Cinematheque Film Schedule

United States | 2017 | Kentucker Audley, Albert Birney

Sylvio, a small town gorilla (clearly played by a man in an ape suit) works as a corporate drone in a debt collection agency. But what Sylvio really wants to do is express himself on TV through his hand puppets. When he finally gets his chance, an unfortunate mishap threatens his future. “This charming lo-fi indie is attuned to its own eccentric wavelength, equal parts absurd and poignant.” –Variety. DCP. 80 min.

France | 2007 | Robin Campillo

One of the best reviewed films at Cannes 2017—and throughout the world—is a riveting group portrait of Parisian AIDS activists during the early 1990s. Voted Best Foreign Language Film of 2017 by the New York Film Critics Circle. “A moving, lump-in-the-throat love story…Should also resonate on a political level as a testimony to the power of activism to awaken an indifferent world.” –Screen Int’l. Subtitles. DCP. 142 min.

France | 2007 | Robin Campillo

One of the best reviewed films at Cannes 2017—and throughout the world—is a riveting group portrait of Parisian AIDS activists during the early 1990s. Voted Best Foreign Language Film of 2017 by the New York Film Critics Circle. “A moving, lump-in-the-throat love story…Should also resonate on a political level as a testimony to the power of activism to awaken an indifferent world.” –Screen Int’l. Subtitles. DCP. 142 min.

United States | 2017 | Kentucker Audley, Albert Birney

Sylvio, a small town gorilla (clearly played by a man in an ape suit) works as a corporate drone in a debt collection agency. But what Sylvio really wants to do is express himself on TV through his hand puppets. When he finally gets his chance, an unfortunate mishap threatens his future. “This charming lo-fi indie is attuned to its own eccentric wavelength, equal parts absurd and poignant.” –Variety. DCP. 80 min.

France, Italy | 1953 |

In this elegant, sensuous, sophisticated drama of adultery set in fin de siècle Paris, a pair of earrings continually changes hands among a trio of privileged, high-society lovers (Danielle Darrieux, Charles Boyer, Vittorio De Sica). The result is a dizzying roundelay of rapture and rupture, and one of the great movies of all time. “Should the day ever come when movies are granted the same respect as the other arts, The Earrings of Madame de...

Italy | 1970 | Bernardo Bertolucci

Long undistributed in the U.S. and still unavailable here on DVD or Blu-ray, this major Bertolucci film (made between The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris) tells of a young man who receives a cool welcome when he returns to the village where his anti-fascist father was murdered in 1936. Adapted from a Borges short story; sumptuous color cinematography by Vittorio Storaro. With Alida Valli. Has a 100% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes. “Bertolucci at...

United States | 2017 | Taron Lexton

Dayton native Nancy Cartwright, the longtime voice of Bart Simpson, co-wrote this semi-autobiographical tale of a sheltered Ohio girl who travels to Italy to meet Federico Fellini after his films open her eyes to a new world of fantastic possibilities. With Maria Bello. “A charming drama about the love of movies and youthful passion…Ms. Cartwright creates a Felliniesque fantasy of her own.” –NY Times. DCP. 93 min.

United States | 2017 | Taron Lexton

Dayton native Nancy Cartwright, the longtime voice of Bart Simpson, co-wrote this semi-autobiographical tale of a sheltered Ohio girl who travels to Italy to meet Federico Fellini after his films open her eyes to a new world of fantastic possibilities. With Maria Bello. “A charming drama about the love of movies and youthful passion…Ms. Cartwright creates a Felliniesque fantasy of her own.” –NY Times. DCP. 93 min.

United States | 2017 | Antonio Santini, Dan Sickles

Dina, a mentally challenged 49-year-old Philadelphia woman who has also survived abuse and trauma, embarks on a new romance with Scott, a genial Walmart greeter with Asperger syndrome. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, this funny, moving, and surprisingly candid and even intimate movie could not have been made if one of the filmmakers did not already have a longstanding relationship with Dina. Has a 98%...

France, Italy | 1953 |

In this elegant, sensuous, sophisticated drama of adultery set in fin de siècle Paris, a pair of earrings continually changes hands among a trio of privileged, high-society lovers (Danielle Darrieux, Charles Boyer, Vittorio De Sica). The result is a dizzying roundelay of rapture and rupture, and one of the great movies of all time. “Should the day ever come when movies are granted the same respect as the other arts, The Earrings of Madame de...

United States | 1980 | Lech Kowalski

This survey of the punk scene circa 1978 focuses primarily on the Sex Pistols during their seven-city U.S. tour, and includes an extended interview with Sid Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. But the Clash, Stiv Bators, the Dead Boys, and others are also included. Cleveland revival premiere. DCP. 90 min.

Sweden | 2017 |

Winner of the Palme d’Or (top prize) at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival as well as 2017 European Film Awards for best film, director, actor, and screenplay, this sardonic, squirm-inducing new film from the director of Force Majeure focuses on a cool, buttoned-down, Swedish curator of modern art (Claes Bang) whose chic, ordered, privileged world is undermined by raging human desires, behaviors, and injustices outside his galleries. With Elisabeth Moss and Terry Notary. Subtitles. DCP....

Sweden | 2017 |

Winner of the Palme d’Or (top prize) at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival as well as 2017 European Film Awards for best film, director, actor, and screenplay, this sardonic, squirm-inducing new film from the director of Force Majeure focuses on a cool, buttoned-down, Swedish curator of modern art (Claes Bang) whose chic, ordered, privileged world is undermined by raging human desires, behaviors, and injustices outside his galleries. With Elisabeth Moss and Terry Notary. Subtitles. DCP....

United States | 1980 | Lech Kowalski

This survey of the punk scene circa 1978 focuses primarily on the Sex Pistols during their seven-city U.S. tour, and includes an extended interview with Sid Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. But the Clash, Stiv Bators, the Dead Boys, and others are also included. Cleveland revival premiere. DCP. 90 min.

United States | 1958-2012 | various directors

The first of four programs celebrating the 50th anniversary of Canyon Cinema, a longtime San Francisco-based distributor of truly independent, often experimental short works by major American filmmakers. This program is named after John Smith’s 1975 film, a joyfully dense, rebus-like image-word construction. It is preceded by Sara Kathryn Arledge’s rarely seen 1958 work What Is a Man, a film years ahead of its time, and Mark Toscano’s 2012 piece Releasing Human Energies, in which...

France | 1936 | Jean Renoir

One of the best films from Renoir’s greatest decade, this effervescent comedy tells of a group of exploited workers at a French publishing house who band together to turn the company into a successful cooperative when their corrupt boss flees from debt collectors and disappears. Presumed dead, he turns up one day to collect the co-op’s profits… Co-written by Jacques Prévert. “Perhaps the most delightful of Jean Renoir’s films…Given its emphasis on the predatory behavior...

Finland | 2017 | Dome Karukoski

A gay WWII vet and advertising designer in homophobic postwar Finland finds escape and solace by making private drawings of hot, muscular, well-endowed gay men. Eventually these idealized pictures are published in the U.S., countering the stereotype of gays as “sissies” and advancing 50s-60s leather and motorcycle culture. This is a biopic of Touko Laaksonen (1920-1991), who became the influential artist Tom of Finland. “A good, strong movie.” –San Francisco Chronicle. Subtitles. DCP. 115 min.

United States | 1937 | Mark Sandrich

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers star in this musical with songs, music, and lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin. It tells of a ballet dancer (Astaire) who, as a publicity stunt, pretends to be married to a showgirl (Rogers). Musical numbers include “Slap That Bass,” “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” and “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.” Co-presented by The Musical Theater Project, the movie will be introduced at 3:30 by TMTP Artistic...

Finland | 2017 | Dome Karukoski

A gay WWII vet and advertising designer in homophobic postwar Finland finds escape and solace by making private drawings of hot, muscular, well-endowed gay men. Eventually these idealized pictures are published in the U.S., countering the stereotype of gays as “sissies” and advancing 50s-60s leather and motorcycle culture. This is a biopic of Touko Laaksonen (1920-1991), who became the influential artist Tom of Finland. “A good, strong movie.” –San Francisco Chronicle. Subtitles. DCP. 115 min.

France | 1936 | Jean Renoir

One of the best films from Renoir’s greatest decade, this effervescent comedy tells of a group of exploited workers at a French publishing house who band together to turn the company into a successful cooperative when their corrupt boss flees from debt collectors and disappears. Presumed dead, he turns up one day to collect the co-op’s profits… Co-written by Jacques Prévert. “Perhaps the most delightful of Jean Renoir’s films…Given its emphasis on the predatory behavior...

United States | 2012 | Noah Baumbach

Greta Gerwig’s arthouse breakthrough as a writer and actress was this delightful, touching, and acclaimed 2012 comedy-drama that has various parallels to her acclaimed new film Lady Bird. Gerwig plays Frances, a ditzy but endearing 27-year-old New Yorker, a Sacramento transplant, whose dance career is going nowhere. The film chronicles Frances’ gauche, funny, fumbling attempts to find her place in the city—and in the world—and even contains a Christmas scene in California featuring Gerwig’s real...

United States | 2017 | Alexandre O. Philippe

Originally scheduled to be shown at the Cinematheque as part of the 41st Cleveland Int’l Film Festival, but pulled by the distributor, this new documentary takes an in-depth look at the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho (which consisted of 78 different camera setups and 52 edits). Fans and filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro, Peter Bogdanovich, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Bret Easton Ellis chime in on this famous sequence, and film scholar Philip J. Skerry, who...

United States | 1980 | Lech Kowalski

This survey of the punk scene circa 1978 focuses primarily on the Sex Pistols during their seven-city U.S. tour, and includes an extended interview with Sid Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. But the Clash, Stiv Bators, the Dead Boys, and others are also included. Cleveland revival premiere. DCP. 90 min.

Italy | 1964 | Bernardo Bertolucci

Long undistributed in the U.S. and unavailable here on DVD or Blu-ray, Bertolucci’s second feature (made when he was 22) is both auspicious and astonishing—the work of a cinema prodigy. The movie focuses on a young man in 1962 Parma who flirts with revolt and sexual freedom after discovering Marx, but also feels the strong pull of bourgeois convention. Inspired by Stendahl’s The Charterhouse of Parma; music by Ennio Morricone. Has a 93% critics’ rating...

United States | 2017 | Alexandre O. Philippe

Originally scheduled to be shown at the Cinematheque as part of the 41st Cleveland Int’l Film Festival, but pulled by the distributor, this new documentary takes an in-depth look at the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho (which consisted of 78 different camera setups and 52 edits). Fans and filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro, Peter Bogdanovich, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Bret Easton Ellis chime in on this famous sequence, and film scholar Philip J. Skerry, who...

Mexico, United States | 2017 | Viktor Jakovleski

Move over, Fourth of July. This singular, visually stunning nonfiction film documents the National Pyrotechnic Festival in Tultepec, Mexico, a ten-day celebration of San Juan de Dios, patron saint of firework makers (which include three-fourths of all Tultepec residents). “An impressionistic immersion into fire and fiesta…As you-are-there experiences go, it has energy to burn.” –L.A. Times. Subtitles. DCP. 67 min.

United States | 2015 |

Two hoarders, Orthodox Jewish twin brothers in their 60s, are compelled to hire a company to clean out the Brooklyn home they originally inherited from their parents, or lose it. This poignant (but not despairing) documentary chronicles the brothers’ pain in dealing with the past while also confronting a present of alcoholism and isolation. “Critic’s pick…Quiet and quietly moving.” –NY Times. DCP. 74 min.

United States | 1965 | James Ivory

This early Merchant-Ivory Production (co-written by the team’s longtime screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala) focuses on a troupe of itinerant British actors who try to keep Shakespeare alive in a fast-changing, post-colonial India more interested in Bollywood than in bodkins. With Shashi Kapoor, Felicity Kendal, and Madhur Jaffrey; music by Satyajit Ray. Cleveland revival premiere. DCP. 122 min.

United States | 2012 | Noah Baumbach

Greta Gerwig’s arthouse breakthrough as a writer and actress was this delightful, touching, and acclaimed 2012 comedy-drama that has various parallels to her acclaimed new film Lady Bird. Gerwig plays Frances, a ditzy but endearing 27-year-old New Yorker, a Sacramento transplant, whose dance career is going nowhere. The film chronicles Frances’ gauche, funny, fumbling attempts to find her place in the city—and in the world—and even contains a Christmas scene in California featuring Gerwig’s real...

United States | 2017 | Nancy Buirski

Recy Taylor, who died in December at age 97 and whom Oprah Winfrey mentioned in her galvanizing Golden Globes speech of 1/7, was a married, 24-year-old, African-American Alabama sharecropper and mother who, on her way home from church one night in 1944, was abducted and raped by six white boys. Her attackers were never prosecuted, even though one of them confessed to the crime. This notorious case, one of the sparks of the Civil Rights...

France | 1958 | Jean Rouch

Jean Rouch’s first great feature was a major influence on the French New Wave. (It introduced jump cuts and employed non-professional “actors.”) Set in the Ivory Coast, the movie focuses on two Nigerian immigrants nicknamed Edward G. Robinson and Eddie Constantine who try to find work as dockworkers while living in a squalid section of Abidjan. Moi, un Noir will be preceded at 7:30 by Rouch’s groundbreaking short film The Mad Masters (Les maîtres fou,...

Mexico, Spain, United States | 2017 | Catherine Gund, Daresha Kyi

Mexican musician Chavela Vargas (1919-2012) was a legendary ranchera singer who also became a gay icon for comporting herself like a man. She is the subject of this new film co-directed by Emmy-nominated documentarian Catherine Gund (Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity). The movie centers around a 1991 interview with the singer—her first public appearance after 15 years lost to alcoholism and heartbreak. This was right before her momentous third act, when she came...

United States | 1973-2017 | various directors

The second of four programs celebrating the 50th anniversary of Canyon Cinema, a longtime San Francisco-based distributor of truly independent, often experimental short works by major American filmmakers. This installment features recent films by Saul Levine, Charlotte Pryce, and Christopher Harris; rarely screened works by Standish Lawder and Jean Sousa; sublime, acutely perceived portraits of cities, seas, skies, and landscapes by Peter Hutton, Julie Murray, Gary Beydler, Robert Fulton, and Emily Richardson; Betzy Bromberg’s audacious...

Switzerland | 2017 | Petra Volpe

A quiet Swiss housewife and mother in 1971 Switzerland becomes a passionate proponent for an upcoming referendum granting women the right to vote. This entertaining movie won the Audience Award for Best Film at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival and is Switzerland’s official entry for this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. “A mainstream crowd-pleaser adept at inspiring and amusing in equal measure.” –Variety. Subtitles. DCP. 96 min.

Japan | 2017 | Takashi Miike

The prolific Takashi Miike returns to the big Cinematheque screen with this supernatural swordplay movie (his 100th film!) about an immortal samurai who helps a young girl avenge her family’s murder. You’ll experience elaborate battles, outrageous weapons, and sacred bloodworms that heal the hero’s hurts! “If you are going to see one outlandish and occasionally nauseating bloodbath samurai pic this year, this is the one.” –The Guardian. Subtitles. DCP. 140 min.

United States | 2017 | Lana Wilson

This moving, acclaimed documentary introduces us to a former Japanese punk rocker turned Buddhist priest who specializes in counseling suicidal individuals. But this taxing work has clearly taken its toll on this husband and father, who has demons of his own. The movie has both a critics and audience score of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. “It’s not often one can have a genuinely spiritual experience watching a movie. But that’s precisely what’s on offer with...

United States | 2017 | P. David Ebersole, Todd Hughes

The new film from the producers of the fascinating Room 237 takes a campy look at the last two years in the highly publicized life of actress Jayne Mansfield (1933-67). Mansfield was a busty, low-rent Marilyn Monroe who pre-dated the Kardashians and eventually became involved with second-rate Satanist named Anton LeVay. (Did a curse from him cause the car crash that ended her life?) With Ann Magnuson, Kenneth Anger, John Waters, et al. “A celebration...

Switzerland | 2017 | Petra Volpe

A quiet Swiss housewife and mother in 1971 Switzerland becomes a passionate proponent for an upcoming referendum granting women the right to vote. This entertaining movie won the Audience Award for Best Film at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival and is Switzerland’s official entry for this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. “A mainstream crowd-pleaser adept at inspiring and amusing in equal measure.” –Variety. Subtitles. DCP. 96 min.

Sweden | 2017 |

Winner of the Palme d’Or (top prize) at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival as well as 2017 European Film Awards for best film, director, actor, and screenplay, this sardonic, squirm-inducing new film from the director of Force Majeure focuses on a cool, buttoned-down, Swedish curator of modern art (Claes Bang) whose chic, ordered, privileged world is undermined by raging human desires, behaviors, and injustices outside his galleries. With Elisabeth Moss and Terry Notary. Subtitles. DCP....