish sequels and a coming American remake, stars Joel Kinnaman (AMC’s The Killing) as a poor but handsome Swedish business student who turns to organized crime and cocaine dealing to finance a second, double life within Stockholm’s wealthy jet set. “One of the best underworld films I’ve seen in years.” –Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly. “A great gangster pic.” -Philadelphia Inquirer.

United States | 2011 | Ron Fricke

Ron Fricke, the cinematographer of Koyaanisqatsi and director of Baraka, returns with another visually stunning, non-verbal movie filmed in remote, exotic locations around the world. Shot on large-format 70mm film over a period of five years in 25 countries and five continents, Samsara (the title is a Sanskrit word that means “the ever-turning wheel of life”) captures sacred rituals, natural wonders, huge industrial complexes, and epic disaster areas in a series of eye-popping, mind-blowing images...

Sweden | 2010 | Daniel Espinosa

This hit Swedish crime thriller, which has spawned two Swedish sequels and a coming American remake, stars Joel Kinnaman (AMC’s The Killing) as a poor but handsome Swedish business student who turns to organized crime and cocaine dealing to finance a second, double life within Stockholm’s wealthy jet set. “One of the best underworld films I’ve seen in years.” –Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly. “A great gangster pic.” -Philadelphia Inquirer.

United States | 2011 | Ron Fricke

Ron Fricke, the cinematographer of Koyaanisqatsi and director of Baraka, returns with another visually stunning, non-verbal movie filmed in remote, exotic locations around the world. Shot on large-format 70mm film over a period of five years in 25 countries and five continents, Samsara (the title is a Sanskrit word that means “the ever-turning wheel of life”) captures sacred rituals, natural wonders, huge industrial complexes, and epic disaster areas in a series of eye-popping, mind-blowing images...

United States | 1962 | Stanley Kubrick

The movie Kubrick made right before Dr. Strangelove is a funny, fascinating adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s famous novel about a respectable professor’s unnatural love for his landlady’s teenage daughter. James Mason plays the obsessed Humbert Humbert and Sue Lyon is Lolita. Shelley Winters and Peter Sellers also star; script credited to Nabokov.

United States | 1962 | Stanley Kubrick

The movie Kubrick made right before Dr. Strangelove is a funny, fascinating adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s famous novel about a respectable professor’s unnatural love for his landlady’s teenage daughter. James Mason plays the obsessed Humbert Humbert and Sue Lyon is Lolita. Shelley Winters and Peter Sellers also star; script credited to Nabokov.

Australia | 1971 | Ted Kotcheff

This re-discovered and newly restored “Ozploitation” classic follows an Australian teacher on his way to Sydney for Christmas break who spends one night in a brutal Outback small town. Succumbing to local traditions, the teacher begins drinking and gambling with the rough, uncouth townspeople. Pretty soon he is at their mercy—trapped in a remote, morally bankrupt desert town where macho rituals of womanizing, fighting, and hunting test one’s manhood. Eventually the educator’s civilized exterior falls...

USSR | 1986 | Aleksei Guerman

The funny-sad-heroic life of a 1930s provincial police investigator is fondly remembered in this acclaimed memory piece set in a young, optimistic Soviet Union shortly before Stalin’s Great Purge. It’s one of Aleksei Guerman’s greatest movies (as well as one of the most revered Russian films of the past 25 years); Guerman adapted a novel by his writer father, Yuri.

Finland, France, Norway, Sweden | 2010 | Jalmari Helander

This isn’t your typical heartwarming holiday classic but a spooky, darkly comic, grim fairy tale rooted in ancient Scandinavian mythology. (When we first showed it last year, the audience lapped it up.) Set in northern Finland, it tells of a Santa found frozen in a block of ice who turns out to be more monster than merrymaker. With similarities to Gremlins and The Thing, Rare Exports is a surefire cult classic in the making. “The...

United States | 2012 | Craig Zobel

Accused of theft by a policeman on the phone, an attractive young woman working at an Ohio fast-food restaurant is detained, strip-searched, humiliated, and violated in the restaurant’s back room by her boss, fellow employees, and one outsider—all of them following spoken orders from the unseen cop. Based on a true case, this disturbing account of how ordinary people kowtow to authority was co-produced by Cleveland’s Tyler Davidson (Take Shelter). It’s one of the most...

United States | 2012 | Craig Zobel

Accused of theft by a policeman on the phone, an attractive young woman working at an Ohio fast-food restaurant is detained, strip-searched, humiliated, and violated in the restaurant’s back room by her boss, fellow employees, and one outsider—all of them following spoken orders from the unseen cop. Based on a true case, this disturbing account of how ordinary people kowtow to authority was co-produced by Cleveland’s Tyler Davidson (Take Shelter). It’s one of the most...

France | 2010 | Guillaume Canet

Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose), François Cluzet (The Intouchables), and Jean Dujardin (The Artist) star in the new film from the director of the hit French thriller Tell No One. It’s a seriocomic drama about a group of attractive, successful Paris friends with assorted personal/interpersonal problems who embark on their annual beach vacation in the south of France—despite the conscience-pricking fact that one member of their group lies injured in a hospital back home....

United States | 1962 | Roger Corman

One of Roger Corman’s most serious and powerful movies was also, reputedly, the only film of his to lose money on its initial release. William Shatner plays a rabble-rousing racist who shows up one day in a small Southern town to foment white hatred for blacks and prod them to protest the forced integration of their schools. Screenplay by frequent Twilight Zone writer Charles Beaumont.

France | 2010 | Guillaume Canet

Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose), François Cluzet (The Intouchables), and Jean Dujardin (The Artist) star in the new film from the director of the hit French thriller Tell No One. It’s a seriocomic drama about a group of attractive, successful Paris friends with assorted personal/interpersonal problems who embark on their annual beach vacation in the south of France—despite the conscience-pricking fact that one member of their group lies injured in a hospital back home....

Finland, France, Norway, Sweden | 2010 | Jalmari Helander

This isn’t your typical heartwarming holiday classic but a spooky, darkly comic, grim fairy tale rooted in ancient Scandinavian mythology. (When we first showed it last year, the audience lapped it up.) Set in northern Finland, it tells of a Santa found frozen in a block of ice who turns out to be more monster than merrymaker. With similarities to Gremlins and The Thing, Rare Exports is a surefire cult classic in the making. “The...