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Film Series in NYC This Week

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Song Kang-ho, left, and Kim Sang-kyung as detectives in a police procedural by the South Korean film director Bong Joon-ho. IFC Center will begin showing the movie, “Memories of Murder,” on Friday; see listing below.

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CJ Entertainment

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

BOXING ON FILM: PART 1 at Anthology Film Archives (Aug. 18-27). This two-part series explores the links between two types of public spectacle: cinema and pugilism. Robert Ryan plays an aging boxer who is unaware that others expect him to take a dive in “The Set-Up” (Friday, Tuesday and Thursday), a 1949 noir and a favorite of Martin Scorsese’s. (Mr. Scorsese’s own “Raging Bull” will show on Sunday, Wednesday and Aug. 26.) In “The Fight” (Saturday, Thursday and Aug. 26), William Greaves (“Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One”) documents the preparations for the first bout between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, showing the fight itself in full. In “Boxing Gym” (Sunday and Aug. 26), Frederick Wiseman observes the rituals of a workout space in Austin, Tex., that — despite boxing’s reputation — appears almost peaceful and utopian.
212-505-5181, anthologyfilmarchives.org

DISASTERPIECES at the Quad Cinema (Aug. 18-24). In proper usage (or what should be proper usage), the word “disasterpiece” refers to a film so terrible in so many respects that it becomes a kind of must-see event — a folly that combines grand ambition with delusional execution. The Quad is therefore misusing the term in this survey of conventional disaster films, of which “The Poseidon Adventure” (Friday, Monday and Wednesday) is perhaps the canonical example. In other offerings, before “Titanic,” there was “A Night to Remember” (Sunday and Tuesday), a strikingly unsentimental account of the ship’s sinking. And after “Airport” (Friday and Saturday), there was the immortal parody “Airplane!” (Saturday, Tuesday and Thursday), in which an outbreak of food poisoning prompts a search for someone who can fly the plane — and who didn’t have fish for dinner.
212-255-2243, quadcinema.com

‘MEMORIES OF MURDER’ at IFC Center (Aug. 18-24). Before “Okja” and “Snowpiercer,” the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho made his mark with this thriller about the hunt for a serial killer. First shown in 2003, Mr. Bong’s police procedural, whose action begins in 1986, plays like a forerunner of David Fincher’s “Zodiac” (2007), which was also based on real events and similarly tracks a confounding investigation that continues for years. Part of “what distinguishes ‘Memories of Murder,’ setting it apart from rank-and-file thrillers, is its singular mix of gallows humor and unnerving solemnity,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The New York Times.
212-924-7771, ifccenter.com

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