This month, celebrate Noirvember with a dazzlingly dark lineup of hard-boiled pleasures: Columbia Noir pays tribute to the studio that made a virtue of pulp seediness; a retrospective dedicated to the tough-as-nails Ida Lupino collects some of her best noir turns; and the latest installment of Queersighted takes a look at the not-so-hidden currents of unspoken desire that run through the subgenre. Noir is just one of many genres that the Coen brothers have reinvented in their sharp-tongued, eccentric, and unpredictable body of work, gathered in a collection that really ties the room together. There’s plenty more to choose from this month, including the taboo-shattering films of Catherine Breillat, a new edition of Adventures in Moviegoing with John Turturro, Gregg Araki’s cult favorite Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, and new restorations of Med Hondo’s brilliant anticolonial musical West Indies and Dennis Hopper’s howl of punk nihilism Out of the Blue.

* indicates programming available only in the U.S.

TOP STORIES

Built around offbeat characters, ultraquotable dialogue, and a total command of craft, the films of Joel and Ethan Coen make up one of the most illustrious bodies of work in contemporary American cinema. For four decades, the prolific Minnesotans have been putting their cleverly idiosyncratic spin on an array of genres—from film noir (Blood Simple) and screwball comedy (Raising Arizona) to the gangster drama (Miller’s Crossing) and the western (True Grit)—while bending and subverting their conventions at will. Featuring colorful performances from regular collaborators like Frances McDormand, Steve Buscemi, John Goodman, and John Turturro, the Coens’ wickedly entertaining, endlessly surprising films constitute a delightfully strange and twisted universe all their own.

FEATURING: Blood Simple (1984), Raising Arizona (1987), Miller’s Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1991), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), The Big Lebowski (1998)*, A Serious Man (2009)*, True Grit (2010)*, Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)*

COMING DECEMBER 1: No Country for Old Men (2007)

Featuring an introduction by Imogen Sara Smith and Farran Smith Nehme

In celebration of both Noirvember and the 100th anniversary of Columbia Pictures, we’re revisiting one of our most popular collections with a refreshed slate of seductively shadowy, cynical gems. While rival studios like MGM and Paramount lavished money and top-tier production values on splashy musicals and prestige literary adaptations, the notoriously budget-conscious Columbia was right at home in the seedy world of film noir. The Columbia lot was where directors like Fritz Lang, Charles Vidor, and Samuel Fuller realized pulp-poetry perfection in classics like The Big Heat, Gilda, and The Crimson Kimono. It was also where resourceful genre specialists could overcome financial constraints through sinister, stylized atmosphere and directorial vision in killer Bs like the expressionist nightmare The Face Behind the Mask and the minimalist-cool hitman thriller Murder by Contract. Starring genre icons like Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, and Peter Lorre, these gritty journeys into the dark side of human nature epitomize the hard-boiled essence of noir.

FEATURING: The Face Behind the Mask (1941), Ladies in Retirement (1941), Gilda (1946), The Killer That Stalked New York (1950), The Sniper (1952), Strange Fascination (1952), The Big Heat (1953), Human Desire (1954), Pickup Alley (1957), Nightfall (1957), Murder by Contract (1958), The Crimson Kimono (1959), Experiment in Terror (1962)

Queerness simmers beneath the surface of classical Hollywood noir, with its heightened ambiguity, shadowy identities, and free-floating sensuality. Made during the era of the Production Code, which banned “any inference of sex perversion,” these films, with their characters’ murky pasts and murkier motivations, moved to the rhythms of teasing, unspoken eroticism. To accompany their selection—which runs the gamut from cornerstone titles like Laura and Gilda to lesser-known gut punches like Desert Fury and Cry of the Hunted—series curator Michael Koresky and special guest programmer Imogen Sara Smith sit down to discuss these tricky films, in which wayward souls are bedeviled by grim, transactional heterosexuality and bewitched by queer pasts and paths not taken.

FEATURING: The Maltese Falcon (1941), Laura (1944), Double Indemnity (1944), Gilda (1946), Desert Fury (1947), The Big Clock (1948)*, Cry of the Hunted (1953)

Shattering taboos with her unflinching, often shocking explorations of female sexuality and pleasure, Catherine Breillat plunges fearlessly into the corporeal realms of eroticism and violence. The two are inextricably linked in her daring body of work, which encompasses controversial coming-of-age portraits like A Real Young Girl and Fat Girl, the overtly autobiographical Sex Is Comedy, and her acclaimed latest, the daring exploration of forbidden desire Last Summer. In all, Breillat explores the intricacies of passion, power, and sexual politics, forcing viewers to confront that which makes them most uncomfortable and radically redefining the depiction of the female body on-screen.

FEATURING: A Real Young Girl (1976), Nocturnal Uproar (1979), 36 fillette (1988), Perfect Love (1996), Fat Girl (2001), Sex Is Comedy (2002), Anatomy of Hell (2004)

A virtuoso actor who brings an unpredictable edge to his always memorable performances for frequent collaborators like the Coen brothers and Spike Lee, John Turturro is also a fervent cinephile who became enamored with the golden-age Hollywood stars whose films he watched religiously on television while growing up in Queens. In this edition of Adventures In Moviegoing, he sits down with Criterion Collection curatorial director Ashley Clark to discuss a selection of the films that have marked his life, including those built around commanding, physical performances from favorite actors like Burt Lancaster (Brute Force), Marlon Brando (On the Waterfront), and Toshiro Mifune (Seven Samurai).

FEATURING: Brute Force (1947), On the Waterfront (1954), Seven Samurai (1954), Wild Strawberries (1957), Divorce Italian Style (1961), Rocco and His Brothers (1960), Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979)

COMING DECEMBER 1: The Lady Eve (1941)

The formidable Ida Lupino lent a defiant toughness and intelligence to some of classic Hollywood’s most unforgettable female characters. Born into a celebrated English family of music-hall artists, Lupino was initially cast in movies that showed off her charm and musical flair, but less of her unique abilities as a dramatic actress. She fought to play the evil, vengeful Bessie in William A. Wellman’s The Light That Failed, and at last Hollywood took notice. Lupino’s steely presence is essential to film noir classics like They Drive by Night and High Sierra, and her fearless intensity anchors her roles in The Sea Wolf and The Hard Way. Though she began to focus on producing and directing in the late forties, she continued to deliver searing performances, such as her standout work as a lonely blind woman in Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1951)—some scenes of which she also directed when Ray fell ill.

FEATURING: Peter Ibbetson (1935), Anything Goes (1936), Yours for the Asking (1936)*, The Light That Failed (1939)*, They Drive by Night (1940), High Sierra (1941)*, The Sea Wolf (1941), Moontide (1942), The Hard Way (1943), The Man I Love (1946), On Dangerous Ground (1951)

EXCLUSIVE PREMIERES

Gu Wentong (Xin Baiqing), a middle-aged food critic, is drifting through the local eateries of vibrant Beijing with his younger photographer colleague Oyang (Huang Yao). A divorcé with a six-year-old daughter who has been estranged from his father for decades, he is looking for a new perspective on life while reconsidering his failings as a father, a son, and a lover. While the seasons come and go, people get together and move apart. Only one thing will remain the same: the White Pagoda where they all meet sooner or later. Costarring major Fifth Generation filmmaker Tian Zhuangzhuang (The Horse Thief, The Blue Kite), this rich, profoundly sensitive rumination on the possibility of human connection achieves a novelistic expansiveness as it surveys the ebbs and flows of a life shaped by loss, yearning, and regret.

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

This savagely subversive, hormone-fueled triptych pushed 1990s indie cinema into bold new aesthetic realms, while giving blistering expression to adolescent rage and libidinal desire.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary on all three films by Araki and cast members, a conversation between Araki and Richard Linklater, a conversation between Araki and actor James Duval, a documentary on the trilogy’s visual style, and more.

A gangster saga that only the Coen brothers could concoct, Miller’s Crossing marries the hard-boiled sensibility of classic noir fiction with the filmmakers’ trademark savory dialogue, colorful characters, and finely calibrated set pieces.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A conversation between author Megan Abbott and the Coens; interviews with actors Gabriel Byrne and John Turturro, cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld, and composer Carter Burwell; and more.

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

Though best known as one of American cinema’s greatest live-wire actors, John Turturro has carved out a rich parallel career making highly personal, emotionally complicated films stamped with his own uncompromising vision. Built around committed performances from powerhouse ensemble casts, his films—including the autobiographical family drama Mac and the vibrant musical romantic comedy Romance & Cigarettes—are works of immense heart and soul, as well as love letters to the boisterous New York that made Turturro the artist he is.

FEATURING: Mac (1992), Romance & Cigarettes (2007), Fading Gigolo (2013)*

To celebrate the release of his acclaimed latest, Emilia Pérez, we’re revisiting the intense, visceral films of French auteur Jacques Audiard, whose masterful crime dramas infuse genre conventions with new freshness through their empathetic focus on the marginalized and oppressed. From his early character-driven thrillers Read My Lips and The Beat That My Heart Skipped to Dheepan, his explosive, Palme d’Or–winning saga of immigrant struggle on the streets of Paris, Audiard weaves gripping underworld tales with profoundly human centers.

FEATURING: Read My Lips (2001), The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), Dheepan (2015)

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

Dennis Hopper’s hurricane-force domestic tragedy is the ’80s answer to Easy Rider, following troubled youth subculture to its frightening, screaming, self-annihilating extreme. Just out of prison for drunk-driving his truck into a school bus, delinquent dad Don (Dennis Hopper) returns home to the planet’s most messed up family: heroin-addict wife Kathy (Sharon Farrell) and self-destructive, Elvis Presley– and Sid Vicious–obsessed rebel-punk daughter Cebe (Linda Manz), whose mantra is “disco sucks, kill all hippies.” Driven by the teenage Manz’s stunningly raw performance, Out of the Blue shocked audiences upon its premiere and in the ensuing decades has lost none of its furiously nihilistic power.

Mauritanian French director Med Hondo’s staggering West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty is a sui generis amalgam of historical epic, Broadway revue, Brechtian theater, and joyous agitprop. Using an enormous mock slave ship as the film’s only soundstage, Hondo mounts intricately choreographed reenactments and dance numbers across his multipurpose set to investigate more than three centuries of imperialist oppression. The story traverses the West Indies, Europe, and the Middle Passage; jumps across time to depict the effects of official French policy upon the colonized, the enslaved, and their descendants; and surveys the actions and motivations of the resigned, the revolutionary, and the powers that be (along with their lackeys). No mere extravaganza, West Indies is a call to arms for a spectacular yet critical cinematic reimagining of an entire people’s history of resistance and struggle.

A brilliantly bizarro, lost-and-found gem of early-1990s independent cinema, this surreal screwball caper casts none other than David Bowie and Rosanna Arquette as Monte and Lucy, a pair of servers at a terminally hip New York City restaurant—he’s a Brit desperate for an American wife so he can get his green card, she’s a wannabe escape artist à la Houdini—whose scheme to rob their employers leads to all sorts of delightful complications. Costarring Eszter Balint (Stranger Than Paradise), Andre Gregory, Buck Henry, and Marlee Matlin, The Linguini Incident, long almost impossible to see, reemerges in a new director’s cut as an offbeat treat—an engagingly out-there, tonally singular comedy whose moment for cult adoration has arrived.

A dazzling science-fiction thriller circling around Hitchcockian themes of double identities and obsession, the sophomore feature from Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar (The Others) is a stylistically and intellectually exhilarating puzzle that inspired the Tom Cruise remake Vanilla Sky. Wealthy, handsome César (Eduardo Noriega) seems to have everything—until he finds himself in a psychiatric facility, his face disfigured from a car accident, and at the center of a strange existential mystery involving two women (Penélope Cruz and Najwa Nimri).

In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays Jef Costello, a contract killer with samurai instincts. After carrying out a flawlessly planned hit, Jef finds himself caught between a persistent police investigator and a ruthless employer, and not even his armor of fedora and trench coat can protect him. An elegantly stylized masterpiece of cool by maverick director Jean‑Pierre Melville, Le samouraï is a razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture—with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology.

HOLLYWOOD HITS

Robert De Niro is a crazed stand-up comic in Martin Scorsese’s brilliantly disturbing satire of stardom and media obsession.

Renowned director Sidney Lumet brought five decades of cinematic mastery to bear in his final film, a riveting thriller and family portrait that achieves the weight of Greek tragedy.

TRUE STORIES

Following in the footsteps of his revered documentarian father, Les Blank, Harrod Blank makes films that immerse viewers in the offbeat subcultures and proudly unconventional fringes of American society. A leading figure in the art-car community explored in Wild Wheels and Automorphosis—both about like-minded individuals who make outrageously creative modifications to their automobiles in the name of personal expression—Blank celebrates the oddballs, dreamers, and outsiders who resist conformity to forge their own paths. This selection brings together a sampling of Blank’s work, along with David Silberberg’s electrifying portrait Oh My God! It’s Harrod Blank!

FEATURING: Wild Wheels (1992), Oh My God! It’s Harrod Blank! (2008), Automorphosis (2009), Why Can’t I Be Me? Around You (2019), Dugout Dick (2022)

Kevin Jerome Everson trains his black-and-white 16 mm camera on the polls on Election Day, November 8, 2016—pointedly centering the participation of Black citizens in a system that has long sought to disenfranchise them.

Take an awe-inspiring journey through Norway’s most scenic valley, where the sounds of the earth harmonize in a majestic symphony of nature.

SHORT FILMS

Dedicated to supporting documentary storytellers whose voices have long been marginalized within the film industry, IF/Then Shorts breaks down barriers to access, exposure, and funding in the media landscape. To date, IF/Then has been instrumental in bringing more than seventy-five projects from across the globe to the screen, including an intimate window into an evolving trans relationship (A Place on the Edge of Breath), a poignant rumination on incarceration and alienation (Blue Room), and a timely look at the Muslim community’s response to rising hate crimes in New York City (Everybody’s Watching).

NEW SHORTS: The Body Is a House of Familiar Rooms (2022), Blue Room (2022), A Place on the Edge of Breath (2022), Everybody’s Watching (2023), Madulu, the Seaman (2023), When It’s Good, It’s Good (2023)

PREVIOUSLY FEATURED SHORTS: Mizuko (2019), Stay Close (2019), Queenie (2020), Flatbush! Flatbush! (2021), Nonstop (2021), Life Without Dreams (2022)

Through an ecstatic fusion of monologue, music, and dance, this at once lusciously stylized and emotionally raw collaboration between actor-musician Jeremy Pope and filmmaker C Prinz explores and expands notions of Black masculinity as it confronts the torment of internalized homophobia and the radical act of self-love.