After a weeklong closure for renovations, the Brattle Theatre reopens Friday, with an ambitious summer lineup. Following a Friday matinee of the original “West Side Story” (1961) on 35mm are two weekend-long premiere runs, one a new restoration of an old favorite, one a new feature by a cult legend. Elaine May’s “Mikey and Nicky” (1976), which screens in beautiful 4K Friday through Monday, is a long-overlooked classic of ‘70s cinema, starring real-life buddies John Cassavetes and Peter Falk as a pair of small-time crooks during one particularly stressful night. Also screening is “Dead Souls” (2025), the purported final film by Alex Cox, in which the revered punk filmmaker plays a con man who drifts into a Wild West border town with a mysterious proposition. As a bonus, Saturday’s matinee screens in a double feature with “Straight to Hell” (1987), Cox’s infamous punk western featuring rare acting roles by the likes of Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello, and a pre-fame Courtney Love. Whether or not his retirement sticks, a new film from Cox is always worth turning out for.
Longtime Brattle-goers know that the theater’s summer schedule switches to a “vertical” format, with each weekday given to a different month-long repertory series. Mondays and Tuesdays in August are for the E.T.s with a new series titled “Keep Watching the Skies: Aliens in the 1950s.” In America, the combination of technological optimism and sociopolitical uncertainty in the ‘50s led to a wave of sci-fi epics that blended the fantastical with the paranoid. No film better encapsulates this dichotomy than “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951), in which an alien messiah arrives on Earth with a message of peace (and one of cinema’s greatest robots), only to be met with human suspicion and artillery. It screens Monday and Tuesday in a double feature with “The Thing from Another World” (1951), which these days tends to get overshadowed by John Carpenter’s 1982 remake, but is an ace ‘50s creature feature in its own right — thanks in no small part to producer, co-writer, and rumored ghost director Howard Hawks. “Keep Watching the Skies” continues Mondays and Tuesdays through August with more visitors from beyond the stars.
On Wednesdays at the Brattle, “TV Goes to the Movies” is a new series curated by Boston Globe TV critic Chris Vognar. While movies and television have shared an uneasy relationship since the latter medium’s dawn, it can’t be denied that some of the most savage critiques of TV news have come from the big screen. The series kicks off Wednesday with two very different — but equally funny — depictions of primetime newscasters. On one end of the spectrum is the scabrous “Network” (1976), in which anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch, in his Oscar-winning final performance) snaps on the air and begins to tell it like it is — only for his candor to be immediately exploited by the corporate higher-ups. Apart from his profession, Beale doesn’t have much in common with Will Ferrell’s pompous title character in the beloved comedy “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” (2004), but it’s fun to imagine TV watchers in the 1970s flipping between the two. The series continues for the next four Wednesdays, with newsmen and newswomen falling at various points on the Beale-Burgundy continuum.
Thursdays at the Brattle belong to a unique voice of the French New Wave. Like his contemporaries Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer began his career as a film critic for France’s renowned film magazine Cahiers du Cinema before becoming a filmmaker himself, specializing in “cycles” of loosely connected films. The most famous of Rohmer’s cycles, “Six Moral Tales,” which screens in its entirety over the next few weeks, tells wryly funny stories of romantic awkwardness and frustration through a very nouvelle vague sense of detachment. The series begins with a two-fer of Rohmer’s two shortest tales, “The Bakery Girl of Monceau” and “Suzanne’s Career” (both 1963). They’re paired with “La Collectionneuse” (1967), a languorous classic of summertime ennui featuring gorgeous color cinematography by the great Nestor Almendros. The cycle continues Thursdays through August — a perfect match for the dog days of summer.
The last of the Brattle’s weekly August series occupies the late-night slot on Thursdays. “When Carolco Was King” celebrates Carolco Pictures, the scrappy independent studio that produced some of the most iconic blockbusters of the 1980s and early ‘90s. Originally a distributor for low-rent Italian and Hong Kong exploitation films, Carolco burst into prominence with “First Blood” (1982), which screens Thursday. “First Blood” is, of course, famous as Sylvester Stallone’s first outing as supersoldier John Rambo, who would become one of the defining action heroes of the ‘80s. Unlike the steroidal franchise it inspired, though, “First Blood” is a downbeat, almost countercultural affair: Rambo’s adversaries here aren’t the Viet Cong, but the crooked small-town cops who harass him as a drifter. Still, once Rambo starts setting his booby traps in the forest, “First Blood” becomes a lurid thriller of the highest order, setting the stage for Carolco’s reign as America’s foremost purveyors of VHS-era guilty pleasures. Keep watching the Brattle’s calendar for the rest of the summer for more of their giddy thrills.
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