Jim Jarmusch’s tough-as-nails ‘Ghost Dog,’ plus the week’s best films

Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.

We toss around a lot of talk about film formats around here — this is showing in 70mm, that will be showing in 4K, etc. — a conversation that is about to get even louder as “The Odyssey” approaches.

Which makes it extra fun that the New Beverly Cinema is going to be showing Paul Thomas Anderson’s best-picture-winning “One Battle After Another” later this week in a new 35mm print. Wait, you might be saying to yourself, didn’t that movie just come out? And you would be correct.

Though it was shot in VistaVision and a limited number of theaters could show the film in either that format or 70mm, there actually weren’t any 35mm screenings. So this is a rare chance to knock one more format off your punch card. It’s just such a thrill that local film lovers get to drill down this far into their own nerdiness, obsession and sense of completism.

Is it really a different experience in the different formats? Your mileage may vary, but there’s fun finding out.

More Michael Mann

Even as audiences eagerly await his long-promised “Heat 2,” Michael Mann continues his recent run of appearances around town with his older films, providing rousing events for local audiences.

On Friday, Mann will be at the Academy Museum to unveil the world premiere of what is being billed as “Michael Mann’s Manhunter: The Final Cut,” a new 4K restoration of his 1986 thriller. Mann’s third feature, this is where his filmmaking took on a true supercharge, leaping ahead in style and intensity.

An adaptation of the novel by “The Silence of the Lambs” author Thomas Harris, the film follows a retired FBI serial-killer profiler (William Petersen), who, in attempting to stop a new murderer (Tom Noonan), must reengage with his nemesis, Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox).

The movie will also open in theaters on July 24. Reviewing the original release, Sheila Benson called it “ferocious … a dark locomotive of a film, roaring straight ahead, dragging its audience with it.”

The revenge of the misfits

Though 2000’s “American Psycho” is the film for which director Mary Harron is best known, that’s because her debut fiction feature, 1996’s “I Shot Andy Warhol,” has been largely out of circulation for years. With the murky rights issues that have befallen many ’90s indies cleared up, the film is ready to be rediscovered by a new generation.

“When movie history gets written, if people aren’t seeing things, then you’re written out,” says Harron, 73, during a recent call from her apartment in Brooklyn. Among the producers on the film is Christine Vachon, who just this week was announced as an upcoming recipient of the academy’s prestigous Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. The restored “I Shot Andy Warhol” will be playing locally at the Nuart Theatre.

The film stars Lili Taylor in a persuasive performance as Valerie Solanis, the woman best known for the 1968 incident in which she shot and severely wounded artist Andy Warhol. Without excusing her actions, Harron’s film explores Solanis’ place as a misfit even within the outsider world of the 1960s NYC underground art scene.

Depicting her friendship with the trans actress Candy Darling (a sensitive turn by Stephen Dorff), the story portrays how Solanis came to write her notorious SCUM Manifesto (an acronym for the Society for Cutting Up Men) and the spiral of rejection that led to her desperate act of violence.

New, younger audiences may better respond to the film’s depiction of gender and identity. When “I Shot Andy Warhol” was originally released, the conversation largely focused on Warhol and the scene around the Factory.

“Symbolically, that was such an apt pairing, two outsiders: Valerie, who dressed like a boy and had this rebelliousness about gender, and then Candy, who was also trying to rebel but in a very feminine way,” says Harron. “They both were trying to defy the future that had been mapped out for them.”

The project has its roots in London, where Harris was living. One day she saw Solanis’ “SCUM Manifesto” in the window of a bookstore and bought a copy, reading it voraciously.

“It was just like a lightning bolt,” the filmmaker says. “It affected me so profoundly. I so wanted to direct but just couldn’t see a way to get the chance. And I was in my 30s, and I felt like, oh, my life is slipping away. And I think it just hit both my feelings about sexism in society and my own frustration. Her analysis was so devastating of how women behave, how men behave. And I thought, OK, this woman’s a genius. Everyone said she was just a crazy person. And I’m going to tell her story somehow.”

Tearing down Hollywood

The pairing of director David Cronenberg and writer Bruce Wagner resulted in a truly demented portrait of Hollywood, the 2014 movie “Maps to the Stars,” starring Robert Pattinson as a limo driver, Julianne Moore as a fading actress and Mia Wasikowska as a young woman hoping to have revenge on the whole city. A bizarro cousin to “Mullholland Drive,” the movie has a strange, singular energy all its own.

“Maps” will play on Sunday at Brain Dead Studios co-presented by Mezzanine and the local literary magazine “The Big One.” Wagner will be there in person to introduce the film.

In a 2014 profile by The Times’ Jeffrey Fleishman, Wagner spoke his frequent use of Los Angeles as a psycho-geography of anxiety, insecurity and general bad vibes. “Hollywood is a laboratory for need and vanity,” he offered. “The knives are always out, and I’m often holding them.”

A return to a lost New York

One of the rediscoveries of the year is Philip Hartman’s 1986 “No Picnic.” Something of a post-punk neo-noir, the story is about a failed NYC musician turned jukebox serviceman (David Brisbin) in search of a woman he glimpses in a photograph. But the film is really a tour of a pre-gentrified East Village, full of low-key bars and cafes, run-down apartments, eccentrics and struggling artists. The film features small roles from musician Richard Hell and then-unknown actors Steve Buscemi and Luis Guzmán.

Director Hartman co-owned NYC’s venerable Great Jones Cafe — the famous bust of Elvis makes an appearance in the film — and would go on to co-found the still-going Two Boots Pizzeria. He made himself an undeniable part of the lore of the city his film celebrated. The movie has become an unexpected juggernaut at New York’s Film Forum, held over week after week. It will be getting a single screening at the American Cinematheque’s Los Feliz Theater on Saturday night. Don’t miss it.

A groundbreaking road trip

Groundbreaking for its depiction of trans and butch characters, the 2001 film “By Hook or By Crook” is an engaging buddy-comedy road picture about two outcasts (played by writer-directors Silas Howard and Harry Dodge) who meet each other and try to find their way through the world. Joan Jett makes a memorable cameo.

Howard, Dodge and producer Steak House will all be there for a 25th anniversary screening at Vidiots on Tuesday, moderated by “The People’s Joker” filmmaker Vera Drew. In a statement, Dodge explained the film’s sustained relevance: “By making something nuanced from the inside, by refusing to oversimplify for expediency, the film manages to create different positive ways to talk about self-representation and signification in mass media, and to question (with nuance) monolithic notions of queer identity, reminding us that people experience identity in thousands of very personal, very particular, often philosophical ways.”

A Jim Jarmusch Sunday

Jim Jarmusch is one of our favorite filmmakers around here, in part because his movies are so richly rewarding on a rewatch. One that I initially underestimated but have since come to adore is 1999’s “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai,” starring Forest Whitaker and a wrecking crew of gangster-film character actors in a story of an enigmatic hitman.

Vidiots will be showing the movie on Sunday in conjunction with Synth History as part of its “Iconic Score” series. The film marked the first time that RZA from Wu-Tang Clan scored a film, and the music mixes crime-jazz allure, spaghetti Western drama and hip-hop beats for a truly unique sound.

Elsewhere, Jarmusch’s “Down by Law,” starring Tom Waits, Roberto Benigni and Ellen Barkin, will be showing in 35mm at the American Cinematheque’s Los Feliz Theater on Sunday afternoon. The timing should work out to get from one theater to the other for anyone so inclined.

New this week

One last thing…

I am also co-host of the awards podcast “The Envelope,” and though it is the thick of Emmys season (and technically TV-related), I would still like to share with you, my film-loving friends, our latest episode featuring an interview with Riz Ahmed. He created and stars in the series “Bait,” about the complications that arise when a little-known South Asian actor auditions to play James Bond.

It is a particularly lively conversation, touching on a range of topics. Ahmed is unusually sharp regarding the industry and his evolving place in it. As he says at one point, “This is where it becomes a full-blown therapy session. I would say that there was a period of time when I was just really desperate to be in the room. And now I’m in a place where I’m really excited to try and build my own room.”