Bryan Miller
The American Cinematheque will once again plumb the depths of the human experience with the fourth annual Bleak Week: The Cinema of Despair. And this year—perhaps fittingly for 2025—Bleak Week will expand nationwide, playing at 10 venues across seven cities. They’ll also be exporting the sadness internationally in a series of screenings in London, because you can’t tariff misery (yet).
L.A. remains the hub of Bleak Week’s glorious despondency, with 55 films from 20 different countries showing in three different theaters, the Aero, Egyptian, and Los Feliz 3, including filmmaker interviews and special guests at several of the screenings beginning June 1. The expansion will continue throughout the month of June, with the Music Box Theater in Chicago June 1-7; from June 6-12 at the Hollywood Theater in Portland, OR and the Trylon in Minneapolis; June 8-14 at the Paris Theater in New York, the Coolidge Corner Theater in Boston, and the Texas Theater in Dallas; and then wrap up June 15-21 at the Prince Charles Cinema in London.
Forget about the comfort movies you’ve fallen asleep to a dozen times; these are extreme discomfort movies, not crowd-pleasers but audience-obliterators. But the Bleak Week lineup reveals the many dark colors in the spectrum of despair, from psychological devastation to physical depravity to black-humored grins into the abyss. The American Cinematheque organizers describe it as “the cinema of despair in pursuit of unpleasant truths and raw empathy,” which is an essential distinction. Empathy is the engine that powers these films, in all their outrage and fury, even as its the quality lacking in the most repugnant characters and circumstances the films depict.
Several filmmakers are represented multiple times across the Bleak Week lineup, many of them no surprise to fans of a good feel-bad movie. Brady Corbet is appears three times, twice as a director (The Childhood Of A Leader, Vox Lux) and once as an actor in Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his own Funny Games. Haneke, perhaps the king of cinematic despair, is also featured multiple times in the lineup, as are Claire Denis, Yorgos Lanthimos, Denis Villenueve, and, for more sardonic takes on existential angst, Todd Solondz and the Coen Brothers. And the series at the Prince Charles Theater doubles down on the Great British misery with locally resonant fare like Trainspotting, Get Carter, Naked, and Threads.
The full lineup at all participating venues is available here. Below is a sampling of films featured this year.
Come and See
For my money, Come and See is the greatest anti-war film ever made, one that captures both the existential catastrophe of war as well as its visceral depravities. The fact that it’s so hauntingly beautiful only renders it all the more devastating. Russian filmmaker Elem Klimov, working from a 1971 novel by one of his countrymen as well as a collection of real survivor narratives, spent eight years fighting government censors to get this film finished and released. He never made another movie, later claiming that he’d already said all he had to say with cinema. After a viewing of Come and See, you’ll understand what he meant.
Come and See will screen at the Trylon in Minneapolis; the Paris Theater in New York City; the Texas Theater in Dallas; and the Aero Theater in Los Angeles.
The Sweet Hereafter
Atom Egoyan adapts Russell Banks’ gut-punch of a novel about a community devastated by a school bus accident that kills more than a dozen children. Ian Holm stars as a lawyer dealing with the tragedy of his own estranged daughter’s drug abuse when he comes to town trying to convince the survivors to file a class-action lawsuit, but in the process even more harrowing details of the townspeople’s lives before the accident are revealed. The Sweet Hereafter is a quiet, still tragedy could risk tipping into black-comedy with just a hint of melodrama or one more agonizing subplot, but, rest assured, there’s nary a laugh to be had here in one of the most grief-sodden films of the ‘90s. The image of the bus poised over the frozen lake just before it breaks through is one you won’t forget, even though you’ll probably try.
The Sweet Hereafter will screen at the Los Feliz 3 in Los Angeles; the Trylon in Minneapolis; and the Paris Theater in New York City.
Happiness
Happiness was a prominent provocation upon its initial theatrical release and video-store run, a must-see for ‘90s indie heads that has fallen into a bit of a cultural memory hole. But bleak Week is here to change that. Todd Solondz doubles down in his follow-up to Welcome To the Dollhouse with this demented family dramedy that’s the transgressive social satire American Beauty thought it was. The tapestry of characters in extremis include Philip Seymour Hoffman as a lovelorn obscene phone caller and Dylan Baker as a pedophile trying to awkwardly explain to son why he never victimized any family members.
Happiness will screen at the Paris Theater in New York City; The Coolidge Corner Theater in Boston; and the Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles.
Scarlet Street
Bleakness is an essential component of all film noir, but Scarlet Street has to be one of the most emotionally devastating examples of the genre. Edward G. Robinson gives one of his all-time best performances as a lonely office clerk who harbors secret dreams of being a great painter. He crosses paths with a classic fatale, played by Joan Bennett, who, in a tragic bit of miscommunication, mistakes the hobbyist painter for a wealthy, well-regarded artist When she and her boyfriend try to run a con on him, they pull a sad man with stunted ambitions into a criminal underworld beyond his comprehension.
Scarlet Street will screen at the Paris Theater in New York City.
The Wages Of Fear and Sorcerer
The film so not-nice they made it twice, first in 1953 as the slow-burn fable about greed and desperation, The Wages of Fear, in the vein of Frank Norris’ classic McTeague (though it’s actually based on a 1950 novel by George Arnaud). Then William Friedkin remade it in 1977 as Sorcerer, a kind of noir-inflected adventure film. In both versions, an uneasy group of down-on-their-luck expatriates from different countries are recruited for a probable suicide mission in which they drive truckloads of volatile explosives through rough terrain in the hopes of a major payout for helping a fossil-fuel company staunch an enormous fire in one of their oil wells. Though similar in plot, both versions stand apart as unique in their execution. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 original is more of a slow-burn thriller with a jaw-dropper of an ending in which black pools of suffocating crude oil become a literalization of the abyss the characters have plunged themselves into. Friedkin’s riff features some of the most dangerous and dizzying on-location filmmaking of all time, including a scene of a truck crossing a rickety rope bridge that still seems impossible today.
The Wages of Fear will screen at the Music Box Theater in Chicago; Sorcerer will screen at the Prince Charles Theater in London.
