Film Series in NYC This Week

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

‘HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER’ at IFC Center (Aug. 4-6) and ‘UNFORGIVEN’ at Film Forum (Aug. 4-10). In an unusual bit of programming synchronicity, IFC Center will show “High Plains Drifter” — one of Clint Eastwood’s earliest directorial efforts, in which he casts himself as an amoral stranger who agrees to defend a hapless town from outlaws — the same week that Film Forum screens a 25th-anniversary restoration of “Unforgiven,” Mr. Eastwood’s landmark revisionist western from 1992. The movie, which was named best picture at the Oscars for that year, was widely hailed as a breakthrough in Mr. Eastwood’s continuing interrogation of his macho screen persona. In “Unforgiven,” the actor plays an aging gunslinger and a reluctant mercenary who is cognizant of the fact that, for those who get killed in the West, “deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
212-924-7771, ifccenter.com
212-727-8110, filmforum.org

SEE IT BIG! 70 MM at the Museum of the Moving Image (through Aug. 27). The museum’s annual program of 70-millimeter prints, which have a larger image area than 35-millimeter prints and, consequently, a gasp-inducing level of detail, brings back some of the standards, including “2001: A Space Odyssey” (through Sunday) and “Lawrence of Arabia” (Thursday through Aug. 13), neither of which should ever be seen in anything less than 70 millimeter. The wild cards are banished to the last week of August: A blowup of “The Dark Crystal” (Aug. 26-27) will make a fitting complement to the museum’s current Jim Henson exhibit, but the most exciting prospects are films by the Soviet director Yuliya Solntseva, the only woman to take the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival until this year, when Sofia Coppola won for “The Beguiled.” Ms. Solntseva’s prizewinning film, “The Story of the Flaming Years,” will show on Aug. 26 and 27, the same days as “The Enchanted Desna” and “Poem of an Inland Sea,” for a complete presentation of a loose trilogy. (“Poem of an Inland Sea,” the first in the series, will screen in 35 millimeter.)
718-784-0077, movingimage.us

JONATHAN DEMME: HEART OF GOLD at BAM Rose Cinemas (Aug. 4-24). The title of this retrospective comes from one of Mr. Demme’s Neil Young concert films (“Neil Young: Heart of Gold,” showing on Aug. 20), but there are few directors who have such a generous, open view of humanity, an outlook that helped the director, who died in April, even on “The Silence of the Lambs” (Aug. 12). The series begins with “Something Wild” (Friday), in which a free spirit played by Melanie Griffith takes Jeff Daniels’s “closet rebel” banker for a whirl. The filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson will participate in a Q. and A. after the 7 p.m. screening; on Saturday he will speak before the 4:20 p.m. showing of “Melvin and Howard” — Howard being Howard Hughes (Jason Robards), and Melvin being the luckless Everyman (Paul Le Mat) who befriends him. The near-comprehensive program has untold riches, but the most underrated may be “The Truth About Charlie” (Wednesday), a remake of Stanley Donen’s “Charade” and a loving homage to the French New Wave.
718-636-4100, bam.org

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