Robert Bresson’s late masterwork THE DEVIL, PROBABLY (1977), a blistering indictment of post-May ‘68 France, will run in a new 4K restoration at Film Forum from Friday, September 20 through Thursday, September 26.

Constructed as a flashback and based off of a newspaper story, THE DEVIL, PROBABLY centers on four disaffected youth, disillusioned with the reality inflicted upon them by their elders, as they drift through Paris, politics, religion, and psychoanalysis, witnesses to a society in moral and physical decline. “I hate life. I hate death. My sickness is that I see things clearly,” confides student Antoine Monnier to his shrink – but, even as he promises marriage to his two girlfriends, he also arranges his own… suicide?

“Bresson’s chilling visions of daily life—includes a brilliant sequence aboard a bus that depicts the mechanical world as a horror—suggesting its hostility to the passions of youth… These children of the revolution tremble with uncertainty, and their loose gestures and shambling ways conflict with his precise images. Both the world and Bresson’s cinema are in disarray, and the signs of his inner conflict are deeply troubling and tremendously moving.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker
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A new 4K restoration of Akira Kurosawa’s epic masterpiece, SEVEN SAMURAI (1954), starring the legendary Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura, will run at Film Forum from Friday, July 5 through Thursday, July 18.

In 16th century Japan, as proud samurai end up as masterless, wandering ronin and farmers are prostrate under the heel of marauding bandits, a village patriarch counsels resistance. How? Hire samurai, “hungry samurai.” Under the calm leadership of Takashi Shimura (Kurosawa regular, star of Ikiru and Godzilla), that magic number enlist for a war against 40 mounted bandits, winding up at the most hair-raising battle ever filmed.

Kurosawa’s orchestration of swords, spears, arrows, men, horses, rain, wind, and mud; blazing tracking shots; giant close ups; chiaroscuro lighting; telephoto lenses that put us underfoot as horses crash amid struggling men; deep focus shots that render the tip of a sword poking into the lens equally clear with scurrying figures fifty feet away, transitions that effortlessly whip us from scene to scene; and ensemble performances that give dimensionality to every character, topped by Toshiro Mifune’s eventual transition from manic goofball to tortured, self-hating tragic hero make SEVEN SAMURAI one of the most influential films of all time.
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A new 4K restoration of Claude Sautet’s CLASSE TOUS RISQUES (1960), a masterpiece of French Noir starring Lino Ventura (ARMY OF SHADOWS) and a very young Jean-Paul Belmondo, will run at Film Forum from Friday, March 15 through Thursday, March 21.

Neo-realism meets Noir, as gangster and family man Ventura, holed up in Italy for over a decade, needs some startup money to return to France, where he’s been sentenced to death in absentia. With Milan’s Duomo looming in the background (shot on location), he and a crony execute a split-second payroll heist — in broad daylight — then begin a lightning-fast getaway via underground passages, car, motorcycle, bus, speedboat, and ambulance. Only the beginning of the mounting mayhem.

Bridging argot-rich 50s masterworks like RIFIFI and TOUCHEZ-PAS AU GRISBI with Melville’s pared-down thrillers of the 60s, CLASSE TOUS RISQUES (the title refers to a type of insurance policy, à la DOUBLE INDEMNITY, but is also a pun on “tourist class”) is a penetrating study of a tough guy at the end of his rope, drawn from screenwriter José Giovanni’s first-hand knowledge of the post-war French underworld.
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