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Three Classics Revived: ‘White Nights,’ ‘The Piano,’ and ‘Mysterious Skin.’

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What do Luchino Visconti’s White Nights, Jane Campion’s The Piano, and Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin all have in common? Aside from critical acclaim, not much. Except this: they’re all returning to the big screen in new restorations over the next few weeks.

Three Classics Revived: 'White Nights,' 'The Piano,' and 'Mysterious Skin.'

Catch The Piano starting July 31st at Laemmle’s Royal, White Nights August 7th also at the Royal, and Mysterious Skin August 21st at the NoHo.

Not to be confused with the 1985 American film of the same name, White Nights (1957) marked a transition in Visconti’s style. Previously known as a master of neorealism, he shot the entirety of White Nights on a large set in a Roman soundstage, giving the production a dreamlike quality in line with the Dostoevsky short story it’s based on. Based on the Tuscan city of Livorno, the set used netting to give the street lights a nighttime haze, and included a functional mini-canal, for a key moment in a rowboat.

Three Classics Revived: 'White Nights,' 'The Piano,' and 'Mysterious Skin.'

Italian acting icon Marcello Mastroianni turns on the charm as Mario, a man on a late-night walk who encounters a crying woman, Natalia (German cinema star Maria Schell). Over the next couple of evenings, he attempts to woo her despite her fealty to a man who left a year ago, with a vague promise to return. Visconti originally planned to dub Schell, but she impressed him with her Italian and got to keep her voice.

At the center of The Piano, on the other hand, is a relationship not serendipitous but pre-ordained. From an early age, Ada (Holly Hunter), from Scotland, is promised into an arranged marriage with New Zealand settler Alisdair Stewart (the late, great Sam Neill). By the time she’s old enough to actually wed, she already has a daughter (Anna Paquin), and is either unable or unwilling to speak…except through the emotional music she plays on her piano. When her new spouse fails to put a priority on her signature instrument, she’s drawn to a man who does – George Baines (Harvey Keitel), a Scottish sailor who has gone native with the Maoris.

Hunter and Paquin both won Academy Awards for acting – unable to use words, Hunter’s Ada conveys everything through her eyes, stomps, and slaps. Paquin’s Flora comes off as a realistically mercurial kid, mostly loyal to her mother but capable of ruining everything in a fit of pique. Writer-director Jane Campion scored the film its third Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and the film’s frank depiction of sexuality from a female gaze pushes the boundaries of what the MPAA typically allows in an R-rated film.

Three Classics Revived: 'White Nights,' 'The Piano,' and 'Mysterious Skin.'

Filmmaker Gregg Araki has always pushed boundaries of sex – and violence — from his breakthrough film The Doom Generation onward. Mysterious Skin is less overtly outrageous, but almost more shocking for it, as it follows two childhood friends, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet, who process childhood sexual abuse in very different ways. Gordon-Levitt’s Neil becomes a hooker in New York City at the height of the AIDS crisis, while Corbet’s Brian, who believes his abuse may have been an alien abduction, increasingly has his repressed memories manifest as physical symptoms.

With a supporting cast that includes Michelle Trachtenberg, Richard Riehle, Elisabeth Shue, Chris Mulkey, and Mary Lynn Rajskub, Mysterious Skin is acclaimed as one of Araki’s finest and most sensitive films, but with its unflinching look at the damage done by child abuse, it isn’t for the faint of heart.

All three of these movies will have regular runs – not just one-off screenings – of at least a week, starting July 31st with The Piano. If you’ve never seen them before on the big screen, or it’s been a while, come and see them look better than ever. Three very different films, by three great directors…and there’ll be more where that came from.

Summer, Youth, and Self-Discovery: Rediscovering Satyajit Ray’s ‘Days and Nights in the Forest’

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A journey into the countryside becomes something far richer in Days and Nights in the Forest, the quietly radiant 1970 film from Indian master Satyajit Ray. Long regarded as one of Ray’s foremost (if relatively underappreciated) achievements, this film serves as a reminder of why he remains one of world cinema’s most revered humanists—a filmmaker of uncommon grace, wit, and emotional intelligence.

Satyajit Ray's Days and Nights in the Forest

Catch the newly restored Days and Nights in the Forest beginning February 6th at the Laemmle Royal, or February 13th at Glendale.

On the surface, the premise is simple: Four young professionals from Kolkata escape the pressures of city life for a few carefree days in the forests of eastern India. They arrive with cigarettes, bravado, and a pocketful of assumptions. They bribe a caretaker to secure lodging they never reserved. They drink too much. They talk too loudly. They treat the rural landscape as backdrop to their own amusement. Ray sketches these early episodes with a light touch that feels almost casual, airy, even playful. But a closer inspection reveals that what seems effortless is in fact exquisitely composed.

Ray builds the film from contrasts: urban and rural, privilege and poverty, men and women, innocence and experience. His camera often frames characters in medium groupings, encouraging us to observe them in relation to one another rather than as isolated heroes. There is no single protagonist here; instead, we’re invited to study a small social ecosystem. Time passes gently. Conversations drift. Meaning accumulates.

Satyajit Ray's Days and Nights in the Forest

When two women vacationing nearby, Aparna and Jaya, enter the men’s orbit, the film’s tone subtly shifts. Banter gives way to vulnerability; posturing reveals insecurity. Ray’s women, clear-eyed and self-possessed, register the men’s arrogance with bemusement rather than outrage. The flirtations and conversations that follow are modest on their face—a walk, a game of badminton, shared laughter—yet they carry the quiet charge of lives tilting off course.

The film’s most celebrated sequence arrives during a picnic, when the six characters play a memory game, each adding the name of a famous figure to an ever-growing list. It might sound inconsequential, but in the rhythms of hesitation and recall, in the glances exchanged and the names chosen, whole inner worlds flicker into view. Ray orchestrates the scene with the delicacy of chamber music. Nothing is underlined; everything resonates.

What makes Days and Nights in the Forest endure is its refusal of easy symbolism or tidy moralizing. Ray does not punish his characters, nor does he absolve them. He simply watches with compassion, irony, and patience as they brush up against their own limitations. The revelations are often small, but they linger. Only after viewing the entire film do you realize just how much it has revealed: about class and conscience, about love and pride, and about the uneasy passage from youth toward self-knowledge.