Showing Fri. 5/9/08

Newly restored on 35mm and available for the first time in almost a decade, Albert Lamorisse's The Red Balloon remains one of the most beloved children's films of all time. In this deceptively simple, nearly wordless tale, a young boy discovers a stray balloon that seems to have a mind of its own. Wandering through the streets of Paris, the two become inseparable, to the surprise of the neighborhood and the envy of other children. Winner of the Palme d'Or at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival, The Red Balloon has enchanted the young — and the young at heart — for decades, and it will surely find a new generation of fans with this rerelease. Shown with White Mane, an earlier film from Lamorisse. In the south of France is a near-desert region called La Camargue, there lives White Mane, a magnificent stallion and the leader of a herd of wild horses too proud to let themselves be broken in by humans. Only Folco, a young fisherman, manages to tame him. A strong friendship grows between the boy and the horse, but they must elude the wrangler and his herdsmen to live freely. Beloved by generations of French children, White Mane comes to North America in a glorious new restoration, featuring a new English translation.

Wong Kar Wai's sensibility is wildly romantic — he's dedicated to replicating, in visual terms, what it's like to feel passion. The movie is the story of Elizabeth (singer Norah Jones) and her travels. Trying to heal a broken heart and get on with her life, she goes to several small towns and takes waitressing and barmaid jobs, and runs into a lovestruck Jude Law. Jones, in her acting debut, is stunned into self-reflection by the spectacle of an alcoholic cop (David Straitharn) still helplessly in love with his estranged wife (Rachel Weisz). So does the demeanor of a strangely buoyant gambler (Natalie Portman), who swallows her grief and lives from thrill to thrill in Las Vegas. "Captures the overwhelming and uncontrollable emotional assault of loving and living through captured moments and sensuous images" (Sean Axmaker, Seattle Post-Intelligencer).

The Oscar winner for best foreign language film, The Counterfeiters is about the most talented counterfeiter in prewar Berlin, and also a bon vivant, ladies' man, cynic, and opportunist; in brief, a happy criminal. In the film, Sally, a Russian-born Jew, is arrested in 1936 and later sent to a concentration camp where he's placed at the head of a counterfeiting workshop run by the S.S. and staffed by Jewish prisoners skilled as printers and graphic artists. The Nazi plan is to produce enormous amounts of authentic-looking British and American currency, dump it on the market, and undermine the economies of those countries. Sally's unit produces the British pound in bulk, but his perfect design for the dollar is sabotaged by a Communist printer in the group, a fiery anti-Nazi who can't bring himself to help the German war effort. "The Counterfeiters is a swift and suspenseful thriller" (A.O. Scott, N.Y. Times).

In the fall of 2006, Martin Scorsese filmed the Stones in a pair of concerts at the Beacon, a relatively small New York theater, and the result, Shine a Light, is a testament to the band's longevity, vitality and verve. Shot with an electric energy, Shine captures a band performing their unassailable catalog of songs with spark and zest that leave you agape, and guest players Jack White, Buddy Guy and Christina Aguilera underscore the Stones' timelessness. "Shine a Light has two maestros, Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, and once they begin to mesh, around the third or fourth song, they put on a display of showmanship that erases the line between art and entertainment" (Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun).