So close, and yet so far away. Fall is the best and busiest season for serious filmgoers, as distributors acknowledge both the return of children to school (the ritual emptying of the multiplexes) and the upcoming Oscar race (the ritual self-congratulating of egomaniacs, bullies and the occasional talented original). The perennial question is how to weather the sultry August doldrums, and bridge the gap ’til Labor Day. Here are a handful of suggestions.
1. The Castro celebrates its 90th anniversary the entire month with a sumptuous smorgasbord of repertory riches, including a John Huston retrospective on Tuesdays. The big kickoff unfolds this weekend, with the Sing-Along Mary Poppins and a double bill of The Big Sleep and Where Danger Lives on Sat., Aug. 4 and Gone With the Wind and Citizen Kane on Sun., Aug. 5. For more information visit castrotheatre.com.
Panic in the Streets
2. August reeks to us of imminent endings, with its lingering childhood echoes of the last free days of summer giving way to button-down shirts, long pants, a frowning teacher and fixed rows of desks. On that melancholy note, the San Francisco Film Society’s ambitious year-round exhibition venture, SFFS Cinema, ends its all-too-brief existence with the Tues., Aug. 28 double bill of Elia Kazan’s Panic In the Streets and Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. The theater, in the New People building in Japantown, goes out with a flurry of great programming including the The Devil, Probably (Aug. 3-9), a typically enigmatic and unflinching chunk of philosophy, morality and spirituality circa 1977 by the utterly unique French master Robert Bresson. For more information visit sffs.org.
La Jetée