The American Cinematheque seems to have made a New Year’s resolution — to do its name full justice. Through February 8, L.A.’s 26-year-old revival and special-screening organization is presenting one of the most ambitious film series it has curated since taking up permanent residence at Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre in December 1998. Called simply “Overlooked and Underrated,” the series culls nearly three dozen feature films dating from as early as 1938 to as recently as 1981, united only in their relative obscurity and (with a handful of exceptions) their unavailability on DVD. It is, to my mind, a program that cuts to the very fiber of what an organization called the American Cinematheque should be doing — namely, giving moviegoers a chance to see movies that deserve to be seen and which are virtually impossible to see by any other means. It’s also a necessary corrective to a video-retail industry that has duped consumers into believing that “everything” is available on those shiny little discs, and a direct challenge to the studios’ home-video divisions, whose decisions about what (and what not) to release can seem absurd bordering on the perverse. (Consider, for example, the strange case of the five classic Columbia Pictures Westerns directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott, three of which surface in the Cinematheque series, all of which have been beautifully restored by the studio in recent years, and not a one of which has yet... More >>>