Sag Harbor Cinema Celebrates Rialto Pictures’ Legacy with Midweek Matinees of Classic Restorations

Starting on February 26th, Sag Harbor Cinema will pay an eight-week tribute to the esteemed, New York-based distributor of classic cinema through a series of midweek matinee screenings of works by, among others, Jules Dassin, Jean Renoir, Michael Powell, Carol Reed, and Jean-Luc Godard.

Restorations of beloved masterpieces of foreign and American cinema from Rialto have been part of SHC’s programs since it re-opened its doors in 2021, with films such as Jacques Deray’s La Piscine; Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria; Francis Coppola’s The Conversation; the Ealing comedy The Ladykillers; Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge; and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless on its 60th anniversary.

Founded in 1997 by Film Forum’s legendary Artistic Director of Repertory Bruce Goldstein, who was joined a year later by partner Adrienne Halpern, Rialto Pictures has become a leading theatrical distributor of classic foreign and American films, with a rich catalog that includes generous selections of French New Wave and poetic realism, British and French film noir, Ealing comedies, British social realism, American cult classics, and commedia all’italiana in between.

“Bruce and Adrienne’s impeccable taste and passion for film have made Rialto an indispensable resource for independent and arthouse cinemas like ours. It is because of Rialto that we have access to mint 35mm prints and 4K restorations of many renowned classics as well as great films that needed to be rediscovered,” says SHC’s Artistic Director Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan. “Their contribution to contemporary film culture and to the moviegoing experience in the US is invaluable.”

“Rialto was a natural extension to my work as a film programmer, at Film Forum and other New York theaters. A lot of the classics I wanted to show were available only in the worst possible 35mm prints, or not at all, and I had many Holy Grails of unobtainable masterpieces,” says Rialto’s Goldstein. “But it was Godard’s Contempt, photographed in gorgeous color and CinemaScope, that was my real impetus for starting the company. Contempt had no U.S. distribution in 1996, so the only way I could strike a sparkling new 35mm print was to get the theatrical rights myself. We backed it up with a fresh new marketing campaign, a new English translation and new subtitles, a brand new trailer — in other words, releasing it exactly as we would a new movie. And that’s how we’ve done every one of our releases since. In our 25 years, we’ve re-released nearly 100 international classics and now represent the StudioCanal catalogue, one of the world’s largest film libraries.”

The series kicks off February 26th with Jules Dassin’s 1955 thriller Rififi which set new standards for all heist films to follow. In March, the matinees will feature Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1951 visionary The Tales of Hoffmann, based on the 1881 opéra fantastique by Jacques Offenbach; Roman Polanski’s Academy award-winning 2002 biopic The Pianist about celebrated Polish composer and pianist Władysław Szpilman, a role that won Adrien Brody an Oscar; and Carol Reed’s 1949 noir The Third Man written by Graham Greene and starring Orson Welles.

In April, the Cinema will screen two films from Jean Renoir: The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936) which François Truffaut called “the richest in miracles of camera work, the most full of pure beauty and truth…a film touched by divine grace”; and WWI film The Grand Illusion (1937), the first foreign language film ever nominated for a best picture Academy Award and one of the most celebrated antiwar films of all time, called “Cinema Enemy No. 1” by Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany, who had prints of the film seized when the Germans occupied France during WWII.

The matinees will also include John Schlesinger’s 1963 British New Wave comedy Billy Liar starring Tom Courtenay as Billy and Julie Christie as one of his three girlfriends. Finally, the series will close out on April 16th with one of Rialto’s latest restoration, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1961 New Wave take on Hollywood musicals A Woman is a Woman starring Anna Karina as a dancer who desperately wants to have a baby with her unenthusiastic boyfriend.

Wednesday Matinees of Rialto Pictures’ Restorations of Classic Films is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The series will run from February 26th-April 16th, with one of the eight films screening every Wednesday.