Cinematheque Film Schedule

France, Ireland, Italy | 2011 | Paolo Sorrentino

Moviegoers buzzed about this odd but lovable road movie when we showed it in January—so we’re bringing it back. Sean Penn is unforgettable as Cheyenne, a retired American rock star with Edward Scissorhands-like features (black hair, pasty face, red lips, timid voice) living in Dublin. When his estranged, Holocaust-survivor father is dying, Cheyenne returns to the U.S. Soon he’s an avenging angel, traversing America to locate and kill the aged ex-Nazi who humiliated his...

Germany | 2012 | Christian Petzold

Germany’s official entry for this year’s foreign language film Oscar is one of the most gripping and acclaimed movies of 2012, with an overall metacrtic.com rating of 87 out of 100. Nina Hoss, the regular muse of director Christian Petzold (Yella, Jerichow), plays a surgeon in 1980 East Germany who is demoted to a small rural hospital on the Baltic Sea after she expresses a desire to leave the repressive GDR. There, under the watchful...

France | 1959 | Georges Franju

This poetic horror film is one of the movies most frequently referenced in Leos Carax’s Holy Motors (see 4/18); the two films even share the same co-star, Edith Scob. Pierre Brasseur plays a mad plastic surgeon who kidnaps beautiful young women and then attempts to transplant their faces onto his daughter who was disfigured in a car crash. Unfolds like a surrealist’s nightmare! With Alida Valli.

Germany | 2012 | Christian Petzold

Germany’s official entry for this year’s foreign language film Oscar is one of the most gripping and acclaimed movies of 2012, with an overall metacrtic.com rating of 87 out of 100. Nina Hoss, the regular muse of director Christian Petzold (Yella, Jerichow), plays a surgeon in 1980 East Germany who is demoted to a small rural hospital on the Baltic Sea after she expresses a desire to leave the repressive GDR. There, under the watchful...

Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden | 2011 | Lars von Trier

Named the Best Film of 2011 by both the National Society of Film Critics and the European Film Awards, Lars von Trier’s most recent movie is a visually stunning drama with an all-star cast: Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland, et al. Set at a lavish estate, the film follows two sisters at a disastrous dusk-to-dawn wedding reception—and later on the property as a rogue planet hurtles toward earth on a possible collision course.

Germany | 2012 | Christian Petzold

Germany’s official entry for this year’s foreign language film Oscar is one of the most gripping and acclaimed movies of 2012, with an overall metacrtic.com rating of 87 out of 100. Nina Hoss, the regular muse of director Christian Petzold (Yella, Jerichow), plays a surgeon in 1980 East Germany who is demoted to a small rural hospital on the Baltic Sea after she expresses a desire to leave the repressive GDR. There, under the watchful...

France | 1959 | Georges Franju

This poetic horror film is one of the movies most frequently referenced in Leos Carax’s Holy Motors (see 4/18); the two films even share the same co-star, Edith Scob. Pierre Brasseur plays a mad plastic surgeon who kidnaps beautiful young women and then attempts to transplant their faces onto his daughter who was disfigured in a car crash. Unfolds like a surrealist’s nightmare! With Alida Valli.

France, Ireland, Italy | 2011 | Paolo Sorrentino

Moviegoers buzzed about this odd but lovable road movie when we showed it in January—so we’re bringing it back. Sean Penn is unforgettable as Cheyenne, a retired American rock star with Edward Scissorhands-like features (black hair, pasty face, red lips, timid voice) living in Dublin. When his estranged, Holocaust-survivor father is dying, Cheyenne returns to the U.S. Soon he’s an avenging angel, traversing America to locate and kill the aged ex-Nazi who humiliated his...

United States | 2012 | Sacha Gervasi

A jowly Anthony Hopkins portrays Alfred Hitchcock in this new film about the making of Psycho. It’s a very entertaining movie, but is it accurate? Phil Skerry, professor emeritus at Lakeland Community College and northeast Ohio’s foremost Hitchcock expert (he published his own book on the 1960 shocker, Psycho in the Shower: The History of Cinema’s Most Famous Scene, a few years ago), will weigh in tonight when he introduces Hitchcock and leads a post-film...

Austria, France, Germany | 2003 | Michael Haneke

Isabelle Huppert stars in this ten-year-old rarity from the director of Amour, The White Ribbon, and Caché. It’s a disaster film devoid of Hollywood heroes and special effects in which an affluent French woman and her two children try to survive in a post-apocalyptic world with no electricity and serious shortages of food and water. Haneke paints a dark, nightmarish portrait of the barbarism that lurks beneath the fragile surface of civilization. With Beatrice Dalle....

Austria, France, Germany | 2003 | Michael Haneke

Isabelle Huppert stars in this ten-year-old rarity from the director of Amour, The White Ribbon, and Caché. It’s a disaster film devoid of Hollywood heroes and special effects in which an affluent French woman and her two children try to survive in a post-apocalyptic world with no electricity and serious shortages of food and water. Haneke paints a dark, nightmarish portrait of the barbarism that lurks beneath the fragile surface of civilization. With Beatrice Dalle....

United States | 2012 | Sacha Gervasi

A jowly Anthony Hopkins portrays Alfred Hitchcock in this new film about the making of Psycho. It’s a very entertaining movie, but is it accurate? Phil Skerry, professor emeritus at Lakeland Community College and northeast Ohio’s foremost Hitchcock expert (he published his own book on the 1960 shocker, Psycho in the Shower: The History of Cinema’s Most Famous Scene, a few years ago), will weigh in tonight when he introduces Hitchcock and leads a post-film...

United States | 1971 | Jim McBride

Originally rated X, this forgotten futuristic fantasy from the director of David Holzman’s Diary and The Big Easy tells of two long-haired teenagers who look like 1960s hippies but are actually inhabitants of a post-apocalyptic world a few decades after Woodstock. (In other words, it takes place around now). Glen and Randa leave their rural tribe and set off in search of a great city that they have seen pictured in the lost civilization’s surviving...

South Korea | 2012 | Choo Chang-min

The third highest grossing movie in South Korean film history is a sumptuous period piece starring Asian superstar Lee Byung-hun (The Good, the Bad, the Weird). Evoking Kagemusha and Dave, the movie tells of an unpopular 17th-century king who hires a comic-actor commoner to impersonate him wherever there might be an assassination attempt.

New Zealand | 2009 | Leanne Pooley

This hugely popular crowd-pleaser—an audience hit Down Under, in North America, and everywhere it has played—profiles two unlikely celebrities. New Zealand’s Jools and Lynda Topp are fiftysomething butch lesbians—twin sisters who make their living as comedic country-and-western singers who yodel, and promote progressive political causes on the side. The talent and joie de vivre that have endeared the Topps to Kiwis for decades are well captured in this infectious portrait that won the People’s Choice...

France | 2012 | Lorraine Levy

An Israeli Jewish couple and a Palestinian couple discover that their 18-year-old sons were accidentally switched at birth—and thus raised by “enemies.” This acclaimed, provocative drama skirts overt sentimentality to become a genuinely touching crowd-pleaser. With Emmanuelle Devos. Co-presented by Cleveland Peace Action, whose members will lead a discussion after the screening.

New Zealand | 2009 | Leanne Pooley

This hugely popular crowd-pleaser—an audience hit Down Under, in North America, and everywhere it has played—profiles two unlikely celebrities. New Zealand’s Jools and Lynda Topp are fiftysomething butch lesbians—twin sisters who make their living as comedic country-and-western singers who yodel, and promote progressive political causes on the side. The talent and joie de vivre that have endeared the Topps to Kiwis for decades are well captured in this infectious portrait that won the People’s Choice...

South Korea | 2012 | Choo Chang-min

The third highest grossing movie in South Korean film history is a sumptuous period piece starring Asian superstar Lee Byung-hun (The Good, the Bad, the Weird). Evoking Kagemusha and Dave, the movie tells of an unpopular 17th-century king who hires a comic-actor commoner to impersonate him wherever there might be an assassination attempt.

France, Italy, Spain | 1970 | Luis Buñuel

Catherine Deneuve, Fernando Rey, and Franco (Django) Nero star in this late Buñuel classic that has been unavailable in a good color print for at least three decades! But tonight we will show a glorious new digital restoration on the Capitol Theatre’s big screen. Set in Toledo (Spain) during the early 1930s, Tristana is a perverse black comedy about desire, death, and deformity in which a progressive-thinking old nobleman (Rey) lusts after his virginal, orphaned...

South Korea | 2012 | Hong Sang-soo

Isabelle Huppert stars in the latest comedy—another experiment in narrative—from South Korean master Hong Sang-soo. The movie, set in a Korean coastal resort town, consists of three distinct episodes—each one starring Huppert as a different French visitor (a successful film director, a bourgeois housewife having an affair, and a divorced woman jilted by her husband). Since Huppert’s character looks the same in each vignette, is always named “Anne,” and interacts with the same locals, the...

Germany | 1938 | Leni Riefenstahl

The notorious but supremely talented Leni Riefenstahl (Triumph of the Will) shot this poetic, two-part account of the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics—the greatest sports film ever made. Part 1 concentrates on the carrying of the Olympic torch and the lighting of the flame—and also on track and field events starring Cleveland’s Jesse Owens, whose four gold medals punctured Hitler’s notions of Aryan superiority.

Germany | 1938 | Leni Riefenstahl

The second part of Leni Riefenstahl’s epic documentary on the 1936 Berlin Summer Games focuses on gymnastic, aquatic, equestrian, and decathlon events, as well as on sailing, rowing, and bicycling. It continues her glorification of the human body and includes the famous, ecstatic men’s diving sequence.

Germany | 1938 | Leni Riefenstahl

The notorious but supremely talented Leni Riefenstahl (Triumph of the Will) shot this poetic, two-part account of the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics—the greatest sports film ever made. Part 1 concentrates on the carrying of the Olympic torch and the lighting of the flame—and also on track and field events starring Cleveland’s Jesse Owens, whose four gold medals punctured Hitler’s notions of Aryan superiority.

Germany | 1938 | Leni Riefenstahl

The second part of Leni Riefenstahl’s epic documentary on the 1936 Berlin Summer Games focuses on gymnastic, aquatic, equestrian, and decathlon events, as well as on sailing, rowing, and bicycling. It continues her glorification of the human body and includes the famous, ecstatic men’s diving sequence.

Italy, United States | 1964 | Ubaldo Ragona, Sidney Salkow

Vincent Price stars in the first film version of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, about a doctor who is the sole survivor of a worldwide plague and now must battle armies of the undead who want to drink his blood. This early zombie movie is often cited as the inspiration for George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.

France, Italy, Switzerland | 1986 | Claude Berri

The two-part art house sensation of the 1980s returns! Gérard Depardieu, Yves Montand, and Daniel Auteuil star in this moving, magnificent adaptation of a novel by Marcel Pagnol (The Well-Digger’s Daughter). Set in rural Provence (in the south of France) during the 1920s, the movie tells how a farmer (Montand) and his nephew (Auteuil) conspire to acquire a coveted piece of land—recently inherited by a hunchback tax collector (Depardieu) from the city—by damming a hidden...

France, Italy, Switzerland | 1986 | Claude Berri

Ten years after the events of Jean de Florette (see previous blurb), the fight for a fertile piece of rural Provence continues. Most of the stars of the first film return, with the welcome addition of the luminous Emmanuelle Béart, playing Depardieu’s now-grown daughter Manon. “Essential viewing…Succeeds, like the earlier film, in tapping the well-springs of one’s emotions.” –Time Out Film Guide.

France, Italy, Switzerland | 1986 | Claude Berri

The two-part art house sensation of the 1980s returns! Gérard Depardieu, Yves Montand, and Daniel Auteuil star in this moving, magnificent adaptation of a novel by Marcel Pagnol (The Well-Digger’s Daughter). Set in rural Provence (in the south of France) during the 1920s, the movie tells how a farmer (Montand) and his nephew (Auteuil) conspire to acquire a coveted piece of land—recently inherited by a hunchback tax collector (Depardieu) from the city—by damming a hidden...

France, Italy, Switzerland | 1986 | Claude Berri

Ten years after the events of Jean de Florette (see previous blurb), the fight for a fertile piece of rural Provence continues. Most of the stars of the first film return, with the welcome addition of the luminous Emmanuelle Béart, playing Depardieu’s now-grown daughter Manon. “Essential viewing…Succeeds, like the earlier film, in tapping the well-springs of one’s emotions.” –Time Out Film Guide.

Italy, United States | 1964 | Ubaldo Ragona, Sidney Salkow

Vincent Price stars in the first film version of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, about a doctor who is the sole survivor of a worldwide plague and now must battle armies of the undead who want to drink his blood. This early zombie movie is often cited as the inspiration for George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.

USSR | 1969 | Sergei Paradjanov

George Gund III, who died in January, was a philanthropist and film lover who first proposed that there be a cinematheque in Cleveland. In 1984—working with journalist Ron Holloway and then Cuyahoga County treasurer Frank Gaul—he made it happen. Gund, who had a particular fondness for Eastern European movies from behind the Iron Curtain (and even distributed some of them in the 1970s and 1980s), will be remembered tonight with a special screening of one...

Sweden | 1963 | Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman’s overtly erotic drama tells of two sisters—a lonely, ailing lesbian (Ingrid Thulin) and a sexually promiscuous mother of a young boy (Gunnel Lindblom)—staying at a mostly vacant hotel in an unnamed foreign country on the brink of war. Dark, cryptic, but unforgettable, the film encountered censorship problems around the world.

Sweden | 1963 | Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman’s overtly erotic drama tells of two sisters—a lonely, ailing lesbian (Ingrid Thulin) and a sexually promiscuous mother of a young boy (Gunnel Lindblom)—staying at a mostly vacant hotel in an unnamed foreign country on the brink of war. Dark, cryptic, but unforgettable, the film encountered censorship problems around the world.

Hungary | 2011 | Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky

Béla Tarr’s latest (and he says last) film is an apocalyptic allegory set on a remote, windswept plain where an aging farmer, his grown daughter, and a precious work horse cling to longstanding daily routines despite growing evidence that the end of their world is near. The Turin Horse is as austere, taciturn, and bleakly beautiful as Tarr’s previous miserablist masterpieces Sátántangó, Werckmeister Harmonies, and Damnation.

France, United Kingdom | 1991 | James Lapine

Bohemian, cross-dressing novelist George Sand (Judy Davis) woos frail composer Frédéric Chopin (Hugh Grant) in this fizzy period piece written by Sarah Kernochan and directed by her husband James Lapine. Mandy Patinkin (as Alfred de Musset), Bernadette Peters, Julian Sands (as Franz Liszt), and Emma Thompson co-star. Kernochan will answer questions after the screening.

United States | 1972 | Sarah Kernochan, Howard Smith

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, this shocking exposé profiles charismatic, twentysomething Southern evangelist Marjoe Gortner. Marjoe began his career as a precocious child preacher but continued holding tent revivals (and milking his followers for money) long after he stopped believing. He comes clean for the cameras. Despite its Oscar, Marjoe was barely released in the American South; the distributor feared it would spark outrage. Co-director Sarah Kernochan will answer questions after...

United States | 1926 | William Beaudine

Christel Schmidt, who edited the recent anthology Mary Pickford: Queen of the Movies (Library of Congress/University Press of Kentucky), will introduce a special screening of Pickford’s 1926 silent film Sparrows, one of her best movies. (The film will be shown in a color-tinted 35mm restoration from the Library of Congress, with live piano accompaniment by Cinematheque favorite Joseph Rubin of New York City.) The expressionistic Sparrows finds the movies’ first female superstar trying to free...

Hungary | 2011 | Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky

Béla Tarr’s latest (and he says last) film is an apocalyptic allegory set on a remote, windswept plain where an aging farmer, his grown daughter, and a precious work horse cling to longstanding daily routines despite growing evidence that the end of their world is near. The Turin Horse is as austere, taciturn, and bleakly beautiful as Tarr’s previous miserablist masterpieces Sátántangó, Werckmeister Harmonies, and Damnation.

United States | 1924 | Raoul Walsh

Douglas Fairbanks, husband of Mary Pickford (see Sparrows on 3/24), was the greatest swashbuckling star of the silent screen. He appeared in such blockbusters as The Mark of Zorro, The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood, and The Black Pirate. But his favorite of all his films, and by far the most elaborate, was The Thief of Bagdad, an Arabian Nights adaptation that we present tonight on the Capitol Theatre’s big screen in a new digital restoration....

United States | 1953 | Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin

60th Anniversary New 35mm Restoration! A seven-year-old Brooklyn boy is tricked into believing that he has killed his older brother. So he runs away to Coney Island and spends a day among the rides, games, and attractions there. This landmark American independent film, shot with non-professional actors in real locations, inspired countless aspiring filmmakers. "Five stars (highest rating)…There's influential, and then there's this 1953 microbudgeted beauty that's made its way into the DNA of everything from cinema...

United Kingdom | 2011 | Ben Rivers

“They could be images unearthed from another era, perhaps from another planet—a verdant dreamscape of fog and forest, photographed on gorgeously distressed black-and-white film stock.” So says Time Out New York ‘s four-star review of the first feature by London experimental filmmaker and gallery artist Ben Rivers, who shoots movies about society’s outsiders on semi-antique cameras and then hand-develops the 16mm film himself. Materiality is one of the hallmarks of Two Years at Sea, a...

United States | 1953 | Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin

60th Anniversary New 35mm Restoration! A seven-year-old Brooklyn boy is tricked into believing that he has killed his older brother. So he runs away to Coney Island and spends a day among the rides, games, and attractions there. This landmark American independent film, shot with non-professional actors in real locations, inspired countless aspiring filmmakers. "Five stars (highest rating)…There's influential, and then there's this 1953 microbudgeted beauty that's made its way into the DNA of everything from cinema...

United Kingdom | 2011 | Ben Rivers

“They could be images unearthed from another era, perhaps from another planet—a verdant dreamscape of fog and forest, photographed on gorgeously distressed black-and-white film stock.” So says Time Out New York ‘s four-star review of the first feature by London experimental filmmaker and gallery artist Ben Rivers, who shoots movies about society’s outsiders on semi-antique cameras and then hand-develops the 16mm film himself. Materiality is one of the hallmarks of Two Years at Sea, a...

France, Sweden | 1986 | Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Tarkovsky’s last film (he died from cancer in 1986 at age 54) is a solemn, magnificent fable about the loss of spirituality in the modern world. Shot is Sweden with Ingmar Bergman’s longtime cinematographer Sven Nykvist and his frequent star Erland Josephson, the movie tells of a man celebrating his birthday with friends when nuclear war breaks out. To avert disaster, the man makes a pact with the Almighty – forswearing everything he has...