Cinematheque Film Schedule

France | 1959 | Jean-Pierre Melville

Jean-Pierre Melville pays explicit tribute to American film noir in his only feature shot in the U.S. He also stars in this b&w classic, playing a French reporter in New York City who tries to solve the sudden disappearance of France’s UN ambassador. Never before shown at the Cinematheque with subtitles! Cleveland revival premiere. DCP. 84 min.

France, Italy | 1961 | Jean-Pierre Melville

Jean-Paul Belmondo and the recently deceased Emmanuelle Riva (Amour) star in this spiritual drama set during the German Occupation of France. It follows a handsome young priest who tries to convert a godless Communist woman to Christianity. She, in turn, tries to get him to break his vow of celibacy. This new 4K restoration is 11 minutes longer than the version of the film shown previously. “Miraculous cinema, even for heretics.” –Time Out Film Guide....

France, Italy | 1961 | Jean-Pierre Melville

Jean-Paul Belmondo and the recently deceased Emmanuelle Riva (Amour) star in this spiritual drama set during the German Occupation of France. It follows a handsome young priest who tries to convert a godless Communist woman to Christianity. She, in turn, tries to get him to break his vow of celibacy. This new 4K restoration is 11 minutes longer than the version of the film shown previously. “Miraculous cinema, even for heretics.” –Time Out Film Guide....

France | 1959 | Jean-Pierre Melville

Jean-Pierre Melville pays explicit tribute to American film noir in his only feature shot in the U.S. He also stars in this b&w classic, playing a French reporter in New York City who tries to solve the sudden disappearance of France’s UN ambassador. Never before shown at the Cinematheque with subtitles! Cleveland revival premiere. DCP. 84 min.

Italy | 2015 | Valerio Ruiz

Italy’s Lina Wertmüller (b. 1928) was the first woman to garner an Oscar nomination for Best Director. This definitive documentary traces Wertmüller’s rise—from Federico Fellini’s assistant to global superstar auteur known for her signature eyewear. With Martin Scorsese, Giancarlo Giannini, Sophia Loren, Rutger Hauer, et al. “Must-viewing for film buffs.” –The Hollywood Reporter. Cleveland premiere. Subtitles. DCP. 112 min.

Italy | 1975 | Lina Wertmüller

Being the adventures of a small-time crook and ladies’ man who, after killing a pimp, spends time in an insane asylum, the Italian army, and a German concentration camp. Giancarlo Giannini, Fernando Rey, and Shirley Stoler star in this grotesque picaresque, a farcical survival epic that was hailed upon its release as Wertmüller’s masterpiece. This movie earned Wertmüller the first-ever Best Director Oscar nomination for a female filmmaker. “Seven Beauties is the great one, the...

United States | 2015 | Daniel Raim

Storyboard artist Harold Michelson and film researcher Lillian Michelson may not be household names. But for six decades this married couple worked on hundreds of renowned movies (The Ten Commandments, The Apartment, The Birds, The Graduate, Rosemary’s Baby, Fiddler on the Roof, Scarface, Full Metal Jacket,etc.) while maintaining a lifelong romance. This fascinating and affectionate documentary pays tribute to these two unsung heroes of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Includes love letters, classic film clips, and interviews...

United States | 1967 | George Roy Hill

Mary Tyler Moore and Julie Andrews star in this jazzy musical set during the Roaring Twenties—about a young flapper who sets out to work as a stenographer for a wealthy boss whom she will marry. But a series of madcap adventures complicates her pursuit. With Carol Channing, James Fox, and Beatrice Lillie; produced by Cleveland-born Ross Hunter. Director George Roy Hill’s next film was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, followed four years later by...

United States | 2015 | Daniel Raim

Storyboard artist Harold Michelson and film researcher Lillian Michelson may not be household names. But for six decades this married couple worked on hundreds of renowned movies (The Ten Commandments, The Apartment, The Birds, The Graduate, Rosemary’s Baby, Fiddler on the Roof, Scarface, Full Metal Jacket,etc.) while maintaining a lifelong romance. This fascinating and affectionate documentary pays tribute to these two unsung heroes of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Includes love letters, classic film clips, and interviews...

Italy | 1975 | Lina Wertmüller

Being the adventures of a small-time crook and ladies’ man who, after killing a pimp, spends time in an insane asylum, the Italian army, and a German concentration camp. Giancarlo Giannini, Fernando Rey, and Shirley Stoler star in this grotesque picaresque, a farcical survival epic that was hailed upon its release as Wertmüller’s masterpiece. This movie earned Wertmüller the first-ever Best Director Oscar nomination for a female filmmaker. “Seven Beauties is the great one, the...

Italy | 1974 | Lina Wertmüller

When their boat breaks down, a Communist deckhand (Giancarlo Giannini) and the wealthy wife of the yacht’s owner (Mariangela Melato) find themselves stranded on an isolated Mediterranean island, where the class distinctions that separate them are reversed or removed. Criticized by many feminists, Lina Wertmüller’s famous film was remade, disastrously, by Madonna and Guy Ritchie in 2002. “By far the lightest, most successful fusion of Ms. Wertmüller’s two favorite themes, sex and politics.” –The NY...

United States | 2016 | Elisabeth Subrin

A successful Hollywood actress (Maggie Siff of Mad Men, Billions, Sons of Anarchy) suffers a mid-life existential crisis and abandons her hit TV show to return to New York and her circle of old theater friends, some of whom regard her as a sellout. This exploration of the plight of middle-aged women in the entertainment industry is the first feature by acclaimed visual artist and filmmaker Elisabeth Subrin (Shulie). With Cara Seymour and John...

United States | 2016 | Elisabeth Subrin

A successful Hollywood actress (Maggie Siff of Mad Men, Billions, Sons of Anarchy) suffers a mid-life existential crisis and abandons her hit TV show to return to New York and her circle of old theater friends, some of whom regard her as a sellout. This exploration of the plight of middle-aged women in the entertainment industry is the first feature by acclaimed visual artist and filmmaker Elisabeth Subrin (Shulie). With Cara Seymour and John...

Italy | 1974 | Lina Wertmüller

When their boat breaks down, a Communist deckhand (Giancarlo Giannini) and the wealthy wife of the yacht’s owner (Mariangela Melato) find themselves stranded on an isolated Mediterranean island, where the class distinctions that separate them are reversed or removed. Criticized by many feminists, Lina Wertmüller’s famous film was remade, disastrously, by Madonna and Guy Ritchie in 2002. “By far the lightest, most successful fusion of Ms. Wertmüller’s two favorite themes, sex and politics.” –The NY...

United States | 1980 | Robert M. Young

Paul Simon wrote and stars in this shot-in-Cleveland movie, about a floundering folk-rock musician who hasn’t had a hit in ten years. While his marriage crumbles, he finds himself in northeast Ohio opening for the B-52’s at the old Agora ballroom. With Blair Brown, Rip Torn, Joan Hackett, Lou Reed, Allen Goorwitz (Garfield), Harry Shearer, Tiny Tim, et al. 98 min.

United States | 2016 | Mimi Chakarova

In this new film that debuted at last fall’s exclusive Telluride Film Festival, American men of widely differing ages, incomes, and locations tell how they feel about love and women. Director Mimi Chakarova, an award-winning photojournalist and professor, says she made the movie to try to restore her faith in men after a disturbing decade spent documenting the sex trade for her 2011 work The Price of Sex. "A beautiful and candid exploration of the...

Belgium, France | 2016 | Stéphane Brizé

Winner of France’s Louis Delluc Prize for Best French Film of 2016, the new movie from the director of Mademoiselle Chambon and The Measure of a Man focuses on a young, aristocratic, 19th-century French woman who slowly realizes that her chances for personal fulfillment are thwarted by an unhappy marriage and other crippling social strictures. From a Guy de Maupassant novel. “Haunting and profound…A Woman’s Life is exactly the kind of movie that seems most...

Belgium, France | 2016 | Stéphane Brizé

Winner of France’s Louis Delluc Prize for Best French Film of 2016, the new movie from the director of Mademoiselle Chambon and The Measure of a Man focuses on a young, aristocratic, 19th-century French woman who slowly realizes that her chances for personal fulfillment are thwarted by an unhappy marriage and other crippling social strictures. From a Guy de Maupassant novel. “Haunting and profound…A Woman’s Life is exactly the kind of movie that seems most...

United States | 2016 | Mimi Chakarova

In this new film that debuted at last fall’s exclusive Telluride Film Festival, American men of widely differing ages, incomes, and locations tell how they feel about love and women. Director Mimi Chakarova, an award-winning photojournalist and professor, says she made the movie to try to restore her faith in men after a disturbing decade spent documenting the sex trade for her 2011 work The Price of Sex. "A beautiful and candid exploration of the...

United States | 1980 | Robert M. Young

Paul Simon wrote and stars in this shot-in-Cleveland movie, about a floundering folk-rock musician who hasn’t had a hit in ten years. While his marriage crumbles, he finds himself in northeast Ohio opening for the B-52’s at the old Agora ballroom. With Blair Brown, Rip Torn, Joan Hackett, Lou Reed, Allen Goorwitz (Garfield), Harry Shearer, Tiny Tim, et al. 98 min.

USSR, West Germany | 1979 | Andrei Tarkovsky

Tarkovsky’s mesmerizing epic is a classic of spiritual cinema—and one of the great modern movies. Set in a nameless police state in some post-apocalyptic future, the film follows a skinhead guide with special powers (a “stalker”) as he leads a writer and a scientist into a fenced-off, forbidden region, known as the Zone, that is part primeval forest, part post-industrial wasteland. The three men journey toward the Zone’s mysterious inner sanctum, where one’s deepest desires...

Italy | 1972 | Lina Wertmüller

When a secret ballot at work turns out to be not so secret, a simple Southern Italian laborer (Giancarlo Giannini) who just wants to provide for his family suddenly finds himself caught between the local Mafia and the Communist party. His world is turned upside down. This farcical comedy, loosely remade in America as the Richard Pryor vehicle Which Way Is Up?, marked the first time that Wertmüller worked on screen with her frequent regulars...

United States | 1971 | Don Siegel

The oddest and artiest of the five features that Clint Eastwood made with director Don Siegel (the next was Dirty Harry) is a Southern Gothic Civil War drama in which a wounded Union solider (Eastwood) takes refuge in an isolated all-girls boarding school in Mississippi. Locked and guarded in the music room while he recuperates, the young Yank ignites the sexual imaginations of the seminary’s prim young ladies and proceeds to seduce each of them....

United States | 1971 | Don Siegel

The oddest and artiest of the five features that Clint Eastwood made with director Don Siegel (the next was Dirty Harry) is a Southern Gothic Civil War drama in which a wounded Union solider (Eastwood) takes refuge in an isolated all-girls boarding school in Mississippi. Locked and guarded in the music room while he recuperates, the young Yank ignites the sexual imaginations of the seminary’s prim young ladies and proceeds to seduce each of them....

United States | 1968 | D.A. Pennebaker

Fifty years ago this weekend (June 16-18, 1967), the Monterey Pop Festival took place on the county fairgrounds in Monterey, California, kicking off the Summer of Love. This granddaddy of all outdoor music fests featured such artists as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Who, Otis Redding, Ravi Shankar, Simon and Garfunkel, the Mamas and the Papas, and Hugh Masekela (among others), many launching their American careers. Pioneering “direct cinema” documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look...

USSR, West Germany | 1979 | Andrei Tarkovsky

Tarkovsky’s mesmerizing epic is a classic of spiritual cinema—and one of the great modern movies. Set in a nameless police state in some post-apocalyptic future, the film follows a skinhead guide with special powers (a “stalker”) as he leads a writer and a scientist into a fenced-off, forbidden region, known as the Zone, that is part primeval forest, part post-industrial wasteland. The three men journey toward the Zone’s mysterious inner sanctum, where one’s deepest desires...

United States | 1968 | D.A. Pennebaker

Fifty years ago this weekend (June 16-18, 1967), the Monterey Pop Festival took place on the county fairgrounds in Monterey, California, kicking off the Summer of Love. This granddaddy of all outdoor music fests featured such artists as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Who, Otis Redding, Ravi Shankar, Simon and Garfunkel, the Mamas and the Papas, and Hugh Masekela (among others), many launching their American careers. Pioneering “direct cinema” documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look...

Belgium, Netherlands | 2014 | Bas Devos

One of the most remarkable films shown at the 2015 Cleveland Int’l Film Festival (or any CIFF, for that matter) has finally been released in America. A teen boy’s grief over the sudden, senseless death of his best friend is rendered through a series of haunting, narratively oblique (but visually inventive) scenes and sequences. A coming of age film like no other, Violet was partially shot on 65mm film. Unmissable! Subtitles. DCP. 85 min.

Italy | 1972 | Lina Wertmüller

When a secret ballot at work turns out to be not so secret, a simple Southern Italian laborer (Giancarlo Giannini) who just wants to provide for his family suddenly finds himself caught between the local Mafia and the Communist party. His world is turned upside down. This farcical comedy, loosely remade in America as the Richard Pryor vehicle Which Way Is Up?, marked the first time that Wertmüller worked on screen with her frequent regulars...

Philippines | 2016 | Lav Diaz

The latest epic moral drama by Filipino master Lav Diaz won the Golden Lion (top prize) at the 2016 Venice Film Festival. Relatively compact by the director’s expansive standards, this three-and-three-quarter-hour movie focuses on a woman, released from prison after spending 30 years there for a murder she did not commit, who seeks vengeance on the man who framed her. Inspired by Tolstoy’s story “God Sees the Truth, but Waits.” “Simple, solid, self-contained and succinct…An...

United States | 1983 | Joe Dante, John Landis, George Miller, Steven Spielberg

Mark Dawidziak, longtime Plain Dealer TV critic and author of the new book Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Twilight Zone (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017), introduces and discusses the 1983 anthology film that reimagines—for the big screen and in color—four episodes from Rod Serling’s landmark supernatural/horror TV series. A quartet of the cinema’s best fantasy filmmakers—Joe (Gremlins) Dante, John (American Werewolf in London) Landis, George (Mad Max) Miller, Steven (E.T.) Spielberg—each direct...

France | 1974 | Philippe Garrel

American-born Breathless star Jean Seberg is captured in extreme close-up, five years before her death from a drug overdose, in this haunting, silent, b&w portrait film which “[depicts] solitude as a kind of contemporary stations of the cross” (Slant). German chanteuse and former Warhol “superstar” Nico, the heroin-addicted girlfriend of filmmaker Philippe Garrel, is also seen in this movie, which is only now being released in the U.S. This singular work is “both ravishing portraiture...

Italy | 1973 | Lina Wertmüller

Giancarlo Giannini won the Best Actor prize at Cannes for his performance in this Lina Wertmüller classic. Set in Fascist Italy during the 1930s, it tells of a farmer who lodges in a brothel while waiting to assassinate Benito Mussolini. But his resolve softens when he falls in love with one of the prostitutes there. With Mariangela Melato. Color cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno and music by Nino Rota—both Fellini regulars. “Passionate and stirring…The scenes inside...

Italy | 1973 | Lina Wertmüller

Giancarlo Giannini won the Best Actor prize at Cannes for his performance in this Lina Wertmüller classic. Set in Fascist Italy during the 1930s, it tells of a farmer who lodges in a brothel while waiting to assassinate Benito Mussolini. But his resolve softens when he falls in love with one of the prostitutes there. With Mariangela Melato. Color cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno and music by Nino Rota—both Fellini regulars. “Passionate and stirring…The scenes inside...

Brazil, France, Portugal | 2016 | João Pedro Rodrigues

Fernando, a lone Portuguese birdwatcher, has a kayak accident while studying the black stork. Suddenly he is plunged into a series of surreal, outlandish, often sexualized encounters—a journey that echoes the life of St. Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of things lost. The fifth feature by the acclaimed Portuguese director of The Last Time I Saw Macao and To Die like a Man is a singular mix of queer aesthetics and Christian iconography. “Deliciously...

Italy | 1974 | Lina Wertmüller

In Lina Wertmüller’s satire, a group of rural Sicilians migrates to the North, forming a commune on the outskirts of Milan. But the big city and life together take their toll on these innocent young men and women. “A noisy, sprawling, incident-filled, slice-of-life comedy-melodrama.” –Pauline Kael. Adults only! Cleveland revival premiere. Subtitles. DCP. 108 min.

Italy | 1974 | Lina Wertmüller

In Lina Wertmüller’s satire, a group of rural Sicilians migrates to the North, forming a commune on the outskirts of Milan. But the big city and life together take their toll on these innocent young men and women. “A noisy, sprawling, incident-filled, slice-of-life comedy-melodrama.” –Pauline Kael. Adults only! Cleveland revival premiere. Subtitles. DCP. 108 min.

Brazil, France, Portugal | 2016 | João Pedro Rodrigues

Fernando, a lone Portuguese birdwatcher, has a kayak accident while studying the black stork. Suddenly he is plunged into a series of surreal, outlandish, often sexualized encounters—a journey that echoes the life of St. Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of things lost. The fifth feature by the acclaimed Portuguese director of The Last Time I Saw Macao and To Die like a Man is a singular mix of queer aesthetics and Christian iconography. “Deliciously...