Film Series in NYC This Week

Photo

Our guide to film series and special screenings. All our movie reviews are at nytimes.com/reviews/movies.

‘HUSBANDS’ at BAM Rose Cinemas (through July 25). This John Cassavetes feature from 1970 is, for better and worse, the least diluted example of his discursive style, which is often mistaken for improvisation. (In general, he used improvisation as only one of several methods to create a scripted, carefully plotted result.) Three Long Island men (Mr. Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara and Peter Falk) embark on a bender and eventually fly off to London for a mortifyingly pointless getaway after the unexpected death of one of their friends. Women, from the characters’ wives to the would-be one-night stands the men pick up in London, are hardly incidental to Cassavetes’s portrait of frustrated masculinity, though without Gena Rowlands — his wife and muse, and the star of most of his greatest films — in the cast as a counterweight, the movie tips heavily toward one extreme of the director’s vision.
718-636-4100, bam.org

‘A PLACE IN THE SUN’ at the Metrograph (July 24). A screening of “A Place in the Sun,” George Stevens’s 1951 adaptation of “An American Tragedy” — starring a Method-infused Montgomery Clift as the lowborn nephew of an industrialist; Elizabeth Taylor as the socialite he pines for; and Shelley Winters as the co-worker who stands in the way of his ambitions — will inaugurate a yearlong partnership between the Metrograph and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which once a month will present prints from its archive at the theater. A tribute to the designer Saul Bass, responsible for some of the most memorable title sequences of Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Martin Scorsese, will follow on Aug. 2.
212-660-0312, metrograph.com

THERE WAS A TIME: CIVIL RIGHTS-ERA HOLLYWOOD at the Quad Cinema (July 26 through Aug. 3). A new, 50th-anniversary restoration of the best picture Oscar-winning “In the Heat of the Night” (Wednesday, Thursday, July 30 and Aug. 3) kicks off this survey of mainstream and independent American movies that reflected changing race relations in the 1960s and ’70s. Several other Sidney Poitier titles are featured (including “All the Young Men,” showing Thursday and July 29, and “Pressure Point,” showing Thursday and July 31). Muhammad Ali plays himself in “The Greatest” (July 29 and Aug. 2). And before making his most famous film, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” Melvin Van Peebles directed “Watermelon Man” (July 31 and Aug. 1), about a white bigot who wakes one morning as a black man.
212-255-2243, quadcinema.com

Continue reading the main story