July - August Film Series at PFA

Ticket Prices for PFA:
$5.50for BAM/PFA members and UC Berkeley students
$9.50 Adults (18-64)
$6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff; non-UC Berkeley students; senior citizens (65 & over); disabled persons; youth (17 & under)
$4 Second same-day screening discount

July
28 Wednesday
Akira Kurosawa
7:00One Wonderful Sunday
Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1947). A young couple encounters the pleasures—and dangers—of Tokyo in Kurosawa’s city-film, inspired by Frank Capra, D. W. Griffith, and Murnau’s Sunrise, and one of the first films to capture the essence and energy of a newly emerging postwar Tokyo. (108 mins)

29Thursday
A Theater Near You
7:00Lourdes
Jessica Hausner (Austria/France/Germany, 2009). A wheelchair-bound woman takes a pilgrimage to Lourdes in this wry, subtle film about organized religion, individual will, and the power of faith. “Conjures a world in which the miraculous seems nearly ordinary.”—Artforum (96 mins)

30 Friday
Criminal Minds
7:00The Lodger
John Brahm (1944). Out of the London fog comes…a mysterious lodger by day, and Jack the Ripper by night, in John Brahm’s moody noir, shot by legendary D.P. Lucien Ballard. Laird Cregar and Merle Oberon star. (84 mins)
 
8:45The Boston Strangler
Richard Fleischer (1968). It’s creepy working-man Tony Curtis versus solid Detective George Kennedy and attorney Henry Fonda in Fleischer’s acclaimed late-noir, a portrait of Boston as seen through its seedy underbelly and overwhelmed cops. (116 mins)

31Saturday
Akira Kurosawa
6:30Sanjuro
Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1962). Kurosawa’s spirited follow-up to Yojimbo finds Mifune leading a band of comically inept samurai. “A superb parody.”—Donald Richie (96 mins)

8:30Scandal
Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1950). A motorcycle-riding artist and a pure-at-heart popular singer are targeted by unscrupulous scandalmongers in this entertaining indictment of journalistic “ethics,” inspired by Warner Bros. muckrakers and starring Toshiro Mifune and Yoshiko “Shirley” Yamaguchi. (104 mins)

August

01Sunday
Francesco Rosi
5:00More Than a Miracle
Francesco Rosi (Italy/France, 1967). Spanish prince Omar Sharif prefers sport to marriage, until he meets bewitching peasant lass Sophia Loren, in Rosi’s unexpected detour into romantic fantasy and comic fable, set in 17th century Italy. “Splashy and beautiful.”—Pauline Kael (103 mins)

A Theater Near You
7:00Lourdes
Jessica Hausner (Austria/France/Germany, 2009). A wheelchair-bound woman takes a pilgrimage to Lourdes in this wry, subtle film about organized religion, individual will, and the power of faith. “Conjures a world in which the miraculous seems nearly ordinary.”—Artforum (96 mins)

04Wednesday
Akira Kurosawa
7:00The Idiot
Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1951). Kurosawa faithfully remakes Dostoevky’s The Idiot in wintry Hokkaido, with Toshiro Mifune and Setsuko Hara bringing to life this tale of a pure soul destroyed by a faithless world. “Probably the only Dostoevsky adaptation which carries something of the complexity and dramatic intensity of the original.”—Noel Burch (166 mins)

05Thursday
A Theater Near You
7:00Hadewijch
Bruno Dumont (France, 2009)
Expelled from a convent, a young woman seeks God’s presence in the “real world,” and develops a friendship with two Muslim men, in this meditation on faith and mysticism in modern society. From the director of Flanders and Life of Jesus. (95 mins)

06Friday
Criminal Minds
7:00Compulsion
Richard Fleischer (1959). Two young men of privilege (based on infamous killers Leopold and Loeb) assumed their obvious superiority would help them get away with murder. Ooops. With Dean Stockwell and Orson Welles. (105 mins)

9:10Boxcar Bertha
Martin Scorsese (U.S., 1972). Depression-era outlaw Boxcar Bertha and her anarchist sidekick Big Bill Shelley ruled the Arkansas rails of the ‘30s, robbing trains and menacing moguls countrywide. Scorsese’s first Hollywood film, starring Barbara Hershey and David Carradine. (92 mins)

07Saturday
Akira Kurosawa
5:30High and Low
Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1963). A kidnapping becomes a moral dilemma for executive Mifune in “one of the best detective thrillers ever filmed. . . . Both spine-tingling and compassionate.”—N.Y. Times (143 mins)

Francesco Rosi
8:10Lucky Luciano
Francesco Rosi (Italy, 1973). Gian Maria Volonté is the Italian American gangster of the title, on the rise and on the run—and, hints Rosi, well-connected to U.S. officials. “The finest movie made about the Mafia.”—Norman Mailer (115 mins)

08Sunday
Francesco Rosi
5:00Just Another War
Francesco Rosi (Italy/Yugoslavia, 1970). During World War I, an upper-crust general orders his troops into a no-win battle, with predictable results, in Rosi’s fiercely anti-militaristic work, an Italian Paths of Glory or Farewell to Arms. (101 mins)

A Theater Near You
7:00The River
Jean Renoir (U.S./India, 1951). Based on a novel by the author of Black Narcissus, Renoir’s wise, warm Technicolor masterpiece follows several young girls coming of age on the River Ganges. “The artist, medium, and location combine, as though effortlessly, to produce an experience of surpassing loveliness.”—NY Times ( 99 mins)

11Wednesday
Akira Kurosawa
7:00Dodes’ka-den
Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1970). Kurosawa’s first color film was also his most personal, an expressionist look at the lives of several Tokyo slum dwellers. Music by Toru Takemitsu. (144 mins)


12Thursday
Francesco Rosi
7:00Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Francesco Rosi (Italy/France, 1987). Rosi adapts Gabriel García Marquez’s famous novel on machismo, murder, and “the forces that can transform a rational man into an assassin” (Rosi), set and filmed in Columbia and starring Rupert Everett. “An absorbing and unusual murder mystery.”—Time Out (110 mins)

13Friday
Criminal Minds
7:00The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond
Budd Boetticher (U.S., 1960). Watch sociopath Legs Diamond go from two-bit hoofer to mob kingpin in genre master Budd Boetticher’s gangster epic, pistol-whipping its way across New York’s Roaring Twenties with help from ace D.P. Lucien Ballard. (101 mins)

9:00Al Capone
Richard Wilson (U.S., 1959). A suitably bulldogged Rod Steiger is the gangster of all gangsters, Al Capone, ready to rub out all comers and take over Chicago, one St. Valentine’s Day Massacre at a time. (104 mins)

14Saturday
Viva la Revolución
6:30Prisoner Number 13
Fernando de Fuentes (Mexico, 1933). The first in de Fuentes's famed trilogy on the Mexican Revolution is a devastating portrait of mendacity among the military pointing to the very human side of this and every revolution. (74 mins)

8:15El Compadre Mendoza
Fernando de Fuentes (Mexico, 1933). A Mexican classic wittily and intelligently dissects the ambivalence of revolutionary values in a Zapatista idealist and his loyalty to an opportunistic landowner. (85 mins)

15Sunday
Akira Kurosawa
7:00Kagemusha
Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1980). George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola helped produce Kurosawa’s big-budget return to epic samurai filmmaking, involving a lord and his double (both played by Tatsuya Nakadai) trying to hold a kingdom together. “Probably the director’s most elaborate, awesome film . . . majestic, stately, cool, almost abstract.”—N.Y. Times (160 mins)