Among the too-cool-for-school enfants terribles of the French New Wave, Jacques Demy was something of an outlier, a true-blue romanticist who adored the classic MGM musicals of the 1940s and sought to bring their swoony emotions and technicolor palette to the nouvelle vague. Demy directed a brilliant string of original movie musicals in the 1960s and beyond, but his magnum opus was undoubtedly “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” (1964), which screens this week at The Brattle Theatre in an eye-popping 4K restoration. Unlike traditional musicals, in which discrete songs are punctuated with scenes of dialogue, “Umbrellas” is entirely sung-through, its characters expressing themselves entirely through lyrics set to the music of Michel Legrand (though the title theme, translated to “I Will Wait for You,” did take on a second life as a stand-alone standard). It is one of the most purely beautiful films ever projected onto the screen, each frame saturated with hot pink wallpaper or melancholy blue mood lighting (to say nothing of the luminous presence of a breathtaking young Catherine Deneuve in the performance that would make her a star). In form and heights of emotion, “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” is pure pop opera. It runs from this Thursday through the next.
If you’re looking for something on the uglier side, The Brattle screens John Carpenter’s postapocalyptic cult classic “Escape from New York” (1981) on Friday and Saturday. The setup is pure pulp: In the far-off future of 1998, Manhattan has been walled off and turned into a penal colony for America’s most dangerous criminals. When Air Force One is shot down over the city and the president is taken prisoner by gangland kingpin The Duke (soul singer Isaac Hayes), the government has no choice but to airdrop in notorious, eye-patched criminal Snake Plissken, played by a never-better Kurt Russell. If Snake rescues the president, he will be released with a clean record; if he fails, a button will be pressed and the collar around his neck detonates. Despite being written directly for the screen by Carpenter and frequent collaborator Nick Castle, “Escape” feels authentically comic-booky in a way that few actual comic book movies are allowed to be, bursting with invention and gleefully snotty satire. It boasts one of the all-time top tough-guy supporting casts, including Harry Dean Stanton, Ernest Borgnine, Lee Van Cleef and Tom Atkins (plus Adrienne Barbeau, who’s probably tougher than any of them). And when Russell sneers “I don’t give a fuck about your war or your president,” it’s a good bet there will be cheering in the aisles.
There will probably be less cheering for “The Sacrifice” (1986), which screens at The Brattle in a new 4K restoration Sunday through Tuesday, but it’s safe to say it’s just as politically relevant. Shot by the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky as he was dying from brain cancer (though it has long been speculated that he was actually poisoned by Soviet officials), “The Sacrifice” stars Erland Josephson as a professor who has visions of an impending nuclear holocaust and attempts to bargain with God to trade his own life for those of his family and the world at large. As final artistic statements go, “The Sacrifice” is as heady as they come, which perhaps makes its continued resonance all the more dispiriting. What is undeniable, though, is the film’s beauty: It was shot on Ingmar Bergman’s facilities on Faro Island with much of the master’s regular crew, including celebrated cinematographer Sven Nykvist. In the years since his death, Tarkovsky’s reputation among cinephiles has only grown, and the prescience of “The Sacrifice” is a perfect example of why.
With less than two months until the 97th Academy Awards ceremony, the Landmark Kendall Square Cinema is kicking off a weekly series titled “And the Best Picture Goes to …” featuring some of the most notable (and in some cases infamous) winners of the big award. The series kicks off on Tuesday with perhaps the least controversial Best Picture selection in the Academy’s history: 1942’s “Casablanca.” Few films in motion picture history are as ingrained in our collective psyche as “Casablanca”; even if you’ve never seen it, there’s a good chance you’ve seen each individual line, scene and performance quoted or parodied in one form or another. Yet, miraculously, even after all these years, “Casablanca” feels positively alive in ways few films since do, from the raffish banter between Humphrey Bogart’s Rick and the delightfully seedy supporting cast (including Peter Lorre and Claude Rains) to the legendarily romantic final scene between Bogart and Ingrid Bergman or the still resonant themes of resistance and solidarity in the face of encroaching fascism. To borrow a line that does not actually appear in the movie: It’s always nice when a local theater plays it again.
Next Wednesday marks what would have been the 76th birthday of rock legend and noted extraterrestrial David Bowie, which is all the excuse anyone should need to gather for a very loud audiovisual feast. To help, The Brattle plans a commemorative screening of Brett Morgen’s immersive rockumentary “Moonage Daydream” (2022). As befitting a figure as eclectic as Bowie, Morgen eschews the traditional talking-head format for a more immersive approach, weaving together performance clips, archival interviews and various B-movie clips in a way that conveys the idea of David Bowie as much as the man himself. The result has as much in common with a planetarium laser show as a conventional documentary, and will leave one feeling as intoxicated as the Thin White Duke in his prime.
Oscar Goff is a writer and film critic based in Somerville. He is film editor and senior critic for the Boston Hassle and his work has appeared in the monthly Boston Compass newspaper and publications such as WBUR’s The ARTery and iHeartNoise. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, and the Online Film Critics Society.
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