Emotionally heartbreaking and deceptively simple, the films of director Vittorio De Sica have come to be the most universally loved and most emblematic of the hugely influential Italian film movement known as neorealismo or neorealism. DeSica was a dashingly handsome, talented, and enormously popular leading actor, particularly for his work in the lighthearted Italian “white telephone” romantic comedies of the 1930s. Like many of his film industry colleagues, the many injustices that arose out of the devastation of fascism and World War II brought De Sica’s conscience to an entirely different level, and he turned to directing in order to expose the problems of society.

Because of destroyed studio space, the neorealist films made the most out of actual Italian locations, and almost exclusively utilized nonprofessional actors. Often through humorous observation, De Sica captured his performers at their naturalistic best. His completed works of art spoke so movingly and urgently of a troubled population that they almost simultaneously found devoted audiences all over the world. On each Thursday in June, we’ll bring you one of De Sica’s most important masterworks, all written or co-written by the director’s most important collaborator, scenarist Cesare Zavattini.

Shot in the days immediately following Italy’s liberation from fascism, Shoeshine (June 4) details the friendship of two homeless boys who make their living shining shoes for American GIs. Perhaps the most important and devastating of all neorealist films, The Bicycle Thief (June 11), in which a poster hanger and his adorable son search the streets of Rome for the stolen bicycle that is essential to their survival, is quite simply unforgettable.

As shattering as The Bicycle Thief in its own way, Umberto D (June 18) tells the story of a retired bureaucrat who finds himself broke and homeless on the heartless streets of Rome with his little dog, Flike. Nonprofessional actor Carlo Battisti, a real-life Florentine professor, is a revelation as the title character, as is his animal companion. A later and unjustly neglected De Sica-Zavattini gem is The Roof (June 25), the heartwarming story of poor newlyweds who search for a home in crowded postwar Rome. The filmmakers deliver another memorable finale in which the protagonists race against time to finish construction on a squatter’s shack. It is impossible not to be moved by these masterfully told works.

While legendary movie star James Stewart is probably better known for the three films he made with director Frank Capra, and the four he appeared in for Alfred Hitchcock, Stewart enjoyed an equally fruitful collaboration with the enormously talented yet frequently neglected Anthony Mann. They worked on eight features altogether, but it is their quintet of Westerns made in the first half of the 1950s that helped redefine Stewart’s image, and provided the basis for Mann’s considerable reputation among film critics, first in Europe, then domestically. Box office successes all, these Westerns have been celebrated for their gorgeous location cinematography, supercharged action sequences, and a willingness to explore adult themes and psychological complexities, as evidenced by the five different variations Stewart offers on a neurotic, vengeance-obsessed hero.

In their groundbreaking collaboration Winchester ’73 (June 2), Stewart plays what seems to be an overly driven man tracking down a murderous criminal who stole his prized rifle. When the villain’s identity and victims are ultimately revealed, the viewer is forced to seriously reconsider the hero’s quest. In the follow-up Bend of the River (June 9), only a few actions separate Stewart’s protagonist from Arthur Kennedy’s charming antagonist. Both men have similar violent pasts as they square off in a plot involving vigilante lynchings and the rescue of beleaguered Oregon settlers.

The Naked Spur (June 16) features Stewart as an unhinged man determined to bring back his lost home by using the reward he’ll receive from bringing in a wanted killer (Robert Ryan). The hero’s actions are determined by his past and a blinding desire to return to how things once were. His angry, destructive behavior toward the villain only serves to underline how little difference there is between the bounty hunter and his bounty. Unlike the others, The Far Country (June 23) doesn’t feature the typical Mann-Stewart antagonist who represents Stewart’s alter ego. While Stewart’s character does have a shady history, his opposite is a thoroughly rotten Judge Roy Bean type and cattle thief played wonderfully by John McIntire.

The final film in the series, and the first to be filmed in widescreen CinemaScope™, is The Man From Laramie (June 30). Stewart seeks revenge on the men responsible for his brother’s death, but he does so without a sense of guilt and with a clear, moral purpose. Mann saves the complex psychological dilemmas for the villains: a corrupt and powerful land baron (Donald Crisp) and his two sons (Alex Nicol and Arthur Kennedy). As fresh and exciting as when they were first produced, don’t miss your chance to see these five masterpieces of pop cinema in new 35mm prints on the big screen.

Long before the days of dance-based reality television, Americans flocked to movie theaters to enjoy the effortless showmanship and romantic chemistry of dapper terpsichorean Fred Astaire and fleet-of-foot, golden-haired ingénue Ginger Rogers. Discover or re-discover them for yourself when we present four of their very best collaborations, each in archival 35mm prints, on consecutive Thursdays in May.

The Gay Divorcee (May 7) was the first film to feature the pair with equal billing. Rogers plays a woman desperate for a divorce, while Astaire is an American dancer visiting England. The two meet cute in a train station, setting in motion a comedy of errors with great songs like Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” and “The Continental.”

“They’re Dancing Cheek-to-Cheek Again!” reads the tagline for Astaire and Rogers’ Top Hat (May 14). Astaire plays another American showman abroad, and Rogers is a neighbor angrily awakened by his late-night hoofing. Top Hat presented the world with “The Piccolino,” an elaborate dance routine famously filmed by director Mark Sandrich in just one take.

Follow The Fleet(May 21) was Sandrich’s third Astaire-Rogers production. Astaire plays a preternaturally gifted dancing sailor who attempts to win back his lady love and former dance partner (Rogers) while on shore leave in San Francisco. Fleet features great Irving Berlin compositions like “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.”

Swing Time (May 28) was their sixth filmic pairing, and is widely considered the best of the ten films they made together. Astaire plays a gambling addicted hoofer torn between two lovers, including Rogers as comely dance instructor Penny Carroll. Jerome Kerns and Dorothy Fields won an Oscar® for the film’s song “The Way You Look Tonight.”

–Dinah Holtzman, Assistant Film Programmer, Motion Picture Department

In 1985, fifth-generation Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou chose the luminous Gong Li, then a Beijing-based drama student, to play the female protagonist in his directorial debut Red Sorghum, thus beginning a decade of personal and professional collaboration. Although he was married when he cast her, they embarked on an affair that produced seven critically acclaimed films, four of which will screen on Tuesdays in May.

In Raise the Red Lantern (May 5), Gong plays a student forced into an arranged marriage with a polygamist businessman. She becomes the fourth wife, and inhabits a compound with her co-wives. While the script passed muster with Chinese censors, it was ultimately banned since it was read as a critique of Communism.

The Story of Qiu Ju (May 19) is Zhang’s first film set in contemporary China. The heroine is a pregnant peasant who sets out on several arduous journeys to appeal to bureaucratic authorities for recompense and an apology from a village chieftain. If Chinese censors were suspicious of Zhang’s spurious political intentions in earlier films, they wholeheartedly supported Qiu Ju’s representation of polite, helpful bureaucrats.

To Live (May 12) traces the changing fortunes of the gentry during China’s transition from Nationalism to the Cultural Revolution. The film weighs the benefits and drawbacks of socialism via Xu, a pragmatic everyman, whose political affinities are malleable and opportunistic.

The couple parted ways, both personally and professionally, shortly before the 1995 release of Shanghai Triad (May 26). Set in a city dominated by criminal gangs, it features Gong as a nightclub chanteuse and mistress to an eminent criminal boss.

–Dinah Holtzman, Assistant Film Programmer, Motion Picture Department

Get ready to blast off on a two-month, 18-film intergalactic cinematic journey! We’ve compiled a terrific sci-fi survey of films that date from the “golden age” of the 1950s through the early part of the 2000s focusing on space travel, starships, and otherworldly beings, both of the friendly and the zap-you-with-their-rayguns variety. The visual and intellectual imaginations on display will stimulate your senses and beam you into another world.

In honor of the release of the newly revamped Star Trek movie, we begin with what is widely considered the most entertaining of the feature vehicles containing the original Starship Enterprise crew, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Also recently brought up to date (and not necessarily for the better) is the sci-fi standby The Day the Earth Stood Still, which shows in its still-terrific 1951 version.

While many of the films ask to be taken seriously, humor is nonetheless plentiful throughout the series. Camp moments abound when Jane Fonda travels to strange new worlds in the Euro superproduction Barbarella; a very smart sense of satire informs John Carpenter’s first feature, Dark Star; and Mars Attacks! is an out-and-out parody of the genre, right down to the giant-brained aliens modeled directly on the creatures from the classic This Island Earth, which also screens.

Some of the other genre milestones in this lineup include MGM’s Forbidden Planet, which retells Shakespeare’s The Tempest on planet Altair IV; It Came from Outer Space, showing in eye-popping 3-D; and Howard Hawks’s original production of The Thing (From Another World). The great contributions of fantasy film legend George Pal are seen in a double bill of War of the Worlds and Conquest of Space; and a double feature of Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and 20 Million Miles to Earth spotlights the innovative and influential stop-motion special effects of the great Ray Harryhausen.

Another twin bill, this time from Japan, shows what happens when visitors from other planets mess with Tokyo’s biggest movie star in Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah and Godzilla 2000. There’s also a double dose of “spaghetti sci-fi” when we pair Italian director Mario Bava’s atmospheric and chilling horror/sci-fi hybrid Planet of the Vampires with the sublimely ridiculous War of the Planets. The series concludes with a favorite from the first days of video arcade games, Nick Castle’s The Last Starfighter.