Upcoming Film Screenings
41 upcoming film screenings from Harvard Film Archive, with dates, venues and ticket links taken from the organization’s own pages and refreshed weekly. All film in Greater Boston →
Fri Oct 23 · 7pm
Mandy (1952), which Alexander Mackendrick made at Ealing between The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers, follows a girl born deaf in early-1950s London, played by Mandy Miller, whose mother, Phyllis Calvert, hears of a residential school that teaches deaf children to speak as the strain threatens to break up the family. Jack Hawkins plays the headmaster. It screens in the season Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945–1960.
Fri Oct 23 · 9pm
The Yellow Balloon (1953), J. Lee Thompson's second film as director, is set among the bomb sites of postwar London, where a boy, played by Andrew Ray, accidentally causes his friend's death and is then blackmailed by a criminal into helping with a robbery. Kenneth More and Kathleen Ryan co-star. It shows on a 35mm print in the season Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945–1960.
Sat Oct 24 · 2pm
In Alain Resnais's Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968), Claude Rich plays a man chosen after a failed suicide attempt for a time-travel experiment tried only on mice and meant to send him back one minute; it malfunctions, leaving him adrift among moments of his past, circling the woman at their centre. It shows on 35mm, preceded by Un chien andalou (1929), in the Harvard Undergraduate Cinematheque series Nostalgia.
Sat Oct 24 · 7pm
Pool of London (1951), Basil Dearden's Ealing drama, follows two cargo-ship seamen ashore in postwar London who are drawn into a smuggling racket of jewel thieves, murder and a manhunt. Bonar Colleano and Susan Shaw star, with Earl Cameron as the romantic lead, a casting of a Black actor the Archive calls bold for its time. It screens in the season Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945–1960.
Sat Oct 24 · 9pm
Three women spend their first day out of prison in London: a bitter burglar, a prostitute and an elderly shoplifter, played by Yvonne Mitchell, Joan Collins and Kathleen Harrison. Geoffrey Unsworth shot the film, which the Archive calls Neorealist-influenced. It screens on 35mm with The Elephant Will Never Forget, an 11-minute 1953 short on a London tram's final run, in the season Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945–1960.
Sun Oct 25 · 7pm
In Robert Hamer's Ealing drama It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), Googie Withers plays Rose, a former barmaid now married to an older man in the East End, whose old lover (John McCallum) escapes from prison and hides in her house over one wet Sunday; Jack Warner plays the detective on his trail. It is part of the Harvard Film Archive's season Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945–1960.
Mon Oct 26 · 7pm
Dirk Bogarde plays a fugitive murderer who drags along the orphaned boy (Jon Whiteley) who saw his crime on a run across England in Charles Crichton's Hunted (1952), also known as The Stranger in Between, which won the Golden Leopard at Locarno in 1953. Shown on 35mm in the Great Expectations season of British postwar cinema, it is preceded by Humphrey Jennings's A Diary for Timothy (1945).
Oct 29, Nov 15 · 6pm/3pm
Thu Oct 29 · 6pm / Sun Nov 15 · 3pm
Kirsten Dunst plays the Austrian teenager who marries the Dauphin and, twenty years later, is the most despised woman in France, in Sofia Coppola's 2006 portrait of Versailles on the eve of the Revolution, shot on location and built on deliberate anachronism. Jason Schwartzman and Judy Davis co-star. Coppola presents the first of two screenings in person, free, as part of Harvard's ArtsThursdays; the second is shown on 35mm.
Fri Oct 30 · 7pm
Monteiro’s Come and Go (2003), his last film, made as he fought a fatal illness, casts the director himself as João Vuvu, an eccentric libertine drifting through a sunlit Lisbon and trading erotic, linguistic and theological debates with the women he meets. It closes the Archive’s series João César Monteiro, Poet-Provocateur, preceded by his 1969 debut, a short documentary portrait of the poet Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen.
Sat Oct 31 · 7pm
In Lance Comfort’s Daughter of Darkness (1948), Emmy Baudine, a disturbed woman who works for an Irish village priest, claws open the face of a carnival boxer who expects sexual favours and is packed off to a Yorkshire farm, where the carnival and the vengeful boxer follow. The Archive likens the morbid melodrama to Buñuel’s Mexican films. It screens on 35mm in Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945–1960.
Sat Oct 31 · 9pm
Daniel Birt's The Three Weird Sisters (1948) follows three ageing sisters clinging to their family estate in a Welsh mining town gone to ruin. When subsidence destroys village homes they have promised to rebuild, they plot to poison their wealthy half-brother. The poet Dylan Thomas co-wrote the screenplay. It screens on 35mm in Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945–1960.
Sun Nov 1 · 3:00pm
Alberto Cavalcanti's They Made Me a Fugitive (1947) stars Trevor Howard as an unemployed ex-RAF pilot who drifts into the postwar black market and is framed for the killing of a policeman. The critic David Thomson found this British noir by the Brazilian-born Cavalcanti “filled with malign eccentricity.” It screens on DCP in Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945–1960.
Fri Nov 6 · 7:00pm
Steve McQueen plays the laconic detective in Peter Yates's 1968 Bullitt, best known for its car chase through real San Francisco streets; the film moves between bursts of action and McQueen's cool restraint, from an Embarcadero flophouse to a Pacific Heights mansion. It opens Visions of a City, or A Weekend in San Francisco, on 35mm, preceded by Lawrence Jordan's 16mm portrait of Beat poet Michael McClure.
Fri Nov 6 · 9:15pm
Gene Hackman plays a professional wiretapper who comes unglued when he takes an interest in a recording beyond its audio quality. Made between the first two Godfather films, Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 Palme d'Or winner is, as A.S. Hamrah puts it, an “aural, Watergate-era version of Blow-Up,” built on Walter Murch's sound design. John Cazale co-stars. On 35mm in Visions of a City, or A Weekend in San Francisco.
Sat Nov 7 · 2:00pm
Ju Dou (1990), directed by Zhang Yimou and Yang Fengliang, was the first Chinese film nominated for an Academy Award, and it made a star of Li Gong. In an early 20th-century dye mill, a deadly triangle forms between a sadistic, impotent patriarch, his adopted nephew and Ju Dou, the old man's indentured bride. On 35mm in the Harvard Undergraduate Cinematheque's Nostalgia series, preceded by Jan Lenica's 1965 short A.
Sat Nov 7 · 7:00pm
In David Miller's 1952 noir, Joan Crawford plays a wealthy San Francisco playwright who marries an actor she once turned down for a part (Jack Palance), then learns from a recording machine that he and his lover (Gloria Grahame) mean to kill her. Lenore Coffee, born and raised in the city, co-wrote the screenplay. Shown on 35mm in the series Visions of a City, or A Weekend in San Francisco.
Sat Nov 7 · 9:15pm
In Blake Edwards's 1962 thriller, Lee Remick plays a San Francisco bank teller whom a stalker forces to rob her own bank by threatening her teenage sister (Stefanie Powers); Glenn Ford is the FBI agent on the case. Henry Mancini wrote the score, and the set pieces take in Fisherman's Wharf and the since-demolished Candlestick Park. Shown on 35mm in Visions of a City, or A Weekend in San Francisco.
Sat Nov 7 · 11:30pm
Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake of Don Siegel's 1956 film moves the pod people to late-1970s San Francisco, where two health-department colleagues, played by Brooke Adams and Donald Sutherland, notice the people around them turning into emotionless copies. Jeff Goldblum co-stars, and the film taps fears of conformity and of a government party to the terror. Shown on 35mm in Visions of a City, or A Weekend in San Francisco.
Sun Nov 8 · 3:00pm
Humphrey Bogart plays an escaped convict, wrongly jailed for his wife's murder, who heads for San Francisco to clear his name and is taken in by a stranger played by Lauren Bacall. The first half of Delmer Daves's 1947 noir is shot from his point of view, until plastic surgery gives him Bogart's face. Shown on 35mm in Visions of a City, or A Weekend in San Francisco.
Sun Nov 8 · 7:00pm
Eli Wallach and Robert Keith play hired killers collecting heroin smuggled into San Francisco in unwitting travellers' luggage, against a tight deadline that takes them to the Embarcadero YMCA and the since-vanished Sutro Baths. The Lineup (1958) was the first of Don Siegel's three San Francisco features. Shown on 35mm, preceded by Nathaniel Dorsky's silent 16mm Threnody (2004), shot in and around the city.
Mon Nov 9 · 7:00pm
James Stewart plays Scottie Ferguson, a retired detective with a fear of heights who is hired to follow an old friend's wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), and is drawn into an obsession with her. Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film displaced Citizen Kane at the top of Sight and Sound's critics' poll in 2012. Shown on 35mm in Visions of a City, preceded by Ernie Gehr's 16mm Side/Walk/Shuttle (1992).
Fri Nov 13 · 7:00pm
Robert Newton plays a dockworker at a Channel port who pockets a bag of money left behind when two criminals fight to the death, an act that changes the course of his life. Lance Comfort's 1947 adaptation of Georges Simenon's novel Newhaven-Dieppe, with Simone Simon and William Hartnell, recalls French Poetic Realism. Shown from a British Film Institute DCP in Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945–1960.
Fri Nov 13 · 9:15pm
Roy Ward Baker's Tiger in the Smoke (1956), adapted from Margery Allingham's novel, follows war veterans turned buskers as they search fog-bound London for their vanished boss, a treasure hunt that turns into murder and flight. Donald Sinden, Muriel Pavlow and Tony Wright star; the critic Imogen Sara Smith likened its London to “a hellish procession out of Bosch.” On 35mm in Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945–1960.
Sat Nov 14 · 2:00pm
Iwai Shunji's All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001), adapted from a novel he developed on an online forum, follows middle-school students linked by anonymous message boards devoted to a fictional pop star, Lily Chou-Chou, as they face violence, abuse and isolation years before social media. Kobayashi Takeshi wrote the score. A 35mm print in the Harvard Undergraduate Cinematheque's Nostalgia series, preceded by Godfrey Reggio's short Evidence (1995).
Sat Nov 14 · 7:00pm
Val Guest's Hell is a City (1960) is a Hammer-produced police thriller starring Stanley Baker as Inspector Martineau, a Manchester detective hunting a murderer while his own marriage comes apart; John Crawford and Donald Pleasence co-star, and it climaxes on a rooftop above the city. The 35mm print comes from the British Film Institute, for Great Expectations, the Archive's version of Ehsan Khoshbakht's Locarno retrospective of postwar British cinema.
Sat Nov 14 · 9:00pm
In John Guillermin's Never Let Go (1960), Richard Todd plays a salesman whose hunt for his stolen car draws him into a brutal London gang, led by Peter Sellers cast against type; Elizabeth Sellars co-stars, and John Barry wrote the score. It screens on 35mm in a British Film Institute print, part of Great Expectations, the Archive's version of Ehsan Khoshbakht's Locarno retrospective of postwar British cinema.
Mon Nov 16 · 7:00pm
Seth Holt's Nowhere to Go (1958) is a spare British thriller, co-written by the critic Kenneth Tynan, about an escaped convict going after the stolen money he stashed in a safe-deposit box. George Nader stars with Bernard Lee, and Maggie Smith makes her feature debut. On 35mm in a British Film Institute print, part of Great Expectations, the Archive's version of Ehsan Khoshbakht's Locarno survey of postwar British cinema.
Fri Nov 20 · 7:00pm
Tim Whelan's This Was a Woman (1948) casts Sonia Dresdel as a domineering matriarch who wrecks the lives of her husband and daughter, a British variation on the 1936 Hollywood drama Craig's Wife that moves into manipulation and murder. Barbara White and Walter Fitzgerald co-star under the American director. It shows in a Park Circus DCP as part of Great Expectations, the Archive's survey of postwar British cinema.
Nov 21, Dec 14 · 7:00pm
Sat Nov 21 / Mon Dec 14 · 7:00pm
Andrzej Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds (1958), from Jerzy Andrzejewski's 1948 novel, takes place on May 8, 1945, VE Day, after the Red Army has driven the Germans out of Poland: Zbigniew Cybulski's Maciek, a Home Army fighter, joins a doomed underground plot against the new Soviet-backed order. The last film of Wajda's wartime trilogy opens the Archive's centenary retrospective, Once There Was History ... Andrzej Wajda at 100.
Sat Nov 21 · 9:15pm
After watching the Nazis kill his friend in 1942 Warsaw, Stach (Tadeusz Łomnicki), a young working-class man, joins a left-wing People's Guard resistance cell in A Generation (1955), Andrzej Wajda's first feature. Shot by Jerzy Lipman with a score by Andrzej Markowski, it used a cast and crew mostly new to professional film. It begins the wartime trilogy and screens on 16mm in the Archive's centenary retrospective.
Sun Nov 22 · 3:00pm
Shot two months before Godard's À bout de souffle but released after it, Andrzej Wajda's Innocent Sorcerers (1960) follows a noncommittal young man (Tadeusz Łomnicki) through nightclubs, apartments and boxing rings in post-thaw Warsaw. Jerzy Skolimowski co-wrote the script, and Krzysztof Komeda composed the score and appears in a cameo, as does Zbigniew Cybulski. Censors added the happy ending. Part of the Archive's Wajda centenary retrospective.
Mon Nov 23 · 7:00pm
Andrzej Wajda's Kanał (1957), the first film about the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, follows exhausted Home Army platoons in late September as they try to escape the defeated city through its sewers, built on a studio back lot in Łódź. Teresa Iżewska, Tadeusz Janczar and Wieńczysław Gliński star, shot in high contrast by Jerzy Lipman. The middle film of Wajda's wartime trilogy screens in the Archive's own 35mm print.
Fri Nov 27 · 7:00pm
Andrzej Wajda's 1975 adaptation of Nobel laureate Władysław Reymont's 1899 novel is a three-hour epic of 1880s Łódź, where three friends, a Pole, a German and a Jew (Daniel Olbrychski, Andrzej Seweryn and Wojciech Pszoniak), open a cotton mill to ride the Industrial Revolution, enriching and destroying themselves. Extreme wide-angle lenses make the looms menacing, and Wojciech Kilar wrote the avant-garde score. Part of the Archive's Wajda centenary retrospective.
Sat Nov 28 · 7:00pm
In Andrzej Wajda's 1977 film, a student director, Agnieszka (Krystyna Janda, in the first of four Wajda roles), investigates Mateusz Birkut (Jerzy Radziwiłowicz), a bricklayer celebrated as a labor hero in 1950s Nowa Huta who has since vanished. Mixing newsreel, reenactment and absurdist fiction, it waited more than a decade for approval, and a fifth of Poland saw it on release. Part of the Archive's Wajda centenary retrospective.
Sun Nov 29 · 3:00pm
Andrzej Wajda's 2013 biopic of Lech Wałęsa, the Gdańsk union leader who became a Nobel laureate and Poland's president, stars Robert Więckiewicz in the title role. Wajda, eighty-seven at its premiere, saw it as a late addition to his Solidarity “triptych,” and as in Man of Marble and Man of Iron he interlaces documentary footage with dramatised scenes. Part of the Harvard Film Archive's Wajda centenary series.
Mon Nov 30 · 7:00pm
Wajda's sequel to Man of Marble grew out of his meeting with the Gdańsk shipyard workers whose 1980 strike founded Solidarity, Poland's first independent trade union. The son of the earlier film's hero, Birkut, takes centre stage in a time-hopping mix of fiction and documentary, and the organisers Lech Wałęsa and Anna Walentynowicz appear as themselves. It won the 1981 Palme d'Or, months before martial law. On 35mm.
Mon Dec 7 · 7:00pm
In Andrzej Wajda's 1980 film, John Gielgud plays Jan Lasocki, a Polish émigré famous as a conductor in New York, whose return after decades abroad unsettles a provincial orchestra, its conductor (Andrzej Seweryn) and a violinist (Krystyna Janda). A work of Poland's “cinema of moral concern,” its struggle over who leads the orchestra was widely read as a picture of Polish politics. Ingmar Bergman counted it a favourite.
Fri Dec 11 · 7:00pm
In Andrzej Wajda's 1978 film, Jerzy (Zbigniew Zapasiewicz), a war correspondent back in Warsaw, says the wrong thing on television and watches his career, relationship and reputation fall apart. Loosely drawn from the travails of the journalist Ryszard Kapuściński, it was the first of five screenplays Agnieszka Holland wrote for Wajda, with Krystyna Janda as Agata, a silent student who watches his slide into apathy and drink.
Sat Dec 12 · 2:00pm
Ingmar Bergman conceived his 1982 film as a swan song, “the sum total of my life as a filmmaker,” returning to his Uppsala childhood and, for the first time, a child's point of view: young Alexander Ekdahl, whose family faces an authoritarian bishop stepfather modelled on Bergman's father. The theatrical cut screens on 35mm after Dave Fleischer's 1933 cartoon Snow-White, in a Harvard Undergraduate Cinematheque series; free with Harvard ID.
Sat Dec 12 · 7:00pm
Andrzej Wajda's 1965 adaptation of Stefan Żeromski's two-volume novel follows Rafał Olbromski (Daniel Olbrychski), an impoverished nobleman caught among the shifting factions of the Napoleonic Wars. Shot in black-and-white CinemaScope by Jerzy Lipman, with battles staged with more than 1,500 extras, it angered Polish nationalists by showing Poles as “imperfect, manipulable and capable of violence.” A four-hour epic, in the HFA's Wajda centenary series.
Sun Dec 13 · 3:00pm
Andrzej Wajda's 1999 adaptation of Adam Mickiewicz's national epic, shot in 1998 for the Romantic poet's bicentennial, keeps the poem's rhyming verse. Set in Polish-speaking Lithuania in 1811–12, it follows two noble families settling a decades-long feud as Napoleon prepares to invade Russia, and it sold more than six million tickets in Poland. On 35mm, in the Harvard Film Archive's Wajda centenary series.
