In my last post I provided a look behind the curtain for the first five weeks of film programming for my fall film calendar. This week we look at the remaining 24 titles that round out the schedule. It features everything from classics such as Vertigo to the state premiere of the latest uncompromising and visually arresting film by Bruno Dumont, Outside Satan (a scene of which is pictured above). READ MORE

The once legendary resort, like everywhere else that one visits now, regardless of the country or continent, was hopelessly run down and ruined by traffic, shops and boutiques, and the insatiable urge for destruction. -W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants

The setting of Kleber Mendonca Filho’s extraordinary debut feature Neighboring Sounds (opening on 8/24 in NYC) is not a resort, but the aging apartment blocks and flimsy, sprouting condominium towers of Recife, Brazil that bear similar scars of overdevelopment. The seemingly haphazard urban planning has the upwardly mobile middle class living on top of and among the blue collars who serve them. Filha’s film presents the neighborhood of Setubal as a series of constant intrusions, from the minor annoyances of a yapping guard dog and a stolen car stereo to the unsettling history of the area’s industrialist/colonialist past leaking into the present. The social contract in Setubal is built on as uneasy a ground as the swiftly built condos. As in Sebald’s description of a depopulated Deauville in The Emigrants, the whole town seems on the verge of collapse, haunted by the ghosts of its lost wealth. Yet all of this is subtext, woven into the comic-melancholic fabric of the neighborhood’s everyday routines.

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The art house film calendar that I program goes to press in two days and, although I’m still waiting for some confirmations, I’m sharing the rough-draft with TCM readers, along with some brief thoughts regarding the choices made.

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A boilingly hot summer day, a crush of commuters, a moment of carelessness. With these universal ingredients, Akira Kurosawa set up a film that would mix the grim obsessions of film noir with a documentarian’s observation of postwar Japanese life. Talk about universal–Stray Dog is a mashup of pulp pop and reportage, of true crime and intimate drama, of buddy cop movies and art house cinema, of East and West. There isn’t much a movie can do that Stray Dog doesn’t put on its agenda.

That being said, the international critical acclaim that greeted this film requires some dissection, because there’s something really weird going on here. Stray Dog was never a barn-burning commercial splash, and it wasn’t even distributed in the US until 1963 (almost 15 years after it was made) but it was an award-winning and highly regarded art house release that contributed substantially to Akira Kurosawa’s growing renown, and there’s something screwy about that.

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In this month’s installment of Spy Games I decided to focus my attention on Robert Hossein’s French thriller DOUBLE AGENTS (aka La nuit des espions; 1959). Countless espionage films have scrutinized the dangerous world of the illusive double agent. These masters of disguise who successfully manipulate government organizations are one of the spy genre’s most effective plot devices. But Hossein’s film explores the dilemma of the double agent in a truly unique fashion.

This unusual low-budget film tells the taut and involving story of two WW2 spies who are ordered to meet at a secluded cabin in the French countryside and exchange some important documents. One of the spies is a beautiful blond (played by Marina Vlady) with a bad case of nerves. She trembles when she hears unfamiliar sounds like distant thunder and creaking floorboards. She also speaks fluent German and sings German songs. The other is a tall dark and handsome man (played by Robert Hossein) wearing a Nazi uniform. His sad eyes and sensitive disposition seem at odds with his wartime activities. When the two first meet they mutually assume they’re both German spies but soon afterward the man claims to be a British double agent in disguise. The woman follows his lead and admits to being a British double agent as well but neither of them has any real proof of where their allegiances lie. Only they know if they’re loyal to Britain or Germany. DOUBLE AGENTS spends almost all of its 80-minute running time focused on these two desperate and solitary individuals as they attempt to confirm one another’s identity in the claustrophobic confines of the isolated cabin. The two spies will wine and dine each other, dance, make passionate love, viciously fight and finally discover their true identities. But all is fair in love and war and exposing the truth comes with a high price.

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For the sixth year running, the Japan Cuts film series in New York City presents an eye-opening glimpse of contemporary filmmaking from across the Pacific, the vast majority of which will never receive distribution in the United States. Programmed in concert with the ongoing New York Asian Film Festival (which I covered for Film Comment), it runs from July 12 – 28 at the Japan Society, and will screen 37 features and two shorts. The normally sober-minded fest has gone pop this year, booking a slate bubbling with hyperactive rom-coms and sci-fi extravaganzas, but there is also a sidebar of films responding to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, as well as a tribute to the expressively stone-faced actor Koji Yakusho, who will appear in-person for the screening of The Woodsman and the Rain (2011).

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The characters in a Nobuhiro Yamashita film do a lot of standing around. They are waiting for something, whether it be a friend, a bus, or simply for the day to end. Yamashita’s films are about killing time, in the hope that the following morning will contain less of it. But each day seems to grow longer, and these young men and women continue to stand, until they have forgotten what they were waiting for in the first place. These are films attuned to the rhythms of in-between moments , reveling in their awkward absurdity and percolating anxiousness. Yamashita’s films are frequently hilarious but of a kind that sticks in the throat, as life sails by his weightless, indecisive characters. Operating in near-anonymity out of Japan, with little festival or international distribution, Yamashita has forged a consistently funny and bittersweet body of work that is deserving of a vastly wider audience.

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ON VAMPYRES AND OTHER SYMPTOMS (2011) is the clever title of a new documentary directed by Celia Novis focusing on the reclusive filmmaker, writer and artist José Ramón Larraz. If Larraz’ name doesn’t ring any bells don’t be alarmed. Although the 83-year-old Spanish director is well regarded by his peers including Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg and author Stephen King, Larraz remains relatively unknown to the public at large. Today he’s best remembered for making one of the most adult vampire films of the 1970s, VAMPYRES (1974), but Larraz’ macabre oeuvre includes the Palme d’Or nominated horror film, SYMPTOMS (1974) as well as WHIRLPOOL (1970), DEVIATION (1971), THE HOUSE THAT VANISHED (1974), THE COMING OF SIN (1978), BLACK CANDLES (1982) and REST IN PIECES (1987) among others.

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