Pickpocket [NTSC]

A film of dazzling originality, “Pickpocket” has exercised an enormous influence on directors as disparate as Fassbinder, Akerman, Scorsese, Aki Kaurismaki, Malle (who called it ‘one of four or five great dates in the history of cinema’), and Schrader (who pronounced it ‘an unmitigated masterpiece’ and lifted its ending for the denouement of his own “American Gigolo”). Loosely based on Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”, Bresson’s intense portrait of a compulsive pickpocket who believes himself above the moral constraints of common humanity, turns the mechanics of theft into a ritual both erotically and spiritually charged. The “ballets of thievery”, as Cocteau called them, are among the most beautifully choreographed and edited sequences in cinema. Cast: Martin Lasalle, Marika Green, Pierre Leymarie, Pierre Etaix. In French with English subtitles.