The Somerville Theatre’s “March Music Madness” series continues Thursday with a 4K screening of “Amazing Grace” (2018), director Sydney Pollack’s long-lost concert film of the great Aretha Franklin. The story behind “Amazing Grace” is nearly as fascinating as the film: In 1972, Franklin decamped, along with the Southern California Community Choir, to Los Angeles’ New Temple Missionary Baptist Church to record her bestselling gospel album of the same name. Pollack and his crew were present to document the spectacle of the recordings, but, due to an equipment error, found it impossible to sync the sound with the footage properly. The raw materials were shelved for nearly a half-century, until filmmaker Alan Elliott was able to use modern technology to finally realize Pollack’s and Franklin’s vision. Of course, none of this matters while you’re actually watching the film; the power of Franklin’s once-in-a-generation voice speaks for itself, and hearing her music blasting through the speakers of a place as holy as the Somerville is, indeed, quite like being taken to church.
Another long-lost film makes its very belated debut at The Brattle Theatre this weekend. Director Charles Burnett took a long road to critical acceptance; his 1978 debut “Killer of Sheep,” which went unreleased for nearly 30 years due to music clearance issues, is now rightly held as a landmark of African American independent cinema – which makes it all the more astounding that we are now receiving a second decades-belated release of a Burnett film. Burnett’s 1999 comedy “The Annihilation of Fish,” starring Lynn Redgrave and the dearly departed James Earl Jones, screened exactly once, at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was picked up for distribution; following a scathing review in Variety, the distributor panicked and scrapped its release, leaving it unseen for a quarter century. Thankfully, the good people at Kino Lorber have finally rescued “Fish,” remastering it in 4K and giving it the release it deserves. “The Annihilation of Fish” opens at the Brattle on Friday and screens through Sunday.
Cinematic rediscovery is the raison d’etre of boutique Blu-ray labels, which are thriving even as mainstream retailers such as Best Buy and Target eliminate in-store physical media selections. Near the top of the heap is Vinegar Syndrome, which has found so much success with its lavish restorations of wildly obscure exploitation films that it has branched out, launching several sublabels that are even more specialized. The most recent, Cinématographe, is dedicated to forgotten American independent film from the 1970s through the ’90s, all lovingly restored and packed with newly produced bonus features. To celebrate the fruits of this venture’s labors, Cinématographe honcho Justin LaLiberty visits The Brattle this weekend with a series called “New from Cinématographe.” Friday brings a restoration of Susan Streitfeld’s 1997 erotic thriller “Female Perversions,” the Hollywood debut of the great Tilda Swinton. On Saturday, LaLiberty will be joined by Guinevere Turner, co-writer and star of “Go Fish” (1994) to discuss that film’s place in the canon of ’90s New Queer Cinema. The series rounds out on Sunday with a matinee screening of Martha Coolidge’s teen comedy gem “Joy of Sex” (1984), featuring a wonderfully ’80s supporting cast including Christopher Lloyd, Colleen Camp and Ernie Hudson. All of these films were staples of video rental stores once upon a time, but are now less immediately accessible; thankfully, as long as there are folks such as LaLiberty at Cinématographe, they remain present and vital.
The Harvard Film Archive series “Albert Serra, or Cinematic Time Regained” reaches its climax this weekend, as the great Catalan filmmaker touches down to introduce three of his greatest films personally. On Friday, Serra sits for a Q&A following his acclaimed 2022 “Pacifiction,” a woozy, paranoid hangout film starring Benôit Magimel as a world-weary French diplomat attempting to avert the nuclear destruction of a Polynesian paradise. Saturday brings Serra’s off-kilter “Story of My Death” (2013), a lyrical film that presents a hypothetical meeting between Casanova and Dracula (no, really). Lastly, on Monday, Serra presents the local premiere of his latest film, “Afternoons of Solitude” (2024), an experimental documentary that deconstructs a Spanish bullfight in real time using extreme close-up cameras and body-mounted microphones. Serra is one of those filmmakers whose work all but demands further discussion, which makes these screenings nigh-unmissable.
If you’re looking for something a little lighter, head to the Somerville on Tuesday for a 35 mm screening of the Coen brothers’ classic “The Big Lebowski” (1998). “Lebowski” is, of course, one of the great sleeper-hit stories of its time, dismissed by critics as a minor work following the Coens’ international breakthrough hit “Fargo” (1996) only to spread via word of mouth to become one of the most beloved (and oft-quoted) films of the ’90s. For all its influence, it is striking from today’s vantage point how different “Lebowski” is from the typical modern studio comedy. For one thing, it looks gorgeous; the cinematography by the great Roger Deakins is miles from the flat-packed aesthetic that dominates the streaming age, and the Coens take pains to make even the silliest sequence look like a Busby Berkeley fever dream. What’s more, despite the shaggy plot and discursive dialogue, “Lebowski” is deceptively tight and immaculately structured. This is “stupid comedy” made by some of the smartest people in Hollywood, and it remains as fresh as the day it was filmed.
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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