New York Film Critics Circle Series:
Foreign Affairs
January 7 - February 12, 2006

Every year, Museum of the Moving Image presents a series of films selected, written about, and introduced by members of the New York Film Critics Circle. In these times of xenophobia, extreme nationalism, and international turmoil, the seventh annual Critics series, Foreign Affairs, offers a wide range of films from the United States and abroad that explore the idea of being “foreign,” of literally or metaphorically visiting another country.

On the opening weekend of the series, the Museum will also present special screenings of Capote and Wong Kar Wai's 2046. Click here for details.


Saturday, January 7, Introduced by Matt Zoller Seitz
Sunday, January 8
2:00 p.m.
HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR
Selected by Matt Zoller Seitz
1959, 88 mins., France/Japan. Imported 35mm print courtesy of French Cultural Services of the French Embassy. Directed by Alain Resnais. With Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada. One of the sexiest movies ever made, and one of the most haunting, Resnais’ pioneering romantic drama begins with an image of an embrace—intertwined lovers (Riva, playing a French actress, and Okada, playing a Japanese architect) dusted with what appears to be radioactive ash. It then covers one day in their relationship, following the lovers (both of whom are married) around postwar Hiroshima, then leaping back into the past without warning, exploring the private obligations and deep traumas that prevent them from uniting permanently. Based on a screenplay by the young Marguerite Duras, which Resnais said he shot word-for-word, the movie was revolutionary for its frank sexuality and its pioneering use of flash cuts. It remains powerful because it counters adolescent, Hollywood-style fantasies of forever-bonded soul mates and instead depicts an intensely physical, in many ways desperate, love between grown ups who are profoundly alienated from their countries, their personal histories, and each other.

—Matt Zoller Seitz, New York Press

Saturday, January 7, Introduced by John Anderson
Sunday, January 8
4:00 p.m.
THE THIRD MAN
Selected by John Anderson
1949, 104 mins., United Kingdom. Directed by Carol Reed. With Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles. Is there an uglier American than Holly Martins? The ostensible hero of Carol Reed, Graham Greene, and Orson Welles’ classic tale of post war corruption and strangers in a strange land, he might once have seemed the innocent abroad—instead of the ill-informed, blundering yahoo, big-footing it around a ruined Vienna, getting ensnared in a world he can’t possibly understand and trying to bend that world to his will. Sound familiar? The Third Man is about nothing if not knowing what you don’t know, even if Joseph Cotten’s Holly never quite gets a clue.

—John Anderson, Newsday, Variety

Saturday, January 14, Introduced by Peter Rainer
1:00 p.m.
HAMSUN
Selected by Peter Rainer
1996, 157 mins., Denmark/Germany/Norway/Sweden. Directed by Jan Troell. With Max Von Sydow, Ghita Norby. Hamsun, starring Von Sydow in his finest performance, is one of the greatest and least-heralded films to appear in the past decade. It takes you as far out as you can go—to the limits of feeling. As a movie about a great and aggrieved artist made by an artist of equal rank, it is perhaps unique in film history. It’s about the final seventeen years in the life of the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, winner of the 1920 Nobel Prize for literature, and, late in life, an ardent defender of Hitler. Hamsun went from being a national hero to a national disgrace. This film plays out the passion of his fall.

—Peter Rainer, The Christian Science Monitor

Saturday, January 14
Sunday, January 15, Introduced by Stuart Klawans
4:00 p.m.
NAKED LUNCH
Selected by Stuart Klawans
1991, 115 mins., Canada. Directed by David Cronenberg. With Peter Weller, Judy David, Ian Holm. A literary adaptation and a biopic, a cultural history and a horror movie, Cronenberg’s masterpiece may be the ultimate hallucination of the not-so-innocent American abroad. We are a practical-minded people, best at patenting mechanisms and exterminating bugs—so our Bill feels a little helpless, a little alienated, when his favorite New York coffee shop melts into the Tangiers soul, and even his body parts start to behave like foreign agents.

—Stuart Klawans, The Nation

Saturday, January 14, Introduced by Stephen Whitty
Sunday, January 15
6:30 p.m.
THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH
Selected by Stephen Whitty
1976, 140 mins., United Kingdom. Archival 35mm print from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Archive. Directed by Nicolas Roeg. With David Bowie, Rip Torn. We’re used to aliens who can make the Earth stand still. But what would happen if the humans they met weren’t quite as squeaky clean as Patricia Neal and Billy Gray? That’s the question asked by Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film, in which David Bowie plays the strange visitor from another planet, and discovers a world of treachery and vice that poor Klaatu couldn’t even have dreamed of in the 1950s. A film of elegant imagery and sardonic intent.

—Stephen Whitty, The Newark Star-Ledger

Saturday, January 21, Introduced by Nathan Lee
Sunday, January 22, Introduced by Oscar-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker (Kundun, Raging Bull, GoodFellas)
1:30 p.m.
Encore screening: Friday, January 27 at 5:00 p.m. FREE
KUNDUN
Selected by Nathan Lee
1997, 128 mins. Directed by Martin Scorsese. With Tenzin Thuthob Tsarong. Arguably the most empathic meditation on Eastern spirituality ever made by an American director, Kundun is an exquisite act of imaginative sympathy. Scorsese’s hushed, gentle, quietly radical biopic of the fourteenth Dalai Lama reflects the light and music of consciousness itself. Narrative becomes a medium for the evocation of mental states, the camera floating though space like an exhalation of smoke: mobile, delicate, sensitive to objects and architecture, reactive to the most attenuated psychological drafts.

—Nathan Lee, The New York Sun, The New York Times

Saturday, January 21, Introduced by Andrew Sarris
Sunday, January 22
4:00 p.m.
FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
Selected by Andrew Sarris
1940, 120 mins. Imported 35mm print from the British Film Institute. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. With Joel McCrea, Laraine Day. The much underrated McCrea and Day provide the romantic backdrop of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 international-espionage thriller Foreign Correspondent, buttressed by a suavely continental cast, notably Herbert Marshall, George Sanders, Albert Basserman, Edmund Gwenn, Eduardo Cianelli, and Martin Kosleck. The set design and special effects of the legendary William Cameron Menzies evoked a sensibility as stark and fanciful as Hitchcock’s, particularly in the climactic plane crash at sea, a brilliantly conceived and edited disaster coup that has never been surpassed. Almost as memorable as Mr. Memory in The 39 Steps is Edmund Gwenn’s benignly avuncular assassin: a short, stocky cherub of cheerful malice who is in some ways a mirror image of the director himself in his role as the scourge of his virile, handsome male stars.

—Andrew Sarris, The New York Observer

Saturday, January 28
Sunday, January 29, Introduced by Michael Atkinson
1:30 p.m.
STROSZEK
Selected by Michael Atkinson
1977, 108 mins., Germany. Directed by Werner Herzog. With Bruno S, Eva Mattes. Everything and nothing is foreign to Werner Herzog, our planet’s greatest native alien and explorer of universalized freakiness. Here, Middle America is the LZ for a gaggle of Euro misfits, who may as well have landed on Pluto. Best of all, Wisconsin is revealed to us as essentially terra incognita, a landscape of extraterrestrial oddities.

—Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice

Saturday, January 28, Introduced by J. Hoberman
Sunday, January 29
4:00 p.m.
ZABRISKIE POINT
Selected by J. Hoberman
1970, 112 mins. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. With Mark Frechette, Daria Halprin, Rod Taylor. Invited by MGM, Antonioni, the new-minted maestro of Swinging London went in search of America. Zabriskie Point was the most anticipated and reviled, as well as the most gorgeous and idiotic, of youthsploitation films. Filming in L.A., Berkeley, and Death Valley, Antonioni was accused of desecrating the RFK assassination site, fomenting a campus riot, and violating the Mann Act; his star, chosen after 1,300 hopefuls mobbed an open call at the Electric Circus on St. Marks Place, trumped his film performance by robbing a bank.

—J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

Saturday, February 4, Introduced by Owen Gleiberman
2:00 p.m.
FULL METAL JACKET
Selected by Owen Gleiberman
1987, 116 mins., United Kingdom. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. With Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin. From the moment that Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam film was released, far too much attention was paid to its funny and harrowing Marine basic-training sequence—a brilliant coup de cinéma, to be sure, but merely the prelude to a movie that embodies, as no other has, the unstable and terrifying foreignness of war. More than Coppola or Cimino or Stone, Kubrick caught the insanity—the psychological disintegration—of combat in his film’s very form, creating, in the process, his least-acknowledged masterpiece.

—Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

Saturday, February 4, Introduced by Lou Lumenick
4:30 p.m.
THE LAST FLIGHT
Selected by Lou Lumenick
1931, 80 mins. Archival 16mm print from the UCLA Film and TV Archive. Directed by William Dieterle. With Richard Barthelmess, Johnny Mack Brown, David Manners, Helen Chandler, Elliott Nugent. John Monk Saunders (Wings, The Dawn Patrol, and Mr. Fay Wray) adapted his autobiographical novel about the Lost Generation for this uniquely witty and evocative drama of four emotionally damaged American flyers who spent their days drinking and chasing bulls with a flippant expatriate named Nikki in post World War I Paris.

—Lou Lumenick, New York Post

Sunday, February 5, Introduced by Armond White
1:30 p.m.
NO GREATER GLORY
Selected by Armond White
1934, 78 mins. Restored 35mm print from Sony Pictures Repertory. Directed by Frank Borzage. With George Breakstone, Jimmy Butler. L. P. Hartley’s famous epigraph “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there,” could apply to the little-known masterworks of Frank Borzage. No Greater Glory is among the finest of Borzage’s affecting tales. Focusing on immigrant American struggles, Borzage’s perceptive view of working-class life evokes the emotional plenitude of American experience before World War II—feelings and conflicts ignored in movies for baby boomers and Gen-Xers. Borzage’s masterly vision foreshadowed Italian neorealism, the closest equivalent to his now foreign world of politics and spirituality.

—Armond White, New York Press

Sunday, February 5, Introduced by Leah Rozen
4:00 p.m.
NINOTCHKA
Selected by Leah Rozen
1939, 110 mins. Directed by Ernst Lutbitsch. With Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas. “Garbo laughs!” MGM’s tag line at the time of the movie’s original release says it all. After a decade of portraying tragic heroines, the dour Swedish-born star loosened up for a comedy romp that would turn out to be her penultimate movie. She is a hoot playing a grim Soviet bureaucrat who, while visiting Paris, is dismayed to find herself succumbing to the bourgeois charms of  sophisticated millinery and a debonair Melvyn Douglas.

—Leah Rozen, People

Saturday, February 11, Introduced by Marshall Fine
2:00 p.m.
THE YAKUZA
Selected by Marshall Fine
1975, 112 mins. Imported 35mm print.
Directed by Sydney Pollack. With Robert Mitchum, Ken Takakura. Mitchum is both deadly and soulful as an American trying to help a buddy, Brian Keith, whose daughter has been kidnapped by the Japanese mafia, the Yakuza. Writers Paul Schrader and Robert Towne treat this strapping American fixer as a reluctant bull in this particular china shop, trying to understand the codes of honor he seems to trample with regularity. He is not the ugly American trying to force his values on a foreign culture; rather, he is playing a game whose rules do not become clear until it is far too late. Director Sydney Pollack creates a taut, brutal action film with a heart and a conscience.

—Marshall Fine, The Star

Saturday, February 11, Introduced by Gene Seymour
4:30 p.m.
MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE 
Selected by Gene Seymour
1985, 97 mins., United Kingdom. Directed by Stephen Frears. With Daniel Day-Lewis, Saad Jaffrey, Roshan Seth, Gordon Warnecke. The contradictions that often get kicked into gear by race and class conflict have rarely, if ever, been as incisively depicted on screen as they are in this still minty-fresh comedy-drama set in Thatcher-era London. A white street tough (Day-Lewis) and a bourgeois Pakistani (Warnecke) form a romantic and professional bond, raising a rat-trap laundrette in their volatile neighborhood from the dead and making it a hip place to wash one’s clothes. Their alliance provokes first bewilderment and then hostility on both sides of a racial and economic chasm. If you’re looking for a daring, polychromatic depiction of “otherness,” look no further than this bittersweet blend of romance, satire, and sociopolitical critique.

—Gene Seymour, Newsday

Saturday, February 11, Introduced by Dennis Lim
Sunday, February 12
6:30 p.m.
ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL 
Selected by Dennis Lim
1974, 89 mins., Germany. Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. With Brigitte Mira, El Hedi Ben Salem. A vital link between All That Heaven Allows and Far from Heaven, Fassbinder’s 1974 masterpiece retained Sirk’s scenario of a scandalizing romance and rendered it extra verboten, widening the age gap and igniting a racial fuse. Lugubrious but tentatively hopeful, filled with implicating stares and reproachful silences, it’s a film of almost painful lucidity: For Fassbinder, love stories are above all studies of power relations—in this case, between the couple and their community and eventually between the two lovers, who are unable to fully insulate themselves against external prejudices. With a forensic compassion, Fassbinder brilliantly illuminates not only their isolation but also the self-interested concessions that pass for social progress in the real world

—Dennis Lim, The Village Voice

Sunday, February 12, Introduced by David Sterritt
2:00 p.m.
THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET
Selected by David Sterritt
1984, 110 mins. Directed by John Sayles. With Joe Morton. The Brother from Another Planet, played to perfection by Joe Morton, is a dark-skinned alien on the run from interstellar bounty hunters who track him clear to Harlem, where he’s blending with the locals after crash-landing in the vicinity. Bypassing sci-fi thrills for moral clarity and sardonic wit, writer-director John Sayles crafted one of cinema’s smartest takes on being a total stranger in the strange, beguiling land called the American inner city

—David Sterritt, The Christian Science Monitor

Sunday, February 12, Introduced by Lisa Schwarzbaum
4:30 p.m.
GENGHIS BLUES
Selected by Lisa Schwarzbaum
1999, 92 mins. Directed by Roko Belic. With Paul Pena. This outrageously exotic, award-laden 1999 documentary is a marvel of joyful adaptability in the face of global mysteries: Paul Pena, a blind, ailing blues musician in San Francisco (he died last October at the age of fifty-four), taught himself the haunting art of “throat singing” most widely practiced in the speck-sized Mongolian republic of Tuva. Young Evanston-based filmmaking brothers Roko and Adrian Belic followed Pena across the world to the annual Tuvan throat-singing competition. The sound alone is guaranteed to raise goose bumps.

—Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

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