The Best Repertory Events
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

In 2007, studio repertory divisions and film archives around the globe continued to make available an unheralded variety of vintage movies in new film prints and restorations that can only be seen in theaters. New York boasts no fewer than six screens devoted to keeping up with that welcome output and access. With major retrospectives devoted to Max Ophuls, Rouben Mamoulian, Mikhail Kalatozov, and Fritz Lang, 2007 was the repertory year of the moving camera. Mindful as always of cineaste-turned-director Paul Schrader’s observation that “list making is the junk food of criticism,” let us nevertheless unwrap this year’s 10 most toothsome classic-film-going experiences.
10. “Images” & “That Cold Day in the Park” (IFC Center, January): Robert Altman has never been absent from local screens for very long, but IFC programmer Harris Dew’s sympathetic pairings of Altman films (based more on mood than chronology) and in-person introductions by Altman fans and collaborators made IFC’s “An Artist and a Gambler” series a fitting and poignant acknowledgment of the director’s November 2006 passing. The austere surreality check of “Images” and the stylistic foreshadowing of “Park” formed quite possibly the seasonal affective disorder double bill of all time.
9. Peter Whitehead “Pop Films” (Anthology Film Archives, February): Mr. Whitehead’s no-budget, short- film documentations of some of Britain’s best-known and most obscure 1960s music acts were mostly made for Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate record label. Billy Nichols’s “London Social Degree” and a pre-Velvet Underground Nico pouting and lip-syncing to “I’m Not Sayin'” almost made up for the absence of Mr. Whitehead’s Stones tour documentary “Charlie Is My Darling,” too mired in clearance issues to be included in the Anthology program.
8. “The Burglars” (Film Forum, February): A pristine new widescreen print of Director Henri Verneuil’s 1971 “The French Connection” rip-off, showcased in Film Forum’s Ennio Morricone tribute, proved that there are some movies whose modest gifts remain hidden on home video. It offered a nostalgic look back at an era when two charismatic international stars (Jean-Paul Belmondo and Omar Sharif), an exotic locale (Athens), and a spectacular midfilm car chase were all that were required to put a movie over.
7. “Le Tigre Aime la Chair Fraiche” (MoMA, August): To the best of my knowledge unavailable on DVD in any of its half-dozen titles and varied running times, Claude Chabrol’s spy fantasia displays the director’s playful camera mastery at its most unbidden. Saddled with “From Russia With Love” starlet Daniela Bianchi, Chabrol chose to prominently display a copy of Ian Fleming’s original novel (in a French edition, of course) onscreen, just in case there were any doubts about who was cashing in on whom.
6. “The Next Generation of Film Presents Martin Scorsese” (Walter Reade Theater, June): Paired onstage ostensibly to introduce and discuss clips from the films of director George Seaton, director, collector, and preservation knight errant Martin Scorsese and Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Kent Jones formed repertory film’s ultimate Mutt and Jeff team. Grinning broadly, Mr. Scorsese engaged the audience in a kind of filmmaking play-by-play that revealed much about the director’s own chain of influences and enthusiasms, while Mr. Jones weighed in with equally affectionate and sometimes hysterically funny color commentary. If these two guys had a TV talk show, I’d buy any dish necessary to pick it up.
5. “Funny Games” (MoMA, October): The ubiquitous bane of New York filmgoing is our city’s self-aggrandizing local version of the after-film Q&A. Year after year, visiting filmmakers throw up their hands, digress, fence, walk offstage, and otherwise endure “questions” that are little more than a misguided audience member’s attempt to ascend the soapbox on behalf of his or her own brilliance. At MoMA’s inaugural “Modern Mondays” event, the director Michael Haneke and a translator addressed every silly and pretentious pseudointellectual sleeve-tug from the gathered audience with the same fatherly bemusement, patience, and pragmatism with which Mr. Haneke fielded actual questions about the director’s most disturbing film.
4. “The Great Ecstasy of t h e Woodcarver Steiner” (Film Forum, May): Werner Herzog’s 1970s made-for-German-TV short documentary opus returned to the big screen (albeit on projected video, not in its original 16 mm) for the first time in decades with all its poetry, personality, and passion intact during Film Forum’s “Herzog (Non) Fiction” program. Exquisite and essential, “Ecstasy” played like Bruce Brown’s lighthearted surf-u-mentary “Endless Summer” — remade for sociopaths.
3. “Deep End” (Anthology Film Archives, November): Here’s another masterpiece from cinema’s margins rescued from not-on-video limbo, this time through the efforts of Barry Allen and Melanie Valera at Paramount Pictures repertory division, and the single-mindedness of Anthology programmer Jed Rapfogel. By turns farcical, brooding, and beautiful, director Jerzy Skolimowski’s cult film in search of a cult finally received an entire week to darkly shine.
2. “B-Musicals” (Film Forum, April): By the midway point in Film Forum’s “B Musicals” series — Bruce Goldstein’s astounding celebration of Hollywood’s long-forgotten tradition of bottom-of-the-bill song-and-dance films — Film Forum regulars had been pummeled by catchy tunes, corny gags, outrageous un-PC plotting, and brilliantly imagined and staged low-budget razzamatazz to the point of toe-tapping, jive-talking seizure.
After a particularly bizzaro three-scoop serving of “Ladies of the Chorus,” “Moonlight in Havana,” and “Minstrel Man,” directed by poverty row masterminds Phil Karlson, Anthony Mann, and Joseph H. Lewis, respectively, a kind of nostalgic Stockholm syndrome kicked in.
1. “The Last Sunset” (BAM Cinematek, May): “This was the first psychological Western,” director Robert Aldrich’s daughter Adele confidently told host Eliot Stein during an in-person introduction to her father’s 1961 film during BAM’s “Overlooked Aldrich” retrospective. Critical consensus usually identifies Raoul Walsh’s 1947 “Pursued” with that debatable and undefinable tag, not to mention various works by Budd Boetticher, Anthony Mann, Delmer Daves, and others during the ’50s.
But once “The Last Sunset” concluded with an incest-driven gunfight that appeared to take place in a godless, Freudian Western Narnia, I was inclined to agree with Ms. Aldrich. “The Last Sunset” may not have been the first “psychological Western” nor the last, but its stylish operatic wallow in the best and worst motivations driving the heroic mind made it feel like it was both.