Melville 100

June 8–August 12, 2017

This retrospective marks the centennial of the great French director whose American-inspired crime films helped set the New Wave in motion.

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  • Le Samouraï

  • Army of Shadows

  • Bob le flambeur

  • Léon Morin, Priest

  • Le cercle rouge

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • Un flic

    • Saturday, August 12 6:30 PM
    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1972

    Alain Delon, Catherine Deneuve, and Richard Crenna star in Melville’s last feature, a consummate Sartre-by-way-of-Simenon heist film of remarkable set pieces and an even more remarkable sense of nihilism.

  • Le cercle rouge

    • Sunday, August 6 7 PM
    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1970

    Alain Delon and Yves Montand in Melville’s “dazzling epic of love, guns, gangsters, and cigarettes” (Los Angeles Times).

  • Le doulos

    • Thursday, August 3 7 PM
    • Saturday, August 5 6 PM
    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1963

    Serge Reggiani suspects Jean-Paul Belmondo of being a stool pigeon in this Melvillean roundabout of ambiguity and betrayal.

  • Two Men in Manhattan

    • Sunday, July 30 7 PM
    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1959

    A French journalist uncovers the death of a French diplomat in New York in Melville’s low-budget, semi-documentary noir.

  • Léon Morin, Priest

    • Wednesday, June 28 7:00
    • Sunday, July 16 7:00
    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1961

    New Digital Restoration

    Two of the French New Wave’s most iconic actors, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Emmanuelle Riva, star as a cleric and a Communist drawn together through love. “A triumph of mood, setting, and innuendo” (Criterion Collection).

  • Quand tu liras cette lettre

    • Friday, July 14 8:30 PM
    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, Italy, 1953

    Imported Print

    A sleazy loverboy on the Riviera meets his match in his young victim’s older sister—a nun (Juliette Gréco) just out of the convent—in this delirious combination of French fatalism, postwar despair, noir angles, and heated melodrama.

  • Le deuxième souffle

    • Friday, July 7 7 PM
    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1966

    Imported Print

    Aging gangster Lino Ventura escapes from jail but winds up being sucked into one last heist in Melville’s well-drilled policier.

  • Army of Shadows

    • Saturday, June 10 6 PM
    • Sunday, June 25 7 PM
    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1969

    Melville’s drama of the French Resistance, starring Lino Ventura and Simone Signoret, “grips tighter than a Gestapo handcuff. . . . A film of noirish compositions and fantastic cool” (The Independent).

  • Bob le flambeur

    • Saturday, June 24 6:30 PM
    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1956

    “The cinematic Birth of the Cool, Melville’s drollest, most likable gangster movie. . . . Exceedingly light on its feet” (Village Voice).

  • Les enfants terribles

    • Sunday, June 18 7 PM
    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1950

    Imported Print

    Jean Cocteau collaborated with Melville on this poetic, moody adaptation of Cocteau’s novel about the obsessive love between a brother and sister. “One of French cinema’s greatest, and most surprising, meetings of the minds” (Criterion Collection).

  • Le Samouraï

    • Thursday, June 8 7 PM
    • Friday, June 16 8:30 PM
    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1967

    Imported Print

    Alain Delon embodies cool as a solitary, silent Parisian killer flitting between hits and flings in this essential, influential assassin film. “Achieves an atmosphere of mesmerizing, otherworldly beauty” (Slant).

  • The Silence of the Sea

    • Sunday, June 11 7 PM
    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1949

    Imported Print

    A German officer in occupied France falls in love with his “host’s” niece in Melville’s spare debut. “A concentrated, sensitive, interior film” (David Thomson). With short 24 heures de la vie d’un clown.