The Brattle Theatre’s Noirvember programming comes to a close Thursday with one of the genre’s towering achievements. The name Orson Welles has become so synonymous with “Citizen Kane” and its fallout that it’s tempting to reduce the director as a one-masterpiece wonder. But Welles continued to turn out vital work after falling from Hollywood’s grace, including his hardboiled 1958 masterpiece “Touch of Evil.” The plot is pure noir: A car bomb kills two on the streets of a Southern border town, drawing vacationing prosecutor Miguel Vargas (Charlton Heston, regrettably cast as a Mexican but otherwise excellent) into a web of intrigue. But it is clear from the famous opening scene, which tracks the bomb from placement to detonation in a single, unbroken shot, that this is far from a typical Hollywood whodunnit. Everything about “Touch of Evil” is thrillingly stylized, from its expressionistic camera angles to its sprawling, eclectic cast (including Marlene Dietrich as a world-weary madam and Welles himself as the grotesque, corrupt police captain). More than 70 years later, there still isn’t much like “Touch of Evil,” leading one to wonder what other masterpieces Welles might have produced had he been less at odds with the studio system. “Touch of Evil” screens in a new 4K restoration of its original theatrical cut, paired with Sam Fuller’s equally excellent “The Crimson Kimono” (1959).
The Harvard Film Archive continues its centennial-and-one tribute to Columbia Pictures with more rarely screened gems from the studio’s vault. Friday brings “Bitter Victory” (1958), a little-seen (but typically bleak) World War II drama from the great auteur Nicholas Ray, and “The Walking Hills” (1949), a slice of Western-noir from John Sturges. Earl McEvoy’s “The Killer that Stalked New York” (1950), which screens Sunday, is an eerily prescient pandemic thriller starring Evelyn Keyes as a femme fatale blithely spreading smallpox across the Big Apple; equally grim is “The Glass Wall” (1953), also on Sunday, starring Vittorio Gassman as a Holocaust refugee who learns that America is less welcoming than its reputation would suggest. The series continues Monday with encore screenings of “Address Unknown” (1944) and “Gunman’s Walk” (1958) before taking a brief break for the holidays; Columbia 101 resumes Dec. 8 for another leg of golden-age obscurities.
As studios roll out their prestige pictures for awards season, The Brattle continues to host some of the year’s most fascinating new releases. From Friday through Tuesday, it presents the local premiere run of Ira Sachs’ “Peter Hujar’s Day” (2025), a lovely little two-hander starring Ben Whishaw (of Sachs’ “Passages”) and Rebecca Hall. The film draws its inspiration from an interview with the titular photographer by journalist Linda Rosenkrantz in 1974, in which the writer asked him to describe, in minute detail, what he had done the day before. Whishaw and Hall more or less reenact the tape verbatim, making for an intimate and witty “conversation film” in the vein of “My Dinner with Andre.” On a grander scale is Lucile Hadžihalilović’s “The Ice Tower” (2025), which also opens Friday. Clara Pacini stars as Jeanne, a teenage runaway who seeks refuge in the rafters of a movie set commanded by imperious screen queen Cristina, played by Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard. As Jeanne works her way into the film as an extra, she catches Cristina’s eye, plunging both into a sinister, dreamlike state in which the fairy tale world of the film bleeds into reality. Last but not least, on Sunday the Hungarian Society of Massachusetts presents the local premiere of Gábor Reisz’s “Explanation for Everything” (2023), followed by a Q&A with Reisz himself. The multiplexes are all well and good, but those with an eye for cinema’s cutting edge will inevitably find themselves in The Brattle’s hallowed halls.
For 30 years, the maverick programmers at Channel Zero have proudly dubbed themselves “Boston’s most obscure repertory film series.” The outfit lives up to that title Friday when it returns to the Somerville Theatre Microcinema with a program titled “The Danger Dames of Silent Games.” Contrary to the contemporary, testosterone-fueled image of the big screen action hero, silent-era thrillers more often than not starred women, getting themselves into and out of scrapes through sheer pluck and ingenuity. Channel Zero celebrates this forgotten age of adventure epics with a selection of stand-alone episodes of the silent serials “The Hazards of Helen” (1914-1917) and “The Perils of Pauline” (1914). More than a hundred years later, these stories still pack a wallop, and Friday’s show offers a rare opportunity to see them on the big screen surrounded by fellow film obsessives. (And if your taste for cinematic action heroines runs closer to this century, RSVP to stop by Lamplighter Brewing in The Port neighborhood of Cambridge from 6 to 8 p.m. Sunday for a free screening of Quentin Tarantino’s 2003 epic “Kill Bill: Vol. 1”!)
As the Windy City finds itself in the crosshairs of the thugs of the current regime, The Brattle pays tribute with a series self-explanatorily titled “Give Thanks for Chicago,” which kicks off Wednesday and runs through the holiday week. For the opening night selection, there could be no other choice than “The Blues Brothers” (1980), which, in addition to sporting one of the greatest soundtracks and comic casts of the 1980s, is a film that truly, unambiguously, hates Illinois Nazis. It’s paired in a double feature with John Hughes’ equally ebullient “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (1986), as energetic a love letter as has ever been written to Chicago’s streets and landmarks. Both are raucous, funny and thoroughly warmhearted – much like the city in which they’re set.
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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