Like lots of you, I’ve been spending extra time at residence than I used to. Turner Traditional Films presents a nonstop array of movies from the previous, together with some I’ve managed to overlook throughout the years. And I’m all the time completely satisfied to find, or revisit, an previous brief topic from Vitaphone or MGM. Name it a leftover from the pandemic, however my spouse and I have to nudge ourselves to exit lately. The supply of recent films at residence—particularly throughout awards season—for a journalist like myself is a digital invitation to remain residence. Even my favourite movie of 2023, The Holdovers, is now accessible digitally and on Blu-ray.

But nearly each journey to a theater serves as a reminder of how rewarding it’s to see a movie on an enormous display, in the dead of night, with out distractions. That features oldies, and denizens of New York Metropolis and Chicago have golden alternatives awaiting them within the new yr.

The Chicago Movie Society by no means fails to impress me with its eclectic programming—and the savvy required to acquire 35mm prints from sure studios and quite a lot of archives. Nobody else I do know is exhibiting Cleopatra Jones and Has Anyone Seen My Gal in the identical season. Nothing is off-limits for this indomitable group, from silent movies with reside musical accompaniment (Frank Borzage’s Humoresque, Allan Dwan’s Padlocked) to Ozu’s Tokyo Story and Elvis Presley in Child Galahad. For extra info, click on at https://www.chicagofilmsociety.org/calendar/current-season/

The Museum of Trendy Artwork in Manhattan is marking the 20th yr of its annual collection To Save and Challenge: The MoMA Worldwide Competition of Movie Preservation. On opening night time, movie buff and filmmaker Alexander Payne launched the long-awaited restoration of Douglas Fairbanks’ The Black Pirate, which was filmed in two-color Technicolor. To cite from the Museum’s press launch, “Centered packages on music are launched by the singer-songwriter Judy Collins and DEVO’s Gerald Casale. We additionally current the world premiere of John Ford’s Arrowsmith (1931) in its authentic theatrical launch model, in addition to Andy Warhol’s never-before-seen Bitch (1965), which screens in a particular program with a newly struck 35mm print of Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Different pageant highlights embody the North American premieres of movies by Chantal Akerman, Agnieszka Holland, Kōzaburō Yoshimura, Idrissa Ouédraogo, Menelek Shabazz, Alain Tanner, Agnès Varda, and Wim Wenders, in addition to Monta Bell’s Man, Girl and Sin ( 1927); Wong Tin-lam’s The Wild, Wild Rose (1960), a cosmopolitan retelling of Bizet’s Carmen starring Hong Kong’s “mambo lady,” Grace Chang; Aribam Syam Sharma’s The Chosen One (1990), which presents a uncommon glimpse of moviemaking within the Indian state of Manipur; and two Soviet documentaries from 1929 and 1930 by the Armenian pioneer Hamo Bek-Nazaryan. The New York premieres of William Worthington’s The Dragon Painter (1919), starring Sessue Hayakawa, and Richard Eichberg’s Weimar melodrama Pavement Butterfly (1929), starring Anna Could Wong, are offered in tribute to 2 American actors who radically redefined the methods by which Asians had been depicted in Hollywood cinema.”

And, following its unveiling right here in Los Angeles late final yr, all 13 chapters of Common’s Flash Gordon serial, which was painstakingly reassembled and rejuvenated from current 35mm supplies which had been sitting all these years within the Hearst company’s vaults.

UCLA Movie & Tv Archive cinema.ucla.edu is all the time as much as one thing. Proper now you’ll be able to see Greta Garbo movies and the very best of Alfred Hithccock’s tv work…and its curators are getting ready its annual celebration of restored movies, which is able to unspool April 5-7. Whilst you’re ready for that, try some spontaneous silent newsreel footage of Anna Could Wong visiting Shanghai in 1937, courtesy of the Packard Humanities Institute and UCLA’s library of uncooked materials from its huge newsreel archive: https://newsreels.web/v/1nmj18r