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4 Film Series to Catch in N.Y.C. This Weekend
Our guide to film series and special screenings happening this weekend and in the week ahead. All our movie reviews are at nytimes.com/reviews/movies.
LA CINÉMATHÈQUE FRANÇAISE PRESENTS: FRENCH MELODRAMA at the Quad Cinema (through May 22). Francophiles, cinephiles and Franco-cinephiles: Time to scope out the best bistro near the Quad. In a partnership with Cinémathèque Française of Paris, the theater will present an assortment of classics (and some lesser-known titles) that broadly fit into the genre of melodrama. They include Alain Resnais’s seldom-screened “Mélo” (on Sunday), Max Ophüls’s “The Earrings of Madame de …” (on Sunday and Tuesday) and François Truffaut’s Hitchcock tribute “The Woman Next Door” (on Sunday and Monday).
212-255-2243, quadcinema.com
SYLVIA CHANG at the Metrograph (May 18-27). There aren’t many careers that combine musicals, melodramas and fantasias from martial arts directors, but such is the case with Sylvia Chang, the Taiwan-born writer, director and actress recently seen in the futuristic, Australia-set segment of Jia Zhangke’s “Mountains May Depart” (on May 27). Much of what’s showing at the Metrograph is difficult to find on DVD and streaming sites, including Edward Yang’s first feature, “That Day, on the Beach” (on Sunday and May 26), in which Ms. Chang plays a woman reunited with an old friend. The series also showcases Johnnie To’s 3-D musical “Office” (on Saturday), which Chang scripted from her own play and stars in as a demanding company boss, and five features Chang made as a director: “Love Education” (on Saturday and Sunday), “Xiao Yu” (on Sunday), “Murmur of the Hearts” (on May 25 and 27), “Tempting Heart” (on May 26) and “20 30 40” (on May 27).
212-660-0312, metrograph.com
NEW YORK AFRICAN FILM FESTIVAL at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (through May 22), BAM Rose Cinemas (May 23-28) and Maysles Cinema (June 7-10). This annual festival celebrates its 25th anniversary with programming designed to bridge generations of filmmakers. The centerpiece is “Wallay” (showing on Friday and Monday at the Film Society), about a 13-year-old boy in France who is sent to live with his uncle in Burkina Faso. The lineup also includes “Abderrahmane Sissako: Beyond Territories” (screening on Friday), a documentary about the Mauritanian-born director of the Oscar-nominated “Timbuktu,” and a retrospective screening of “Black Sun” (on Sunday). A Soviet production from the early 1970s, it follows an African politician modeled on Patrice Lumumba, who was the first democratically elected leader of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, and was assassinated in 1961.
africanfilmny.org
WILLIAM FOX PRESENTS: RESTORATIONS AND REDISCOVERIES FROM THE FOX FILM CORPORATION at Museum of Modern Art (May 18-June 5). Under the stewardship of William Fox (and even after he was forced from control of the company in 1930), the Fox Film Corporation was home to some of the most innovative filmmaking of the late silent and early sound eras. Just how innovative can be seen in the 1929 feature “Sunnyside Up” (on Friday and June 2), which was made with Fox’s Movietone sound system and opens with an amazing crane shot that introduces two sides of a New York tenement block. The delightful musical stars Janet Gaynor as a poor city girl who has a chance for love and happiness with a Southampton heir (Charles Farrell). See Ms. Gaynor, the star of several films in this festival, again in “One More Spring” (on June 1 and 4) as an aspiring actress who finds a surrogate family while squatting with an antiques dealer (Warner Baxter) and a violinist (Walter Woolf King) in a Central Park toolshed. A Depression-era portrait of how communities can lead the way out of poverty, this 1935 film is markedly blunt in its politics.
212-708-9400, moma.org
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