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      Mifune’s Transcendent Films, With and Without Kurosawa

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      Yes, the Japanese team was one of cinema’s great collaborations. But Film Forum’s salute to Toshiro Mifune shows that he was a superb actor no matter who was in the director’s chair.Toshiro Mifune once wrote of his collaboration with the director Akira Kurosawa, “I have never as an actor done anything that I am proud of other than with him.”OK. Fine. Those were 16 pretty great movies the two of you made together. But you made roughly 170 movies! Never?We can judge whether Mifune, who died in 1997, was being a little too harsh on himself (and his many other directors) beginning this weekend at Film Forum, where a four-week festival will present 33 of the great Japanese actor’s films, as well as a documentary, “Mifune: The Last Samurai.”It includes all the movies Mifune and Kurosawa made together — certified masterpieces like “Seven Samurai” and “Rashomon,” as well as less well-known but excellent pictures like “High and Low” and “Red Beard.” The chance to see them on a theater screen shouldn’t be missed.But a lot has already been said about those films — I don’t have much new to offer on “Seven Samurai” — and it’s the other half of the Film Forum program where you’re more likely to find some surprises.As a contract player for the Toho studios, Mifune never stopped working — according to “The Last Samurai,” at the peak of his career he appeared in 27 movies in a four-year period. Some of them were filler, no doubt, but the 1950s and ’60s were a great era for Japanese film, and when he wasn’t with Kurosawa, Mifune got to work with other top-flight directors like Hiroshi Inagaki and Masaki Kobayashi.Here, in the order they were made, are some highlights from the series’s non-Kurosawa productions. Mifune might not have been working with his favorite director, but watching these, it’s clear that he still brought his expressive physicality, his quicksilver emotion and his unparalleled charisma to the set every day.Mifune making his film debut as a bank robber on the lam in “Snow Trail.”Janus Films‘Snow Trail’Mifune’s first feature, a tense and bittersweet 1947 thriller filmed in the snowy mountains of Hokkaido, feels as if it could be a Kurosawa film. That’s probably because Kurosawa wrote the screenplay for the director, Senkichi Taniguchi. The 27-year-old Mifune had been discovered in a Toho cattle call for actors, and he’s shockingly handsome, with a wild lock of hair hanging down over his face. He also knew how to command the camera from the very start. As the youngest and most ruthless of a group of bank robbers on the lam, he’s a tight bundle of angry, nervous energy — you spend the picture waiting for him to explode. (As an older and more conscience-stricken crook, Takashi Shimura makes the first of many appearances alongside Mifune.)‘Samurai Saga’Mifune’s Macbeth in “Throne of Blood” is widely celebrated, but fewer people know that he is also an excellent Cyrano in Inagaki’s 1959 adaptation of “Cyrano de Bergerac.” It’s a kick to see Mifune in a role in which his mastery of language is more important than his looks and just as important as his fighting ability (though swordplay is crucial to the story, of course). French 19th-century romance transfers well to the 17th-century Shogunate; Inagaki stages the famous first-act poetry duel on a Kabuki stage, with Mifune dealing sword blows between verses to an entire company of attackers. And Mifune’s ability to play the alpha male with notes of humor and abashment suits him perfectly when it comes to the ultimate rom-com hero.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      What to Do for Halloween in New York City

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      The Village Halloween Parade is back. Haunted houses have reopened. And we’ve rounded up movies that are not-so scary or are downright horrifying.Recently, a friend told me she hated horror movies. Make that horror movie. Turns out she’d only seen one, and didn’t make it through: “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”Renouncing horror after watching one of its most notoriously grisly films through trembling fingers is like watching “The Sopranos” and swearing off New Jersey. Take it from a horror movie fan: Being scared doesn’t have to be that scary.In time for Halloween, here’s a selection of in-person experiences around New York City, as well as movies to view at home, to get the just right amount of fright, whether you’re a curious newbie or a seasoned aficionado.Creepy CuddlyFor families with kids.Through Oct. 31, the Metrograph Theater is offering digital streams of a 45-minute compilation of Halloween-themed cartoons from the collection of the archivist Tommy José Stathes, with live-action and animated shorts featuring Felix the Cat and Koko the Clown. (It’s recommended for ages 8 and up.) On Halloween, head to the Film Forum for an 11 a.m. screening of the original “Frankenstein” (1931).“Frankenstein,” from 1931, will be screened at Film Forum on Oct. 31.Universal Studios Home EntertainmentOn Saturday, costume contests for all ages are set at the Bronx Halloween Parade, where the entertainment lineup includes the Marching Cobras, a drum line; Mazarte, a Mexican dance company; and the comedian Sasha Merci, the parade’s host. The Halloween Kids Spooky Cruise (Oct. 23, 30 and 31) offers panoramic views of the Manhattan skyline and — you’ve been warned — unlimited Halloween-themed candies. BAMboo! at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (Oct. 31) is a free block party with goody bags that kids can grab from decorated car trunks.For families with little ones, steer clear of the movie “Pumpkinhead” and go for the real thing. Pumpkin Point transforms Nolan Park on Governors Island into a family-friendly pumpkin patch; for a donation, you can take home a pumpkin of your own. Decker Farm on Staten Island offers pumpkin carving and a corn maze. Bring your own bag and load up on pumpkins or explore the Amazing Maize Maze at the Queens County Farm, which will host trick or treating with farm animals on Halloween.Finish your day with “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,” streaming on AppleTV+.Easily EerieFor horror beginners.After being canceled last year because of the coronavirus, New York City’s Village Halloween Parade is back on Oct. 31. Now in its 48th year, the parade runs up Sixth Avenue from Spring Street to 16th Street, starting at 7 p.m. and finishing around 11 p.m. The grand marshal is the comedian and YouTube star Randy Rainbow. If you can’t participate in person, the parade will be telecast live on NY1 starting at 8 p.m.“Universal Horror,” a new eight-film collection on the Criterion Channel, spotlights some of the legendary movie monsters, like Frankenstein and the Mummy, that originated at Universal Pictures in the 1930s. Highlights include the longer and racier Spanish-language version of the original “Dracula” (1931), and Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in the grisly, Poe-inspired revenge tale “The Raven” (1935).Bela Lugosi in “Dracula,” from 1931. Universal PicturesGhost stories, true crime — and interior design? That’s “Dark House,” a new podcast from House Beautiful magazine and the first podcast in Hearst’s 125-year history. The five-episode series is free, and explores the architectural elements of spooky houses around the country. One episode is about a house in the Hollywood Hills — where Jean Harlow and Sharon Tate’s boyfriend Jay Sebring once lived — that may be cursed.The Brooklyn Brainery offers digital and in-person (and affordable!) classes for adults who want to learn about the scary side of history. Options include a “Murder at the Seaport” walking tour in Manhattan (Oct. 23 for $25) and a virtual class on witch hunts (Oct. 27 for $7)..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Moderately MacabreFor a scare that won’t keep you up at night.The guided NYC Ghosts tour stops at said-to-be haunted locations across New York, including the Jefferson Market Library, which once served as a women’s prison, and a Revivalist Greek brownstone in the West Village that’s known as the House of Death, where the ghost of Mark Twain, who lived there for a year, allegedly roams. For chilly nights, stay at home and read “Yours Cruelly, Elvira,” the dishy new memoir from Elvira (a.k.a. Cassandra Peterson), the longtime horror movie hostess and entrepreneur. In it, she details her rise from a Kansas childhood to Las Vegas showgirl to beloved horror personality. But she also spills the beans on her chance encounter with Elvis and her relationship with a woman. Stream the horror comedy “Elvira, Mistress of the Dark” (1998) on Amazon Prime.The Alamo Drafthouse Lower Manhattan opened this month beneath the landmark 28 Liberty Street building in the Financial District. “Lights of New York,” a series of movies set in and about the city, will include the religious paranoia thriller “God Told Me To” (1976) and the gritty vampire film “The Addiction” (1995), for a week starting Oct. 29. For horror fans on a budget, the new streaming service Kino Cult offers a free deep dive into cinematic weirdness. The collection includes bizarro films by the Oscar-winner Yorgos Lanthimos (“Dogtooth”) and the Italian master Mario Bava (“Black Sabbath”), as well as themed collections like ’70s and ’80s Flashback (“The Pit”) and Drive-In Favorites (“Beware! The Blob”).Truly TerrifyingFor those who like their horror pitch black.“The Dark House” in the Hudson Valley, inspired by W.W. Jacobs’s ghost story “The Toll House,” is an immersive theatrical experience that takes place entirely in the dark. Written and directed by Timothy Haskell, the story is told through a headset you wear as you navigate the darkened space, where sounds, tastes and smells emerge around you. The show continues through Oct. 31 at the Philipstown Depot Theater in Garrison, N.Y. The Dark House in the Hudson Valley is an immersive theatrical experience that takes place in the dark.Russ RowlandSpectacle Theater, the offbeat Brooklyn microcinema, has reopened its doors, and its Halloween offerings are as delightfully bizarre as ever. On Halloween night the theater is showing “Cemetery of Terror” (1985), a Mexican film about teenagers who bring a serial killer back from the dead.The creative team behind Blood Manor, the ultra-scary haunted house in Lower Manhattan (through Nov. 6), takes a culinary turn this year with Nightmare on Beech Street, a “haunted dining experience” in Long Beach on Long Island. Costumed actors will interact with diners, who will choose from a menu that includes Witches Hair Pasta, the Death Wish-key cocktail and the Brain Hemorrhage, a chocolate brain-shaped dessert. The venue is open until 2 a.m. through Oct. 31. More

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      ‘Illustrious Corpses’: A Mafia Thriller Heavy With Metaphors

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      Francesco Rosi’s film, released in 1974 when Italy feared a coup d’état, remains astute analysis of corruption. A new restoration is at Film Forum.An absorbing, resonant, at times near majestic whodunit, “Illustrious Corpses” is the Italian analog to Watergate-era conspiracy thrillers like “The Parallax View” and “The Conversation.” The movie, first seen here at the 1976 New York Film Festival, is at Film Forum in a new 4K restoration through Oct. 21.As directed by Francesco Rosi, one of the most political of Italian filmmakers, “Illustrious Corpses” aspires to the metaphysical. The opening sequence, partially set to Chopin’s Funeral March, has an elderly gentleman pay a visit to the sacred mummies in a dank church catacomb and, reaching for a flower, fall from an assassin’s bullet — the first of many judges to be shot. “The mafia killed him,” one orator later announces at the judge’s funeral. “He was the mafia,” shout the youthful demonstrators in the street, thus laying out the movie’s particular logic.“Illustrious Corpses” is based on the novel, “Equal Danger,” by Leonardo Sciascia, a Sicilian author who wrote often about the mafia, ultimately as metaphor. His afterword to “Equal Danger,” Sciascia calls it “a fable about power anywhere in the world.” Still, although Italy is never mentioned, the locations — recognizably Palermo, Naples and Rome — are scarcely allegorical.By contrast, Rosi’s protagonist is something of an abstraction or a useful cliché. Tough, honest Inspector Rogas (the veteran roughneck Lino Ventura) is tasked with solving the first murder and those that follow. As he theorizes a culprit, an existential policier plays out against a background of strikes and demonstrations, under constant state surveillance. There are strong hints of unseen forces. Playing a judge, Max Von Sydow materializes as a version of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor advancing a theology of judicial infallibility.In his 1976 review, the New York Times critic Vincent Canby called “Illustrious Corpses” “a dazzling example of fashionably radical Italian filmmaking — elegantly composed, breathlessly paced, photographed in the beautiful, drained colors of a landscape in mourning for the sun.” He also found the movie drained in another way, so broad in its “indictment of government” as to lack any real force.In fact, made during a time when Italy had ample reason to fear a coup d’état, “Illustrious Corpses” is not only topical but quite specific in addressing a bombing campaign waged by the right-wing extremists to destabilize the country as well as the “historic” compromise by which the Italian Communist Party joined the Christian Democratic government. More explicit than the novel, the movie ends with a communist official inverting a quote associated with the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, “the truth isn’t always revolutionary.”Casting contributes to the film’s sardonic gravitas. Along with Von Sydow, the French war horses Charles Vanel and Alain Cuny appear as a pair of judges and Luis Buñuel’s frequent alter ego, the urbane Fernando Rey, plays a duplicitous minister of security. Despite the youthful radicals massed around the edges, “Illustrious Corpses” is, as the title suggests, an old man’s world. The corrupt gerontocracy is disrupted only when Tina Aumont (the daughter of camp icon Maria Montez) makes a scene-stealing appearance as a witness to murder.Illustrious CorpsesThrough Oct. 21 at Film Forum, Manhattan; filmforum.org. More

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      5 Things to Do on Labor Day Weekend

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      Our critics and writers have selected noteworthy cultural events to experience virtually and in person in New York City.Art & MuseumsMoMA PS1’s Engaging CourtyardNiki de Saint Phalle’s “La femme et L’oiseau fontaine” (1967) will be on view in MoMA PS1’s courtyard until Monday.Niki Charitable Art Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; MoMA PS1; Marissa AlperIn 1997, the courtyard at MoMA PS1 became the main venue for “Warm Up,” a summer event that mingled art, music and design in order to draw new audiences. But things change. “Warm Up” certainly hasn’t gone away, but last fall, the institution began “PS1 Courtyard: an experiment in creative ecologies,” a program testing out ways to use the outdoor space that encourage community engagement.The initiative’s projects include a fountain from Niki de Saint Phalle, part of a larger exhibition at PS1 that closes on Monday, and Rashid Johnson’s “Stage.” Visitors are welcome to get up on his installation’s large yellow platform and freely use its five live microphones of varying heights. By showing a microphone as a dynamic social tool, Johnson’s piece, which will be on view through the fall, indicates the many things a stage can represent: a site of protest, music making, solidarity and, most important, amplification of your voice.MELISSA SMITHFilm SeriesScenes From Every SeasonA scene from “A Summer’s Tale,” one of four features in Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons, all of which Film Forum will screen through Sept. 9.Janus FilmsThe maximalist moviegoing event of Labor Day weekend is “Lawrence of Arabia,” screening on Saturday and Sunday on 70-millimeter film at the Museum of the Moving Image. But for a minimalist alternative, try Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons — four features, each set at a different time of year, that Rohmer, the most conversation-oriented French New Wave director, turned out from the late 1980s through the late 1990s. (Together, the running times total roughly two showings of “Lawrence of Arabia.”) With the changing of the seasons, Film Forum is showing all the titles separately from Friday through Sept. 9.Watching them in tandem illustrates how Rohmer — superficially so consistent and serene — subtly toys with structure and variation, recombining types of characters in friendships and romances that rarely develop as expected. The most summery is, naturally, “A Summer’s Tale.” Melvil Poupaud plays a commitment-phobe vacationing in Brittany who somehow winds up juggling a surfeit of commitments to women.BEN KENIGSBERGJazzCelebrating a Visionary Record LabelCharles Tolliver at the 50th anniversary of Another Earth in 2019. Through Saturday, he will be celebrating another 50th anniversary at Birdland — that of the record label he started with Stanley Cowell, Strata-East.Lev Radin/Pacific Press, via Getty ImagesIn 1971, seeking refuge from an exploitive, increasingly commercialized jazz industry, the trumpeter Charles Tolliver and the pianist Stanley Cowell founded Strata-East, a record label offering artists creative freedom and relative commercial control. Though short-lived, Strata-East inspired Black musicians in other cities to undertake similar efforts. And it captured a moment in time: Nearly every Strata-East album simmers with the heat and tension of the Black Power era, delivering terse, syncopated rhythms and pushing jazz linguistics into a more spare, confrontational zone.Cowell died last year after a prolific career, but Tolliver, 79, continues to perform. At Birdland through Saturday, he is celebrating the label’s 50th anniversary with an ensemble of all-stars, including some who recorded on Strata-East in the 1970s: the tenor saxophonist Billy Harper, the pianist George Cables, the bassist Buster Williams and the drummer Lenny White. Sets are at 7 and 9:30 p.m. The late show on Saturday, which will also be livestreamed at dreamstage.live, will feature a guest appearance by the storied bassist Cecil McBee and will be hosted by the actor Danny Glover.GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOComedyNo Labor for These LaughsErik Griffin in his Showtime special “AmeERIKan Warrior.” He is headlining at Carolines on Broadway through Saturday.ShowtimeEven workaholics know they should take it easy this weekend, and fans of “Workaholics” will recognize the headliner at Carolines on Broadway through Saturday: Erik Griffin, who played Montez Walker on that Comedy Central sitcom. Griffin also portrayed a stand-up in “I’m Dying Up Here,” a dramedy about comedy in the 1970s on Showtime, where you can find two of Griffin’s comedy specials. At Carolines, he will perform one set at 7 p.m. on Thursday and Friday, and two sets at 7 and 9:30 on Saturday. Tickets start at $31.25.On Sunday at 7 and 9:30, Carolines will welcome Rosebud Baker, who released her debut special, “Whiskey Fists,” in August on the Comedy Central Stand-Up YouTube channel. Tickets are $27.25 and up.There will be a two-drink minimum at each show.SEAN McCARTHYKIDSThis Is How They RollA child at an NYC Unicycle Festival event in 2019. The 12th edition of the annual celebration takes place throughout the boroughs this weekend.Kenneth SpringleIn New York, casual basketball games are about as common as strutting pigeons. But the contest scheduled on Saturday at 11 a.m. in the Bronx should result in a lot of head-turning, not to mention wheel-turning.That’s when the King Charles Unicycle Troupe will play — while riding its favorite vehicles — at the basketball court in Clinton Playground in Crotona Park. (Enter at Clinton Avenue and Crotona Park South.) A beloved local circus act, these guys can double-Dutch jump rope on one wheel, too.Their show is a highlight of the 12th annual NYC Unicycle Festival, a free outdoor celebration presented by the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus. The festivities also include long-distance group rides on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, which proficient young unicyclists can join if they’re accompanied by an adult. (Details are on the festival’s website.) Experienced riders can participate in a post-performance pickup game with the King Charles players on Saturday, too, along with a free-throw basketball contest and a unicycle obstacle course.Neophytes, however, can do more than watch. On Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m., at Grant’s tomb in Morningside Heights, the festival’s conclusion will offer instruction and youth-size equipment for children who want to give unicycling a whirl.LAUREL GRAEBER More

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      A Steamy French Thriller Is a ‘Sleeper Smash Hit’

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      The 1969 film “La Piscine” was supposed to run for two weeks at New York’s Film Forum, but it’s been extended to the fall.For the past 14 weeks at Film Forum, a longstanding independent and repertory theater on West Houston Street in Manhattan, the 1969 French film “La Piscine” has been playing — a run that has extended its initial engagement by 12 weeks, and counting.“Rear Window,” “8 ½,” “La Strada” and a popular Humphrey Bogart series that included “Casablanca” have all come and gone, but “La Piscine” swims on.If there is a film of New York’s 2021 summer, this may be it.“La Piscine” (which means “The Swimming Pool”) revolves around Jean-Paul (played by Alain Delon) and Marianne (Romy Schneider), who have retreated to a house with a large pool outside St. Tropez. Sadly, he only gets one month of vacation. The lovers are unexpectedly joined by Harry (Maurice Ronet), Marianne’s former paramour and Jean-Paul’s former best friend, and his 18-year-old daughter, Penelope (Jane Birkin). Much decadence and extremely French crossover love ensues.Of course, life at the pool is not as it seems. (If you are a person with strong opinions about spoiler alerts for 50-year-old French films, skip the rest of this paragraph.) Tensions mount and in the final half-hour Jean-Paul coldly murders Harry by slow, brutal, drowning. After one of the chicer funeral scenes committed to film, Marianne covers for Jean-Paul to the police, despite the fact Jean-Paul had just declared his desire to leave her for Penelope.Sex, opulence, a dash of danger. Could anything better describe New York’s post-lockdown mood? And then there’s the epic style: Come for Alain’s open-to-the-navel denim shirt, stay for Romy’s Courrèges-designed bathing suits. It turns out, many New Yorkers have.“It’s a total sleeper smash hit,” said Bruce Goldstein, the director of repertory programming for Film Forum and the founder of Rialto Pictures, which distributes “La Piscine” in the United States. “The numbers have not dipped at all. We hit all the right nerves with this.”Ah, yes, those nerves. After more than year of pandemic restrictions, a lot of people, including me, were more than ready for a heavy dose of outrageous beauty. I have seen the two-hour film four times since it arrived in mid-May.“It’s vicarious,” Mr. Goldstein said, trying to explain why a 50-year-old French film starring actors who were largely unknown in America, has been such a hit. “It’s a vacation in the south of France that a lot of people can’t take. There’s also the incredible magnetism and chemistry of the two stars, who were real-life lovers.”The film is classified as a psychological thriller, but to first-time viewers, very little happens until the very end. “Can you believe there’s another hour of this?” I overhead one older woman marvel to her friend near the halfway mark.“A Bigger Splash,” the marvelous 2015 remake starring Ralph Fiennes and Tilda Swinton, which Americans may be more familiar with, maintains the broad strokes of the plot, but, as the title suggests, it is much splashier. In that version, the drowning is an accidental crime of passion, far from the cold, calculating murder of “La Piscine”; the dialogue is faster, the cuts sharper, the music louder.Watching it now, having done a deep dive (ahem) into the original, made me acutely aware it was the very absence of action, the unapologetic decadence, that kept pulling me back to the theater. This is not a film interested in passing judgment on la belle vie.Even as I became more sensitive to the subtleties of the film’s dialogue (“the first swim really takes it out of you,” says Marianne, when Penelope returns from the beach having lost her virginity to Jean-Paul), I remained more interested in simply watching beautiful people do very little. “Tomorrow I will take a long siesta,” Marianne declares, lying on a couch in her bathing suit after a day by the pool. Yes, please.That a film so grounded in the gratuitous has resonated in 2021 is perhaps not entirely surprising. After a year in which New York City suffered enormous loss and its residents lived heavily circumscribed lives, it’s understandable we are looking to take our clothes off and have a good time, onscreen and off.Perhaps, too, there is something unconsciously appealing about the pervading undercurrent of anxiety. Much like the “hot vax summer” that never was, it turns out there is not another hour of this.After returning from Harry’s funeral, Jean-Paul, Marianne and Penelope stand at the pool’s edge. “I will have the pool drained,” Jean-Paul says. “I will never swim in this pool again,” Marianne says.New York will, no doubt, swim in many pools again, but for the moment, as the darker days return, there is some comfort in still being able to do so for two hours at a time. More

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      In Paul Schrader’s ‘Blue Collar,’ the Factory Floor Is Brutal

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      His 1978 debut, which features quick-witted performances by Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel, now has a short run at Film Forum.The robber baron Jay Gould supposedly bragged that he could hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. That quote, likely apocryphal, is the essence of Paul Schrader’s “Blue Collar,” a harshly garish morality play in which — squeezed between the Scylla of a factory’s exploitative management and the Charybdis of their corrupt union — three autoworkers go rogue.“Blue Collar” has been revived for a week at Film Forum in a 35-millimeter print. It was timely in 1978 and, in its expression of rust-belt alienation, prescient as well.Perhaps because it was Schrader’s first movie as a director, “Blue Collar” communicates the thrill of breaking new ground, albeit showing the influence of Martin Scorsese (for whom, a few years earlier, Schrader wrote “Taxi Driver”). It echoes both the prole-drama “Car Wash” (1976) and the mode’s classic example, “On the Waterfront” (1954).The most daringly uncommercial move in Schrader’s screenplay, co-written with his brother, Leonard Schrader, was constituting his larcenous trio as the so-called “Oreo Gang” — two Black workers, played by Richard Pryor and Yaphet Kotto, and one white, Harvey Keitel. (The reverse would have been conventional Hollywood wisdom.) Schrader’s boldest strategy was to allow each then-hungry actor to believe himself the star. Call it a form of “method” direction. In his history of ’70s film, Peter Biskind describes the set as a “powder keg.”Thus, while Keitel and Kotto smolder with suppressed rage, Pryor (who, like Marlon Brando, rarely gave the same line-reading twice) is incandescent as a quick-minded trickster with a jittery strut and an answer for everything. In his mixed review, the New York Times critic Vincent Canby noted that, for the first time, Pryor had a role utilizing “the wit and fury that distinguishes his straight comedy routines.”Pryor’s improvisations heighten the movie’s dialectic of oppressive reality and imaginary escape. While the factory scenes, shot at a Checker cab plant in Kalamazoo, Mich., have a documentary quality, fantasy is furnished by the Norman Lear TV sitcoms that punctuate the domestic scenes. The movie’s resident realist is the wily president of the union local. Nicknamed Eddie Knuckles, he’s embodied by Harry Bellaver, a veteran (and genuine) working-class actor who, no less than Pryor, gives the impression of conjuring his dialogue on the spot.“Blue Collar” has a few weak bits, notably one where, interrupting Pryor’s critique of “The Jeffersons,” an I.R.S. examiner pays an unexpected house call. And just as the Oreo Gang fail to think through their robbery, the movie glosses over a worse crime that could not have been committed without management collusion. Still, this portrait of frustration is powerfully framed. The opening credits — an assembly-line montage scored to the pounding first chords of the blues song “I’m a Man,” sung with new lyrics by Captain Beefheart — provide a brutal annunciation. And, following a gripping finale, Schrader redeems the cliché of ending on a freeze frame by returning the struggle to the factory floor.Interviewed by the leftist film journal Cineaste, Schrader asserted his apolitical intentions while congratulating himself as having come to “a very specific Marxist conclusion.” Be that as it may, “Blue Collar” is less Marxist than it is Hobbesian, as expressed by Kotto’s indictment of the powers that be: “They’ll do anything to keep you on their line. They pit the lifers against the new boys, the old against the young, the Black against the white — everybody — to keep us in our place.”Collective action is futile.Blue CollarJuly 9-15 at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, Manhattan; filmforum.org. More

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      in Music

      5 Things to Do on Memorial Day Weekend

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      Our critics and writers have selected noteworthy cultural events to experience virtually and in person in New York City.Art & MuseumsExpressions of FreedomZaq Landsberg’s “Reclining Liberty” will be on view in Morningside Park until April.Zaq LandsbergIn 2005, Zaq Landsberg created a new nation in rural Utah called Zaqistan, on the premise that our ideals around governance were worth re-evaluating. In Harlem’s Morningside Park, his yearlong installation “Reclining Liberty” — a 25-foot-long Buddha-like version of the Statue of Liberty — is another re-examination, this time of a quintessential American symbol. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Paris Calligrammes’ Review: Recalling the 1960s With Fondness and Passion

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      The German artist and filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger takes us on an unhurried journey through her past.The German artist and filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger, whose work is not nearly as well distributed in the United States as it ought to be, is not generally known for sentimentality. Her long, searching films are elaborately costumed and visionary not-quite allegories of queer radical feminism. Representative titles include “Madame X: An Absolute Ruler” (1982), “The Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press” (1984) and “Joan of Arc of Mongolia” (1992). She can’t be blamed for getting at least a little wistful, though, in her new “Paris Calligrammes,” an autobiographical documentary. It’s about Paris, after all — her Paris, first experienced in the early 1960s.After the film opens with footage that Ottinger shot in the Paris of today, we’re swept back in time, aurally and visually: Notably by the singers Juliette Gréco and Jacques Dutronc, and a clip from Marcel Carné’s immortal 1945 “Les Enfants du Paradis.” But “Paris Calligrammes” consistently mixes what’s familiar to the Francophile with much that isn’t. The movie takes its title from a bookshop Ottinger frequented as a young woman. She had been enchanted by French culture growing up in occupied Germany, and sought out a connection home once she landed in the City of Lights to study. The bookstore Calligrammes, run by the German-born Fritz Picard, served German expatriates. It was a place where, Ottinger puts it, “The Dadaists encountered the Situationists.” It became a formative aesthetic home for the young artist.Ottinger’s account of a reading at the store by Walter Mehling is one of the movie’s high points. The filmmaker has what seems like a torrent of anecdotes and attendant ideas to impart, but the movie never feels rushed. She created three different narrations, those in French and English read by the actors Fanny Ardant and Jenny Agutter, and one in German, read by Ottinger herself. This U.S. release features the Agutter narration. This reading is as crucial in conveying the mood of Ottinger’s story as the film’s unhurried pace is.We see Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Signoret and Nico, but also now-obscure figures including Raymond Duncan, the dancer Isadora Duncan’s eccentric brother, who stalked the Paris streets in a toga and philosophized at the famed cafe Les Deux Magots. Ottinger’s account of the riot-provoking 1960s Paris premiere of Jean Genet’s play “The Screens” emphasizes how that production’s use of costuming and makeup influenced Ottinger’s own future film aesthetic.Ottinger also remembers alienation: Her account of a strike in May 1968 is less-than utopian. And she is pointed when recalling how when the activist Daniel Cohn-Bendit was agitating in Paris, it wasn’t just the right wing that dismissed him with the categorization “a German Jew.”When she ends the movie by putting Édith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” on the soundtrack, you may think Ottinger has finally succumbed to the sentimentality she’s kept mostly in check. But wait. Just like the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, “Paris Calligrammes” has a mid-credits stinger — this one about Piaf’s dedication of the song.Paris CalligrammesNot rated. In English, German and French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. Watch through Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema. More