Weekend Classics

Few classics of Indian cinema are as exhilarating as Ramesh Sippy’s 1975 hit SHOLAY, a delirious four-course meal of action, musical numbers, Indian cinema’s most iconic actors and jaw-dropping widescreen 70mm cinematography. Riffing off Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, Akira Kurosawa’s Samurai films, and classic westerns, the film follows two ne’er-do-wells asked to rid a village of a notorious bandit. (New 4K Restoration of the Original Cut)

Desperate to flee Calcutta’s rat race, four friends drive to a sylvan guesthouse in one of India’s rural “tribal lands” where they mix with the locals. Filled with some of director Satyajit Ray’s most indelible characterizations and lavish images, the film touches on masculine vulnerabilities and Indian class divisions with the graceful complexity of a master at his peak.

Director Mikhail Kalatozov’s delirious 1964 masterpiece unfolds in four stunning vignettes that paint a portrait of pre-revolutionary Cuba — its culture and the people who call the island home. Shot soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis, this wildly offbeat but influential work represents an early effort to keep abreast of the ongoing and crucial work of film preservation — even if our means of exhibition left much to be desired at the time.

Widely considered to be Robert Bresson’s masterpiece, AU HASARD BALTHAZAR charts the adverse lives of a donkey named Balthazar and Marie, the young girl who named him.

A master work of the Revisionist Western subgenre and a personal fave of our dear, recently passed H.G. Webb, Sam Peckinpah’s classic THE WILD BUNCH tells the tale of a band of aging outlaws forced to contend with the inevitable death of their chosen lifestyle and the Old West as they once knew it.

Set in the post-Depression Tennessee Valley and concerning an idealistic young TVA administrator sent to clear land to be flooded by a new dam, Elia Kazan's film is a masterful recreation of a unique period in Tennessee history. WILD RIVER opened our Visions of the South series in 2011 — which we called “a survey of 20th century film depicting life in the southeastern United States from the inside and out” — and the first such mega-series of its kind.

“What’s black and white, speaks Hungarian, and is 37,204 feet long? Don’t look now, Nashville, but it will soon be in your midst. It is a phantom, a behemoth that only a comparative few have ever glimpsed. People have driven hours to see it and emerged half a day later from its company, changed. Some compare its effect to a drug. Others say it has the power to stop time. The harder it has been to see, the more its legend has grown. Spoken aloud, its name practically arrives in a clap of thunder: SÁTÁNTANGÓ!” —Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene (Dec 2006)