August 28th 2013. Pick Of The Day.

New York City's premiere resource for classic film screenings in the metropolitan area. Offering reviews, recommendations, venues and a host of links keeping classic film and the silver screens alive.

My birthday week continues merrily apace! In terms of celebratory cinematic doings last night's screening of Powell and Pressburger's THE RED SHOES at the Nitehawk Cinema will prove hard to top indeed. Yet I'm glad there will be several attempts to do so by the various rep houses about our fair metropolis! Ongoing series on today's classic screening calendar include MoMA's Auteurist History of Film, Anthology Film Archives' That's Sexploitation!, and Film Forum's monumental Son of Summer Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. The complete rundown as follows:

Film Forum

THINGS TO COME (1936) Dir; William Cameron Menzies

ALIEN (1979) Dir; Ridley Scott

JUST IMAGINE (1930) Dir; David Butler

ALIENS (1986) Dir; James Cameron

PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959) Dir; Edward D. Wood Jr.

 

MoMA

SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING (1960) Dir; Karel Reisz

 

Anthology Film Archives

LET ME DIE A WOMAN (1977) Dir; Doris Wishman

DOUBLE AGENT 73 (1974) Dir; Doris Wishman

 

Today's Pick? William Cameron Menzies' THINGS TO COME, screening at the Film Forum. Brit mega-producer Alexander Korda placed the production design ace, the man responsible for the opulent backdrops of Doug Fairbanks' THIEF OF BAGDAD to cite but one credit, in the director's chair for the first time to helm this visionary Sci-Fi treatise on war, peace and the potential our human civilization might someday achieve. Considering this was 1936, the bullet rocket to the moon seems quite the quaint erroneous prediction, but H. G. Wells' script, informed by the horrors of the first World War, eerily succeeded in predicting the second, which lay a mere three years away. Both a time capsule of how we once speculated on our planet's future and a still timely take on the seemingly never-changing human condition. Oh, and the FX and design work are groundbreaking Cinegeek eye candy. What more do you need? How often do you get a chance to catch an old school genre masterpiece like this on the big screen? GO!

 

For more info on these and all of the month's classic screenings feel free to click on the interactive calendar on the upper right hand side of the page. And be sure to follow me on Facebook and Twitter! September calendar's nearly complete, and if ya like Medieval knight tales, Marlene Dietrich Westerns and everything ever directed by Howard Hawks, you're gonna be one happy SOB! Back tomorrow with another Pick!

 

-Joe Walsh

joew@nitratestock.net