(Elaine May, 1971, 102 min)

Sat July 15, 4:00 pm
Tue July 18, 7:00 pm

Writer-director-star Elaine May’s first feature concerns stunted manboy Henry (Walter Matthau) who, having squandered his inherited wealth, plots to marry and murder the very rich and very maladjusted Henrietta (May.) May’s savage take on her characters underscores their vanity and self-absorption, but also their tenderness. The Village Voice: “A film of such wit and comic invention that it belongs among the great American comedies.”

 

(Jason Reitman, 2011, 94 min)

Sun July 16, 4:00 pm

Wed July 19, 7:00 pm


If Lydia Tár traded classical music for YA literature and Berlin for Minnesota, she’d probably behave a lot like Young Adult’s Mavis. As in writer Diablo Cody’s previous feature, the lately re-appraised Jennifer’s Body, Young Adult centers a complicated, unlikeable female protagonist. Charlize Theron gives a pitch-perfect performance as a Young Adult author who delusionally exploits adolescent romance platitudes to try to break up the marriage of her long-lost high school boyfriend. Patton Oswalt delivers a delightful performance as her floundering sidekick torn between his conscience and his crush. One of the more astonishing - and corrosive - rom-coms one could ever hope to see.

 

(Jean-Luc Godard, 1963, 102 min, in French with English subtitles)

Sat July 22, 4:00 pm
Tue July 25, 7:00 pm

Jean-Luc Godard’s subversive foray into commercial filmmaking is a star-studded Cinemascope epic. Contempt (Le Mépris) stars Michel Piccoli as a screenwriter torn between the demands of a proud European director (played by legendary director Fritz Lang), a crude and arrogant American producer (Jack Palance), and his disillusioned wife, Camille (Brigitte Bardot), as he attempts to doctor the script for a new film version of The Odyssey. An inimitable riff on marital breakdown, artistic compromise, and the cinematic process.

 

(Jean-Luc Godard, 1967, 87 min, in French with English subtitles)

Sun July 23, 4:00 pm
Wed July 26, 7:00 pm

The most intellectually heroic of Jean-Luc Godard’s early features was inspired by his reading an article about suburban housewives day-tripping into Paris to turn tricks for spending money. Marina Vlady plays one such woman, followed over a single day in a slender narrative with many documentary and documentary-like digressions. But the central figure is Godard himself, who whispers his poetic and provocative ruminations over monumentally composed color ‘Scope images and, like James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, continually interrogates his own methods and responses. Few features of the period capture the world with as much passion and insight. (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader)

 

(Lawrence Kasdan, 1981, 113 min)

Sat July 29, 4:00 pm
Tue Aug 1, 7:00 pm

“You’re not too smart, are you? I like that in a man.” White-clad Kathleen Turner inveigles sweatily lustful lawyer William Hurt into a definitely R-rated reworking of Double Indemnity. More than one critic at the time noted that it didn’t make a lot of sense for the film’s lead characters to speak in the kind of erotically charged innuendo that was once written to get around censorship, only to then show them actually having sex… The one and only Body Heat!