Rialto Pictures Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Salute

September 2–November 29, 2023

It would not be possible for BAMPFA to showcase many essential films from the history of cinema without the stellar work of Rialto Pictures, a boutique distributor based in New York. This salute features digital restorations of many landmark films, including two by Jean-Luc Godard, Contempt and Alphaville; two French thrillers, Army of Shadows and Le cercle rouge, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville; two Italian classics starring Alberto Sordi, Federico Fellini’s The White Sheik and Dino Risi’s Una vita difficile; Carol Reed’s exceptional The Third Man; a masterpiece from postrevolutionary Iran, The Runner; and Akira Kurosawa’s stunning film adaption of King Lear, the monumental Ran.

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  • Contempt, Courtesy: Rialto Pictures

  • The Runner, Courtesy: Rialto Pictures

  • Alphaville, Courtesy: Chaumiane/Film Studio/Kobal/Art Resource/Georges Pierre

  • Ran, Courtesy: Rialto Pictures

  • The Third Man, Courtesy: Rialto Pictures / Studiocanal

  • Una vita difficile, Courtesy: Rialto Pictures / Studiocanal

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

Past Films

  • Le cercle rouge

    • Saturday, November 18 7 PM
    • Wednesday, November 29 7 PM
    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1970

    4K Digital Restoration

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

  • The Third Man

    • Saturday, November 18 4:30 PM
    • Sunday, November 26 5 PM
    Carol Reed
    United Kingdom, 1949

    4K Digital Restoration

    Joseph Cotten pursues Orson Welles through postwar Vienna in Graham Greene and Carol Reed’s cynical masterpiece. “Seeing it on the big screen is like watching it for the first time” (New York Times).

  • Ran

    • Sunday, November 26 1:30 PM
    Akira Kurosawa
    Japan, France, 1985

    4K Digital Restoration

    King Lear in feudal Japan, with Tatsuya Nakadai as the lord who divides his kingdom among his three sons, with disastrous results. “A majestic piece of filmmaking” (Village Voice).

  • Army of Shadows

    • Saturday, November 25 6:30 PM
    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1969

    Digital Restoration

    Jean-Pierre 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” (Independent).

  • Una vita difficile

    • Saturday, November 4 4:30 PM
    • Friday, November 24 6:30 PM
    Dino Risi
    Italy, 1961

    4K Digital Restoration

    “Alberto Sordi’s pungent embodiment of a left-wing pamphleteer who can’t prosper in a capitalist republic propels [Dino] Risi’s deft seriocomic panorama from Mussolini’s fall to the rise of the postwar Roman oligarchy. . . . The closest America has come to Alberto Sordi is Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in their prime, rolled into one” (Michael Sragow, Air Mail).

  • The White Sheik

    • Friday, November 3 6:30 PM
    • Sunday, November 19 2:30 PM
    Federico Fellini
    Italy, 1952

    4K Digital Restoration

    Provincial newlyweds arriving in Rome get sidetracked by the wife’s obsession with a fumetto photo-comic star in Federico Fellini’s solo directorial debut. “A funny, sardonic, and clever satire on popular heroes and ordinary people’s illusions” (Chicago Reader).

  • The Runner

    • Saturday, September 9 5 PM
    • Friday, October 6 7 PM
    Amir Naderi
    Iran, 1984

    4K Digital Restoration

    Amiro, an illiterate eleven-year-old orphan living alone in an abandoned tanker in the Iranian port city of Abadan, survives by shining shoes, selling water, and diving for deposit bottles, while being bullied by both adults and competing older kids. But he finds solace by dreaming about departing cargo ships and airplanes and by running . . . seemingly to nowhere.

    Madjid Niroumand in Person on October 6

  • Alphaville

    • Friday, September 8 7 PM
    • Saturday, September 23 7 PM
    Jean-Luc Godard
    France, 1965

    4K Digital Restoration

    “[Jean-Luc] Godard’s conceptual masterpiece is a hardboiled, Pop Art, sci-fi gloss on [Jean] Cocteau’s Orpheus and [George] Orwell’s 1984” (Village Voice).

  • Contempt

    • Saturday, September 2 7 PM
    • Friday, September 22 7 PM
    Jean-Luc Godard
    France, 1963

    4K Digital Restoration

    Jean-Luc Godard’s Homeric homage to Fritz Lang, “one of the defining moments of modernist filmmaking” (Film Comment).

  • Army of Shadows

    • Saturday, September 9 7 PM
    Jean-Pierre Melville
    France, 1969

    Digital Restoration

    Jean-Pierre 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” (Independent).