French Films, Film Noir, and Rubber Returns: Your Weekly Movie To-Do List

Thursday

The 15th edition of French film showcase City of Lights, City of Angels, aka ColCoa, wraps up on Monday. Highlights from the back end of the festival include West Coast premieres of new films by Bertrand Blier (The Clink of Ice, Thursday, 8:30 p.m.), Benoît Jacquot (Deep in the Woods, Saturday, 2:45 p.m.) and Catherine Breillat (The Sleeping Beauty, Saturday, 10:15 p.m.), and the Los Angeles premiere of Marc Fitoussi's Copacabana (Saturday, 5 p.m.), starring Isabelle Huppert.

The Festival of Film Noir is, as always, an embarrassment of riches, but if you can only make it out to one night, you certainly could do worse than Thursday's double feature of Caught and Beware, My Lovely (Egyptian Theatre, 7:30 p.m.), with a double helping of Robert Ryan, plus Max Ophuls, James Mason and Ida Lupino.

Friday

The UCLA Film and Television Archive kicks off its Patricio Guzmán retrospective in fine fashion with his latest film, Nostalgia for the Light (7:30 p.m.; it also opens on April 22 at the Nuart for a one-week run). If a better documentary opens theatrically in Los Angeles this year I'll eat my shoe.

Following a week off Los Angeles screens, Rubber, Quentin Dupieux's sunbaked existentialist horror-comedy cum goofball essay on spectatorship returns for a one-week run at the Downtown Independent.

Sunday

Sunday through Tuesday the New Beverly Cinema offers up an object lesson in contrasting notions of surface in the cinema via two classics of high Hollywood — both with Maurice Chevalier — in Vincente Minnelli's Gigi and Billy Wilder's Love in the Afternoon.

Following the inclusion of his Market Street in February's "New Urban Observations" show, experimental dynamo Tomonari Nishikawa returns to Los Angeles FilmForum for an evening dedicated to his peculiar brand of spatio-temporal condensation, featuring 13 Los Angeles premieres (Spielberg Theater at the Egyptian, 7:30 p.m.).