RENT CONTROL

Before he was hitching up Harold and Maude, director Hal Ashby used the gentrification of the once-stroller-less, decidedly-not-vegan, predominantly black neighborhood of Park Slope as a vehicle to frankly address race relations in the early ’70s in The Landlord. Beau Bridges stars as the rich and innocent-looking Elgar, a typical Ashby protagonist who foreshadows the serially suicidal Harold. Smothered by a family “of wealth”—which is to say, the kind that dresses for dinner and speaks with a slight Hepburn-esque inflection—Elgar decides to buy and renovate a slum but becomes far more involved in the lives of his tenants than he ever imagined. Catch this rare masterpiece tonight as part of the “Brooklyn Close-Up” series.

Mon., Aug. 27, 4:30, 6:50 & 9:15 p.m., 2012