Cinematheque Film Schedule

Hungary | 1981 | István Szabó

Winner of the 1982 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, István Szabó’s historical epic tells of a left-leaning stage actor in pre-WWII Germany who, in a Faustian bargain for fame and fortune, hitches his wagon to the rising Nazi party. Klaus Maria Brandauer’s monumental performance as the corrupt, compromised thespian made him an international star. Cleveland revival premiere. Subtitles. DCP. 144 min.

Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Russia, Switzerland | 2019 | various directors

10 new animated short films from seven different countries—including three movies that have qualified for Academy Award consideration—comprise the latest edition of this popular program. For over two decades now, the Animation Show of Shows has been presenting new and innovative short films—a curated selection of “the best of the best”—to appreciative audiences around the world. 40 of the films showcased in the ASOS over their first 20 years went on to receive Academy Award...

United States | 2018 | Mark Levinson

Claude Shannon (1916-2001), “the father of information theory,” is the subject of the new film from the director of Particle Fever. In a single landmark paper published in 1948, Shannon introduced the notion of a “bit” and laid the foundation for the information age. His ideas influence every aspect of modern life: computing, communication, economics, cryptography, genetics, cosmology. The movie employs contemporary interviews, archival footage, animation, and reenactments to tell the story of this overlooked...

Chile, France | 2019 | Patricio Guzmán

Winner of Best Documentary prize at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, the new essay film by master filmmaker Patricio (The Battle of Chile) Guzmán concludes a poetic trilogy he began with Nostalgia for the Light (2010) and The Pearl Button (2015). Like those movies, The Cordillera of Dreams explores the relationship between historical memory, political trauma, and geography in Guzmán’s native country of Chile. The imposing Andes Mountains, which run the length of Chile’s eastern...

Brazil, Germany | 2019 | Karim Aïnouz

Brazil’s official entry for the 2020 Oscar for Best International Film is a bold, stylish melodrama that focuses on two close-knit sisters growing up in conservative 1950s Rio de Janeiro. One aspires to be a pianist; the other yearns for true love. But life causes them to separate and take different paths through a world that proves patriarchal and unfair to both of them. Though they yearn to be reunited, their unforgiving father keeps them...

Brazil, Germany | 2019 | Karim Aïnouz

Brazil’s official entry for the 2020 Oscar for Best International Film is a bold, stylish melodrama that focuses on two close-knit sisters growing up in conservative 1950s Rio de Janeiro. One aspires to be a pianist; the other yearns for true love. But life causes them to separate and take different paths through a world that proves patriarchal and unfair to both of them. Though they yearn to be reunited, their unforgiving father keeps them...

Chile, France | 2019 | Patricio Guzmán

Winner of Best Documentary prize at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, the new essay film by master filmmaker Patricio (The Battle of Chile) Guzmán concludes a poetic trilogy he began with Nostalgia for the Light (2010) and The Pearl Button (2015). Like those movies, The Cordillera of Dreams explores the relationship between historical memory, political trauma, and geography in Guzmán’s native country of Chile. The imposing Andes Mountains, which run the length of Chile’s eastern...

France | 2000 | Agnès Varda

The late, great Agnès Varda reinvented her career with this landmark essay film about the practice of “gleaning” (originally the collecting of grain left behind after a harvest, depicted memorably in a famous 1867 painting by Millet). Armed with a lightweight digital video camera for the first time in her career, Varda traverses France and captures an assortment of indomitable individuals who, for reasons ranging from poverty to protest, scavenge in potato fields, orchards, vineyards,...

Belgium, France | 2018 | Alexis Michalik

Filmgoers adored this funny, fast-paced, fanciful comedy set in Belle Époque Paris when we showed it in January, so we’re bringing it back. In the movie, Edmond Rostand is a blocked writer beset with debts, so he frantically writes and assembles a motley cast for a new play about a French nobleman with a large nose and an abundance of panache. “Give[s] the Shakespeare in Love treatment to the timeless French play Cyrano de Bergerac…Undeniably...

United States | 2019 | Benny & Josh Safdie

Adam Sandler is sensational in this frenetic, often funny, always nerve-wracking thriller set in an around Manhattan’s Diamond District. A reckless, wheeler-dealer jeweler with marital problems and a gambling addiction regards a rare African gemstone as his ticket to getting out of debt to some unhappy, impatient loan sharks. Shot on 35mm film (and shown from film here), Uncut Gems has the look and feel of a great, gritty 1970s NYC movie. One of the...

United States | 2019 | Clint Eastwood

Roundly (and deservedly) criticized for the sexist liberties taken with Olivia Wilde’s newspaper-reporter character, Clint Eastwood’s latest film became the baby thrown out with the bathwater. Few moviegoers saw this engaging and affecting “everyman” drama about the heroic security guard who first spotted the bomb that killed one and injured scores of people in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park during the 1996 Summer Olympics—and was subsequently accused by the FBI of planting it himself. Paul Walter...

France | 2000 | Agnès Varda

The late, great Agnès Varda reinvented her career with this landmark essay film about the practice of “gleaning” (originally the collecting of grain left behind after a harvest, depicted memorably in a famous 1867 painting by Millet). Armed with a lightweight digital video camera for the first time in her career, Varda traverses France and captures an assortment of indomitable individuals who, for reasons ranging from poverty to protest, scavenge in potato fields, orchards, vineyards,...

Belgium, France | 2018 | Alexis Michalik

Filmgoers adored this funny, fast-paced, fanciful comedy set in Belle Époque Paris when we showed it in January, so we’re bringing it back. In the movie, Edmond Rostand is a blocked writer beset with debts, so he frantically writes and assembles a motley cast for a new play about a French nobleman with a large nose and an abundance of panache. “Give[s] the Shakespeare in Love treatment to the timeless French play Cyrano de Bergerac…Undeniably...

Canada | 2018 | Alison Reid

In 1956, four years before Jane Goodall ventured into the world of chimpanzees and seven years before Dian Fossey left to work with mountain gorillas, 23-year-old Canadian biologist Anne Innis Dagg made an unprecedented solo journey to South Africa to study giraffes in the wild. Now 86, the world’s first “giraffologist” retraces her steps, looking back over a scientific career scarred by sexism while pondering the current plight of her beloved animals. Includes stunning, original...

United Kingdom | 2019 | Michael Apted

Are our adult lives predetermined by our earliest influences and by the social class in which we are born and raised? That’s the question British filmmaker Michael Apted first explored in the 1964 TV documentary Seven Up!, which profiled 14 diverse British schoolchildren, all age seven. Apted revisited the question, and his aging subjects, in follow-up films every seven years. 63 Up, the series’ ninth and perhaps final installment, is a moving, emotional group portrait...

United Kingdom | 2019 | Michael Apted

Are our adult lives predetermined by our earliest influences and by the social class in which we are born and raised? That’s the question British filmmaker Michael Apted first explored in the 1964 TV documentary Seven Up!, which profiled 14 diverse British schoolchildren, all age seven. Apted revisited the question, and his aging subjects, in follow-up films every seven years. 63 Up, the series’ ninth and perhaps final installment, is a moving, emotional group portrait...

United Kingdom | 1995 | Agnès Varda

Marcello Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Robert De Niro, Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Harrison Ford, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Hanna Schygulla, Alain Delon, Gérard Depardieu, Gina Lollobrigida, and Leonardo DiCaprio all appear—along with others—in Agnès Varda’s love letter to the movies, made to celebrate 1995’s centennial of cinema. Michel Piccoli plays Simon Cinema, a wheelchair-bound old man who claims to have been involved in every aspect of the movie business for the past 100 years. But his memory is...

United Kingdom | 1995 | Agnès Varda

Marcello Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Robert De Niro, Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Harrison Ford, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Hanna Schygulla, Alain Delon, Gérard Depardieu, Gina Lollobrigida, and Leonardo DiCaprio all appear—along with others—in Agnès Varda’s love letter to the movies, made to celebrate 1995’s centennial of cinema. Michel Piccoli plays Simon Cinema, a wheelchair-bound old man who claims to have been involved in every aspect of the movie business for the past 100 years. But his memory is...

United States | 2019 | Greta Gerwig

Greta Gerwig’s thoughtful deconstruction of Louisa May Alcott’s oft-filmed novel (about the lives and loves of the four March sisters in 19th-century New England) honors the beloved book as well as its feminist author and her original intentions. Shot on 35mm, this American art film will be presented in that format for the first time in Cleveland. The all-star cast includes Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Timothée Chalamet, Meryl Streep, Laura Dern, et al....

China, Hong Kong | 2019 | Wilson Yip

The fourth and final installment in the Ip Man martial arts series finds the grandmaster of the Wing Chun fighting style (Donnie Yen) traveling to 1960s San Francisco, where his student Bruce Lee has opened a controversial kung fu school. While in the U.S., he also battles prejudice, bigotry, and intolerance. “Never less than thrilling.” –NY Times. Subtitles. DCP. 105 min.

Finland, United States | 2009 | Hanna Hemilä

Before he became one of Manhattan’s foremost event planners and chefs, Paavo Turtiainen worked in Europe on and off for 12 years as personal secretary and archivist for Ingrid Bergman. This documentary about him reveals how a towheaded Finnish farm boy came to live in Paris and Sweden with the great actress and her third husband, Swedish producer Lars Schmidt, learning the lessons of high-society hospitality while becoming Bergman’s trusted friend and confidante until her...

Germany, United States | 2019 | Terrence Malick

The beauty of God’s natural world and the spiritual strivings of human beings are once again celebrated in the ravishing new film by cinema’s foremost transcendentalist, Terrence Malick. Malick’s latest is an epic poem/period piece shot in Europe, about real-life Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter, a devout Catholic and conscientious objector who refused to fight for the Nazis during WWII. “A forceful denunciation of the complicity of church and state.” –L.A. Times. Some subitles. DCP. 173...

France | 2019 | Bertrand Bonello

The new film from the director of Saint Laurent and Nocturama is a brainy, stylish, seductive blend of horror film, teen coming-of-age story, and colonialist drama. It tells two parallel stories that eventually connect in meaningful ways. Story #1: in 1962 Haiti, a man is brought back from the dead only to be sent to the living hell of the sugarcane fields. Story #2: in a prestigious all-girls boarding school outside present-day Paris, a Haitian...

South Korea | 2003 | Bong Joon-ho

The second feature by Parasite director Bong Joon-ho is a taut police thriller turned Keystone Cops comedy that is regarded as one of Bong’s greatest works. Based on a true case that was solved just recently, the movie follows two woefully out-of-their-depth lawmen, a country bumpkin and a city hotshot, as they clumsily try to solve a string of grisly murders. Their hapless investigation drags on for years. With Song Kang-ho. “[A] singular mix of...

South Korea | 2003 | Bong Joon-ho

The second feature by Parasite director Bong Joon-ho is a taut police thriller turned Keystone Cops comedy that is regarded as one of Bong’s greatest works. Based on a true case that was solved just recently, the movie follows two woefully out-of-their-depth lawmen, a country bumpkin and a city hotshot, as they clumsily try to solve a string of grisly murders. Their hapless investigation drags on for years. With Song Kang-ho. “[A] singular mix of...

France | 2019 | Bertrand Bonello

The new film from the director of Saint Laurent and Nocturama is a brainy, stylish, seductive blend of horror film, teen coming-of-age story, and colonialist drama. It tells two parallel stories that eventually connect in meaningful ways. Story #1: in 1962 Haiti, a man is brought back from the dead only to be sent to the living hell of the sugarcane fields. Story #2: in a prestigious all-girls boarding school outside present-day Paris, a Haitian...

France | 1991 | Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda pays loving tribute to her late husband, fellow filmmaker Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), in this poetic work that combines evocative reenactments of Demy’s 1940s childhood in Nantes with clips from his films and intimate home movies. “Deeply moving.” –Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide. Cleveland revival premiere. Subtitles. DCP. 118 min.

United States | 1926 | Clarence Badger

In his landmark 1975 book The Silent Clowns, critic Walter Kerr writes that Raymond Griffith, a largely forgotten silent-era comic actor, “seems to occupy a handsome fifth place—after Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and Langdon—in the silent comedy pantheon.” The suave, mustachioed, unflappable Griffith, often attired in top hat and opera cape, uses his wits to extricate himself from disastrous situations. In his Civil War comedy and masterpiece Hands Up! (one of the few Griffith features to...

United States | 1924 | Ernst Lubitsch

This landmark silent film marked Ernst Lubitsch’s transition from the expansive historical romances that brought him from Germany to the U.S., to the sophisticated sex comedies that would define his American career, making him one of Hollywood’s most revered and successful directors and producers. Inspired by Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris, The Marriage Circle was reputedly Lubitsch’s favorite of all his films—and that includes such masterpieces as Trouble in Paradise, Ninotchka, The Shop Around the...

France | 1991 | Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda pays loving tribute to her late husband, fellow filmmaker Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), in this poetic work that combines evocative reenactments of Demy’s 1940s childhood in Nantes with clips from his films and intimate home movies. “Deeply moving.” –Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide. Cleveland revival premiere. Subtitles. DCP. 118 min.

United States | 2019 | Louie Schwartzberg

March 26 has been designated “Fantastic Fungi Day.” To mark the occasion, 500 cinemas around the world have been enlisted to show this remarkable mushroom documentary that is the Cinematheque’s all-time biggest hit (four sellout screenings in January & February). Because of our success with the movie, we have been asked to be the Cleveland venue in this global “movie theater mycelium.” As a bonus, tonight’s special screening will be followed by a pre-recorded discussion...

Czech Republic, South Korea | 2013 | Bong Joon-ho

Chris Evans, Song Kang-ho, Ed Harris, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, Jamie Bell, and Octavia Spencer star in the imaginative, visually stunning English-language debut of South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho. Snowpiercer is a dystopian futuristic allegory in which a train carrying the last vestiges of humanity circles the frozen globe nonstop after a failed climate change experiment. The wealthy are pampered in the train’s lavish front carriages while the impoverished masses huddle in rear cars, separated from...

Czech Republic, South Korea | 2013 | Bong Joon-ho

Chris Evans, Song Kang-ho, Ed Harris, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, Jamie Bell, and Octavia Spencer star in the imaginative, visually stunning English-language debut of South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho. Snowpiercer is a dystopian futuristic allegory in which a train carrying the last vestiges of humanity circles the frozen globe nonstop after a failed climate change experiment. The wealthy are pampered in the train’s lavish front carriages while the impoverished masses huddle in rear cars, separated from...

Canada, France, Germany, Palestine, Qatar, Turkey | 2019 | Elia Suleiman

The first feature in ten years by Palestinian moviemaker Elia Suleiman is a droll, stylized comedy in which the wry filmmaker, playing himself, silently observes the absurdities and incongruities of daily life not only in his native Nazareth, but also in Paris and New York. Casting his Keatonesque gaze on a series of Tati-like tableaux, the homeland-less director discovers that the whole world—with its fixation on surveillance and security, on mistrust and military might—now looks...