Only a few newly featured ones this week, but there are a whole lot of awesome repeats to check out in case you’ve missed any in previous weeks. Among new things, TCM has the highly enjoyable Valentino silent Son of the Sheik on Thursday, the 1963 British version of Lord of the Flies as well as ripped-from-the-headlines prison film Caged on Saturday, then The Miracle Worker and Kurosawa’s Sanjuro on Sunday.

Monday, July 18

7:30am – Sundance – Man on Wire
One of the most highly-acclaimed documentaries of recent years tells the story of high-wire walker Philippe Petit as he embarks on perhaps his most dangerous stunt yet.
2008 UK/USA. Director: James Marsh. Starring: Philippe Petit, Jean François Heckel, Jean-Louis Blondeau.
(repeats at 11:55am)

9:10am – Sundance – Wendy & Lucy
This is a favorite among Row Three writers, and I’m ashamed to say I still haven’t managed to catch up with it, despite it being ever-available to me on Netflix Instant Watch. One of these days I will rectify that, I promise.
2008 USA. Director: Kelly Reichardt. Starring: Michelle Williams, Will Oldham, Michell Worthey, John Robinson.
(repeats at 5:30pm)

12:15pm – IFC – Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Easily one of the most absurd, random, hilarious, and quotable comedies of all time. A more hapless bunch of Round Table knights couldn’t be found, and Monty Python has never been better than they are here.
1975 UK. Directors: Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones. Starring: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones.
Must See
(repeats at 6:30pm on the 22nd)

2:05pm – MGM – The Purple Rose of Cairo
A love letter to cinema, The Purple Rose of Cairo has Woody Allen at his most romantic. Unhappy housewife Cecilia (Mia Farrow) escapes to the cinema to see The Purple Rose of Cairo again and again, where she fantasizes over hunky character Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels). Much to her surprise (and the other characters’ consternation), Baxter steps off the screen to join her. It makes it even more complicated when Gil, the actor who played Baxter, turns up as well.
1985 USA. Director: Woody Allen. Starring: Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels, Danny Aiello.
(repeats at 4:20am on the 25th)

8:00pm – Fox Movie – I Wake Up Screaming
Better known for bright and sunny musicals, Betty Grable took a turn for the noir in this crime film, playing the sister of a recently-murdered model with a rising career. It’s a slight noir, but fun nonetheless, especially for the chance to see Grable in a role unusual for her.
1942 USA. Director: H. Bruce Humberstone. Starring: Betty Grable, Victor Mature, Carole Landis.
(repeats at 9:30pm, and 1:30pm on the 24th)

11:45pm – TCM – Love Affair
This film is not as well known as its remake, 1957’s An Affair to Remember, which has the advantage of having the more famous Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr rather than Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer – who were both huge stars at the time, but are less known now. Both films were directed by Leo McCarey, and tell of a shipboard romance and a fateful rendezvous. I actually like Love Affair a tad better, but that could be just because I like being contrarian.
1939 USA. Directed by: Leo McCarey. Starring: Irene Dunne, Charles Boyer, Maria Ouspenskaya.

Tuesday, July 19

6:45am – TCM – A Face in the Crowd
A rare film role for homespun comedian Andy Griffith really shows his chops as he plays an Ozark hobo who becomes an overnight sensation on radio and TV; when the fame and power starts going to his head, the film shows the cynical dark underbelly of media sensations. One of the recently late Patricia Neal’s best roles, too, as the girl who discovers him.
1957 USA. Director: Elia Kazan. Starring: Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Anthony Franciosa, Walter Matthau, Lee Remick.

8:15am – IFC – Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
Lawrence Sterne’s 1769 proto-postmodern novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy has long been considered unfilmable. So what does director Michael Winterbottom do? He makes a film about the difficulty of filming Tristram Shandy. Winterbottom’s film is something of an experiment, but it’s a delightful one, showing the behind-the-scenes antics of production as well as highlighting the circularity and self-defeating narrative of Sterne’s novel in the film-within-the-film.
2005 UK. Director: Michael Winterbottom. Starring: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Keeley Hawes, Shirley Henderson, Jeremy Northam.
(repeats at 4:00pm)

12:30pm – Fox Movie – Anna and the King of Siam
The earlier/non-musical version of The King and I stars Irene Dunne in one of her last films and Rex Harrison in one of his earliest American ones. Both do a fine job.
1946 USA. Director: John Cromwell. Starring: Irene Dunne, Rex Harrison, Linda Darnell, Gale Sondergaard.

2:00pm – TCM – I Confess
The most obvious example of Hitchcock’s usually subdued theme of Catholic guilt has priest Montgomery Clift refusing to reveal a murderer’s confession due to the sanctity of the the confessional.
1953 USA. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Starring: Montgomery Clift, Anne Baxter, Karl Malden, Brian Aherne.

7:50pm – MGM – The Long Goodbye
Robert Altman’s brilliant take on Raymond Chandler’s quintessential gumshoe Philip Marlowe complicates the hard-boiled detective genre with an apathetic and often ineffectual lead, while still bearing nostalgia for a time when the genre could be taken seriously. Works as homage, satire, elegy, and straight genre piece, which is something very hard to pull off.
1973 USA. Director: Robert Altman. Starring: Elliott Gould, Sterling Hayden, Nina Van Pallandt.
Must See

8:00pm – IFC – thirteen
As disinterested as I am in her recent mainstream tween films, I keep giving Catherine Hardwicke the benefit of the doubt based on this film, a pretty solid exploration of a young teenager’s troubled relationship with her mother as she acts out with a wild-living friend.
2003 USA. Director: Catherine Hardwicke. Starring: Evan Rachel Wood, Holly Hunter, Nikki Reed.
(repeats at 12:30am on the 20th)

10:00pm – MGM – Capote
Phillip Seymour Hoffman inhabits the role of author Truman Capote, capturing the period of time while Capote researches the senseless murder of a Kansas family for the book that would become In Cold Blood, in the meantime getting rather too involved with one of the killers as he interviews him extensively.
2005 USA. Director: Bennett Miller. Starring: Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Clifton Collins Jr., Catherine Keener.

12:00M – Fox Movie – The Panic in Needle Park
A harrowing tale of NYC heroin addicts, exemplifying the dark side of youth culture that New Hollywood does so well. A star-making turn for Al Pacino, just a year prior to The Godfather.
1971 USA. Director: Jerry Schatzberg. Starring: Al Pacino, Kitty Winn, Alan Vint.
(repeats at 4:00am on the 20th)

2:10am (20th) – MGM – Interiors
In case anyone doubted Woody Allen’s admiration for Ingmar Bergman, he made this film to prove it. Interiors is about the best imitation of a Bergman chamber drama you could ask for, down to the spare set design, strained family relations, and a climax involving an angry sea. Still, it is also very much Allen’s film, focusing on deeply neurotic, introspective characters unable to get outside their own heads for long enough to form really true relationships.
1978 USA. Director: Woody Allen. Starring: Diane Keaton, Kristin Griffith, Geraldine Page.

Wednesday, July 20

8:00 – IFC – Curse of the Golden Flower
One of the weaker entries in Zhang Yimou’s series of historical martial-arts-on-wires films, but it still has its moments – and the production design, as usual, is flawlessly beautiful. Definitely worth a watch if you’re a fan of the style.
2006 China. Director: Zhang Yimou. Starring: Chow Yun-Fat, Gong Li, Jay Chou, Ye Liu.
(repeats at 3:15pm)

8:30am – TCM – Miracle on 34th Street
The original classic Christmas tale of a Macy’s department store Santa who claims to be the real thing and the family whose cynicism is tested by his presence. One of Natalie Wood’s most memorable pre-growing-up roles, and an Oscar-winner for Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle.
1947 USA. Director: George Seaton. Starring: Maureen O’Hara, Natalie Wood, Edmund Gwenn, John Payne.

11:00am – Fox Movie – Carmen Jones
Oscar Hammerstein takes on Bizet’s Carmen, transposing it into a contemporary setting at a Korean War army base and writing new lyrics to go with Bizet’s operatic melodies. It’s interesting not only for the adaptation of opera to musical, but also its use of an all-African American cast – giving Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte and many others lead roles in an era when they were still all-too-often relegated to roles as servants or one-off entertainers.
1954 USA. Director: Otto Preminger. Starring: Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Pearl Bailey.

5:30pm – TCM – Splendor in the Grass
Warren Beatty made his screen debut in this film of frustrated young love (written by Thomas Inge), fairly racy for the time as Beatty and Natalie Wood struggle with sexual repression and social mores. 1961 USA. Director: Elia Kazan. Starring: Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty, Pat Hingle, Audrey Christie, Barbara Loden.

8:00pm – TCM – Pride and Prejudice
A Golden Age adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel, which means, among other things, the use of Victorian-era costuming rather than Empire-era, but nitpicking aside, this is a decent version of the story. It’s still third on my list behind the A&E miniseries and Joe Wright’s version, but for classic film fans, Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier make quite a compelling couple, and they’re surrounded by a nice group of MGM stock players.
1940 USA. Director: Robert Z. Leonard. Starring: Greer Garson, Laurence Olivier, Mary Boland, Edmund Gwenn, Maureen O’Sullivan, Ann Rutherford.
Newly Featured!

8:00pm – IFC – Sin City
Frank Miller joined Robert Rodriguez in creating this adaptation of Miller’s graphic novel series, a highly stylized evocation of film noir tropes that’s rather overdone in many ways, but still so visually striking that I really enjoyed watching it. Most of it.
2005 USA. Directors: Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller. Starring: Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Bruce Willis, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson.
(repeats at 12:45am on the 21st)

8:00pm – Sundance – Metropolitan
If Jane Austen made a movie in 1990 and set it among entitled Manhattan socialites, this would be it. The film follows a group of such entitled teens from party to party, focusing especially on the one outsider, a boy from the blue-collar class who has to rent a tux and pretend he likes to walk to avoid letting his new friends know he has to take the bus home. Though they find out soon enough, they keep him around because his intellectual nattering amuses them. In fact, it’s quite amazing that this film is interesting at all, given the amount of pseudo-intellectual nattering that goes on, from all the characters. But from start to finish, it’s both entertaining and an incisive look at the American class structure.
1990 USA. Director: Whit Stillman. Starring: Edward Clements, Chris Eigeman, Carolyn Farina, Taylor Nichols, Dylan Hundley.
(repeats at 5:15am on the 21st)

9:00pm – Fox Movie – Unfaithfully Yours
Preston Sturges’s last great film is a pitch-black comedy with Rex Harrison as a jealous conductor who fantasizes ways to deal with his wife’s supposed infidelity as he conducts a symphony. The combination of bombastic music and his by turns morbid and farcical fantasies makes for one of the more unusual memorable films of the 1940s.
1948 USA. Director: Preston Sturges. Starring: Rex Harrison, Linda Darnell, Rudy Vallee.

10:30pm – IFC – American Psycho
A virtuoso performance from Christian Bale leads this controversial thriller about an affluent Wall Street investment banker leading a double life as a psychopath carrying out his amoral and misanthropic fantasies through sex and murder.
2000 USA. Director: Mary Herron. Starring: Christian Bale, Justin Theroux, Josh Lucas, Chloe Sevigny, Reese Witherspoon.

Thursday, July 21

6:00am – IFC – Paranoid Park
I go back and forth on whether I think Gus Van Sant is brilliant or a pretentious bore – maybe some of both. But I really quite liked the slow, oblique approach in this film about a wanna-be skateboarder kid who relishes hanging out with the bigger skateboarders at the titular skate park – but there’s a death not far from there, and it takes the rest of the movie to slowly reveal what exactly happened that one night near Paranoid Park. Gets by on mood and cinematography.
2007 USA Director: Gus Van Sant. Starring: Gabe Nevins, Daniel Lu, Jake Miller, Taylor Momsen, Lauren McKinney.
(repeats at 12:15pm)

8:05pm – IFC – Reservoir Dogs
Quentin Tarantino’s first directorial feature sets the tone for his career – ultraviolet, talky, self-aware, and flamboyantly confident. It’s far from my personal favorite Tarantino film, but I’m in the minority on that; most Tarantino fans rank it quite favorably against his later films.
1992 USA. Director: Quentin Tarantino. Starring: Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi.
(repeats at 1:20am on the 22nd, and 8:00pm and 10:00pm on the 23rd)

10:00pm – Sundance – Moulin Rouge!
Baz Lurhmann admittedly has a love-it-or-hate-it flamboyantly trippy aesthetic, especially in the informal Red Curtain trilogy which Moulin Rogue! closes. And sure, it’s over the top; sure, the story is fairly routine; sure, the acting is so-so. I love it to pieces anyway.
2001 USA. Director: Baz Lurhmann. Starring: Nicole Kidman, Ewan McGregor, Jim Broadbent, John Leguizamo.

10:05pm – IFC – Pulp Fiction
Tarantino’s enormously influential and entertaining film pretty much needs no introduction from me. Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta give the performances of their careers, Tarantino’s dialogue is spot-on in its pop-culture-infused wit, and the chronology-shifting, story-hopping editing style has inspired a host of imitators, most nowhere near as good.
1994 USA. Director: Quentin Tarantino. Starring: Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, John Travolta, Tim Roth, Bruce Willis, Ving Rhames.
Must See

2:00am (22nd) – TCM – Son of the Sheik
The sequel to The Sheik, with Rudolph Valentino playing both the Sheik and his son, who’s after his own European bride this time around. I actually like this film a bit better than the original, as it better balances its desert romance and action without being quite as sexist as the first one.
1926 USA. Director: George Fitzmaurice. Starring: Rudolph Valentino, Vilma Banky, George Fawcett, Montagu Love, Agnes Ayres.
Newly Featured!

3:55am (22nd) – MGM – The Bride Wore Black
That Truffaut admired Hitchcock is no secret – he even wrote a book of interviews with him shortly before making this film, his most overt homage to Hitchcockian suspense. After a failed suicide, Jeanne Moreau heads out to track down the five men who are responsible for her husband’s death on their wedding day.
1968 France. Director: François Truffaut. Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Michel Bouquet, Jean-Claude Brialy.

Friday, July 22

8:00pm – MGM – Death at a Funeral
The British original, this is, not the three-years-later American remake. Even the British film is not quite as solid as you’d hope, but the strong cast plays well with the idea of a stiff-upper lip British family discovering their father had a gay lover (played winningly by Peter Dinklage). A hilarious turn from Alan Tudyk helps, too.
2007 UK. Director: Frank Oz. Starring: Matthew Macfadyen, Peter Dinklage, Alan Tudyk, Keeley Hawes, Ewen Bremner, Andy Nyman, Rupert Graves.
Newly Featured!

Saturday, July 23

1:45pm – TCM – Lord of the Flies
The earlier version of the high school required reading staple, dramatizing the story of a group of young boys shipwrecked on an island and forced to govern themselves. The savagery that ensues is captured here quite well.
1963 UK. Director: Peter Brook. Starring: James Aubrey, Tom Chapin, Hugh Edwards, Roger Elwin, Tom Gaman.
Newly Featured!

5:45pm – TCM – Fort Apache
The first entry of John Ford’s informal Cavalry trilogy has John Wayne and Henry Fonda posted to the eponymous Fort following the Civil War, dealing with Indian uprisings, and delving in Fonda’s character of a man driven to reclaim his lost honor in the military by any means possible.
1948 USA. Director: John Ford. Starring: John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Shirley Temple.

8:00pm – TCM – Cool Hand Luke
One of Paul Newman’s most memorable films, with Newman playing a renegade prisoner on a Southern chain gang who refuses to do what he’s told, escaping time and time again only to be recaptured as the guards attempt to break him.
1967 USA. Director: Stuart Rosenberg. Starring: Paul Newman, George Kennedy, J.D. Cannon, Lou Antonio.

8:00pm – Fox Movie – Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Not the TV show, but the much more comedic film version that inspired it (Joss Whedon is said to have wanted to make the TV show after being disappointed with what the movie based on his script turned into) – it’s certainly nowhere near as good as the series, but it’s decent fun and plays into the Buffy mythology more than you might expect, especially leading into Season One of the show.
1992 USA. Director: Fran Rubel Kuzui. Starring: Kristy Swanson, Donald Sutherland, Paul Reubens.
(repeats at 11:30pm)

10:00pm – Sundance – Notes on a Scandal
If you want to see a be-all-end-all actress-on-actress battle of the wills, this is the film to watch. Aging teacher Judi Dench finds out her younger colleague Cate Blanchett is carrying on with one of her students, and Dench sets out to psychologically blackmail Blanchett, with whom she is secretly infatuated. There are a ton of levels to these characters, and both actresses shine in their roles, playing off each other with an intensity rarely seen on-screen.
2006 UK. Director: Richard Eyre. Starring: Cate Blanchett, Judi Dench, Andrew Simpson.
(repeats at 3:25am on the 24th)

10:30pm – TCM – Caged
What sounds like a B-level prison exploitation film is actually a cut above, thanks to solid, if not glossy, production values and strong performances from Eleanor Parker as a naive woman hardened by her incarceration and Agnes Moorehead as the kinder-than-she-seems warden. This one surprised me with how enjoyable and nuanced it was, for little more than a B picture.
1950 USA. Director: John Cromwell. Starring: Eleanor Parker, Agnes Moorehead, Ellen Corby, Hope Emerson, Jan Sterling.
Newly Featured!

12:00M – IFC – Carrie
There aren’t that many movies that you can say are equally loved by horror fans and feminist academics, but Carrie is one of them – Carrie’s physical coming-of-age sparks telekinetic abilities, allowing her to take bloody revenge on the schoolkids who mistreated her. And who can’t relate to that, really?
1976 USA. Director: Brian DePalma. Starring: Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Amy Irving.

1:30am (24th) – Sundance – The Dreamers
Bernardo Bertolucci’s love letter to the French New Wave, with American Michael Pitt heading to Paris just in time to join the ’68 Cinematheque riots, becoming friends and eventually lovers with a siblings Louis Garrel and Eva Green, a pair of fellow cinephiles. Bertolucci draws on Band of Outsiders and Jules and Jim especially, as well as the history of the era and his own sensibilities. It loses me personally a bit in the eroticism of the second half, but the first part is fantastic.
2003 France/UK/Italy. Director: Bernardo Bertolucci. Starring: Michael Pitt, Louis Garrel, Eva Green.

Sunday, July 24

12:00N – Fox Movie – Niagara
Marilyn Monroe got a chance to play against type a bit as a calculating newlywed planning to off her husband during their honeymoon. Also unusual for what is basically a noirish crime film, it’s shot in color.
1953 USA. Director: Henry Hathaway. Starring: Marilyn Monroe, Joseph Cotten, Jean Peters.
(repeats at 6:00pm)

6:00pm – TCM – The Miracle Worker
Both Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft won Oscars for this film, as Helen Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan respectively. Certainly both roles are tour-de-force worthy, as the struggle to teach the blind and deaf Helen to talk as well as Helen’s struggle to learn makes for a pretty incredible story.
1962 USA. Director: Arthur Penn. Starring: Anne Bancroft, Patty Duke, Victor Jory, Inga Swenson, Andrew Prine.
Newly Featured!

8:00pm – TCM – The Thing from Another World
An team of scientists in the arctic discover an ice-bound spacecraft, but when they bring the dead pilot back to their station, they discover he’s carrying a bloodthirsty alien parasite. Through credited to Christian Nyby, the film is at least partially directed by Howard Hawks (who produced). Also, this is one of the very few situations where I think the remake (John Carpenter’s The Thing) is actually better than the original. But this one is still worth watching, especially if you’re into 1950s sci-fi/horror.
1951 USA. Director: Christian Nyby. Starring: Margaret Sheridan, Kenneth Tobey, Robert Cornthwaite, James Arness.

12:15am (25th) – TCM – The Mark of Zorro
Douglas Fairbanks’ silent version of the Zorro story, detailing Zorro’s exploits against the colonial government in Spanish California. I love the Zorro story, but haven’t made it to this Fairbanks film yet…glad to see it pop up on TCM.
1920 USA. Director: Fred Niblo. Starring: Douglas Fairbanks, Noah Beery, Marguerite De La Motte.

2:15am (25th) – TCM – Sanjuro
Following directly on the success of Yojimbo, Kurosawa and Mifune teamed back up for this film about a scruffy samurai helping a group of younger men clear their town of corruption.
1962 Japan. Director: Akira Kurosawa. Starring: Toshirô Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Keiju Kobayashi, Reiko Dan, Takashi Shimura.
Newly Featured!

4:00am (25th) – TCM – Ride the High Country
In the 1960s, Sam Peckinpah contributed to the beginnings of the revisionist western, taking complicated heroes and violence to new levels – in Ride the High Country, Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott (who had both starred in many westerns throughout the 1930s and 1940s) play jaded cowboys hired to transport gold who get caught up in a family feud that forces them to confront their own differences and troubled pasts. It’s a fairly simple plot on the surface, but goes much deeper than you’d expect.
1962 USA. Director: Sam Peckinpah. Starring: Joel McCrea, Randolph Scott, Mariette Hartley, Ron Starr.