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      In New York, Masks Will Not Be Required at the Opera or Ballet

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      Many arts groups, worried about alienating older patrons, have maintained strict rules. Now “the time has come to move on,” one leader said.Masks are no longer required in New York City schools, gyms, taxis and most theaters. But a night at the opera or the ballet still involves putting on a proper face covering.That will soon change. Several of the city’s leading performing arts organizations — including the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic and New York City Ballet — announced on Monday that masks would now be optional, citing demands from audience members and a recent decline in coronavirus cases.“The time has come to move on,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in an interview.The Met, Carnegie Hall and the Philharmonic will end mask requirements on Oct. 24, along with Film at Lincoln Center and the Juilliard School. The David H. Koch Theater, home to City Ballet, will follow on Nov. 1. Two venues on the Lincoln Center campus, the Mitzi E. Newhouse and Claire Tow theaters, will maintain their mandates.The decision is a milestone for classical, dance and opera institutions, which had been among the most resistant to relaxing mask rules — wary of alienating older patrons, who represent a large share of ticket buyers. As coronavirus infections have declined and masks have vanished from many other settings, arts groups are feeling pressure from audiences to make a change.At the Met, for example, only about a quarter of ticket buyers said in a survey last month that they would feel uncomfortable attending a performance if masks were optional. Over the summer, that number had been close to 70 percent.“People’s attitudes are changing,” Gelb said. He hoped that relaxing the rules would help make the Met more accessible to “younger audiences who really don’t want to wear a mask.” With the elimination of the mandate, the company will also reopen its bars, many of which have remained closed during the pandemic.Proof of vaccination, as well as masks, were required to gain entry to many venues starting last year, when arts organizations returned to the stage after a long shutdown. Over the summer, however, as hospitalizations and deaths declined, many groups began to ease their rules. Broadway theaters (with a few exceptions) dropped the vaccine requirement on May 1, and the mask mandate on July 1.While most classical, opera and dance groups eliminated the vaccine requirement this fall, many kept in place strict mask mandates on the advice of medical advisers. The question of masks posed a challenge for many groups; they risked alienating some ticket buyers, no matter how they proceeded.At the Met, stage managers have delivered announcements from the stage before each performance reminding audiences to keep masks on for the duration of opera. At Carnegie Hall, ushers have checked each row and called out people who were not wearing masks.Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said that the hall kept mask rules in place this fall because of lingering concerns about the virus among some medical advisers and audience members. But it decided to make a change after medical advisers said it could operate safely without masks, and after complaints from the audience were growing.“Ushers were finding it actually quite difficult because a lot of people were very annoyed having to still wear masks when in most of their lives they’re no longer doing so,” Gillinson said in an interview.By eliminating the mask rules, arts leaders hope they can help restore a sense of normalcy at a time when many groups are struggling to recover from the turmoil of the pandemic. While live performance is flourishing once again in New York and across the United States, audiences have been slow to return.Deborah Borda, the president and chief executive of the Philharmonic, said in an interview that the mask rules could change if the virus emerged as a deadly threat once again.“This is an ever-evolving situation,” she said. “We will stay on top of whatever the current medical protocol dictates.”But for now, she said, it is time to change focus.“We feel it’s important that we do our part to help the city return to a much more normal state of affairs,” she said, “and to encourage people to come back into the city and to reinvigorate the economy.” More

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      Joanne Koch, Who Led Lincoln Center’s Film Society, Dies at 92

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      A lifelong film lover, she stood up to protesters, and to federal and church authorities, to bring challenging movies to the masses.Joanne Koch, the longtime head of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, who stared down picketers and, at times, government and church authorities to present controversial works by the likes of Godard, Scorsese and Oshima while presiding over the New York Film Festival, and who oversaw the creation of the center’s own temple for cineastes, the Walter Reade Theater, died on Aug. 16 at her apartment in Manhattan. She was 92.Her daughter, Andrea Godbout, said the cause was aortic stenosis.A lifelong defender of artistic freedom, the Brooklyn-born Ms. Koch (pronounced “coke”) served as the Film Society’s executive director over more than a quarter-century of change and growth, starting in 1977. (She was not related to David H. Koch, the oil magnate whose name adorns the ballet theater at Lincoln Center).In 1973, she helped create the film festival’s New Directors/New Films series, which showcases the work of emerging directors and has included the work of Spike Lee, Pedro Almodóvar and Wim Wenders. She also helped produce 19 of the society’s celebrity-studded gala tributes to film luminaries including Fred Astaire, Laurence Olivier and Audrey Hepburn, as well as spearheading the acquisition in 1974 of the influential critical journal Film Comment, where she served as publisher.As the society’s chief financial officer, she helped raise funds and coordinate the design for the Walter Reade Theater, which opened in the center’s Rose Building in 1991 as a sanctuary for independent and foreign films at a time when the VHS revolution was imperiling many repertory film houses.Ms. Koch, center, with Wendy Keys and Richard Peña of the Film Society of Lincoln Center in the Walter Reade Theater. Ms. Koch oversaw the creation of the theater, which opened in 1991.courtesy Film at Lincoln Center“Her passion was always to build new audiences for films and provide them superior venues for moviegoing,” said Wendy Keys, a board member and former executive producer of programming for Film at Lincoln Center, as the society is now known. “She wasn’t just a dollars-and-cents person. She was driven by her great love of film.”Her most visible role, however, was managing the prestigious New York Film Festival. At a time when competing film festivals in North America were exploding, she helped it maintain its international prominence — and its strictly curated format.“We would fight like cats and dogs over every film we showed,” Ms. Keys, a former member of the selection committee, said in a phone interview. “We always considered ourselves to be presenting each of our 25 films on a velvet cushion, as opposed to showing more than 350 films, which is what a lot of other festivals do.”Sometimes those decisions came at considerable risk. For example, Ms. Koch and the rest of the society found themselves in a face-off with federal authorities in 1976 when the festival scheduled the North American premiere of Nagisa Oshima’s “In The Realm of the Senses,” an unflinchingly graphic tale of sexual obsession set in Tokyo in 1936. (“‘Senses’ does not show anything that has not been available in hard-core porn houses around Manhattan,” Richard Eder of The New York Times wrote in 1977.)That notorious film created a buzz in New York cultural circles, Ms. Keys recalled, with notables like John Lennon and Yoko Ono scheduled to attend the premiere at Alice Tully Hall. But then federal customs and Treasury officials, after seeing the film at a press screening, threatened seizure and legal action if the film society showed it.The film was cleared in court, and Ms. Koch invited the original audience, which had been turned away, to a screening at the Museum of Modern Art a few months later. “She thought that nothing should be avoided, whether it was too violent or explicitly sexual or anti-religious,” Ms. Keys said. “That was very deep to her core. She was a provocateur.”The firestorm was far greater in 1985, when the festival scheduled a premiere of “Hail Mary,” a film by Jean-Luc Godard that imagined the Virgin Mary as a modern-day young woman who worked at a gas station. More than 5,000 protesters, some toting candles, turned out at the screening, according to an essay by the philosopher Stanley Cavell in the 1993 anthology “Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary: Women and the Sacred in Film.” The rector of a seminary in Connecticut warned, “When the bombs fall on Manhattan, one will especially fall on the cinema where this film is being shown.”Ms. Koch in an undated photo with her husband, Richard A. Koch, and the playwright David Mamet. Among her accomplishments at Lincoln Center was helping to create the New Directors/New Films series. courtesy Film at Lincoln Center“The film is not anti-Catholic,” Mr. Cavell quoted Ms. Koch as saying. “We don’t mean to offend — certainly that was not our intent — but we feel strongly that art has to be respected as art.”Picketers again swarmed Lincoln Center for the festival’s premiere of “The Last Temptation of Christ,” Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film portraying Jesus as a man caught in a struggle between the earthly and the divine.Joanne Rose Obermaier was born on Oct. 7, 1929, in Brooklyn, the only child of John Obermaier, an electrical engineer, and Blanche (Ashman) Obermaier, a professor of elementary education at New York University. As a teenager at Midwood High School, she “used to sneak into the Loew’s Kings movie theater on Flatbush Avenue through a side door for matinees,” Ms. Godbout, her daughter, said.She graduated from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vt., with a degree in political science, and in 1950 she took a job in the film department of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, eventually becoming a technical director working on film preservation.In 1949 she married Oscar A. Godbout, a journalist who covered Hollywood for The New York Times in the 1950s and later wrote about the outdoors as the newspaper’s “Wood, Field, and Stream” columnist. The couple divorced in 1967, and later that year she married Richard A. Koch, the director of administration for MoMA.Mr. Koch died in 2009. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by three stepsons, Stephen Jeremy and Chapin Koch, and two grandsons.In 1971, Ms. Koch took a job at the Lincoln Center Film Society, where she ran a program called “Movies in the Parks.” She ascended to the society’s top post six years later.Not all her battles there amounted to artistic crusades. In 1987 she found herself embroiled in a different sort of controversy when she and Alfred Stern, the society’s president, were reported to have led a campaign to oust Richard Roud, a respected cinephile and the longtime director of the festival, in a dispute that erupted after Ms. Koch overruled the festival’s selection committee to include two films by Federico Fellini.“I think Joanne wanted more power,” David Denby, then the film critic for New York magazine and a member of the selection committee, was quoted as saying in The Times. “It became obvious this summer when she started strong-arming the committee on the selections.”Ms. Koch told The Times that the move “had nothing to do with film selection,” but rather involved longstanding administrative differences.Even so, it was a difficult chapter. “It was horrible,” Ms. Koch recalled in a 1992 oral history. “I was put on the cover of The Village Voice as ‘The Terminator.’”But she was unrepentant. “It really did change the way I look at myself professionally,” she said. “Realistically, I’m not such a nice person all the time. You can’t be, in this kind of a job.” More

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      An Avant-Garde Film That Went for Laughs Instead of Scandal

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      Nothing controversial: Adolfas Mekas’s “Hallelujah the Hills,” from 1963, is romantic slapstick, with two guys competing for the same young woman.The early 1960s was the golden age of underground movies. Some, like Jack Smith’s “Flaming Creatures,” provoked scandals. Others were too explicit to be written about (see Barbara Rubin’s “Christmas on Earth”). At least one was a commercial success: Adolfas Mekas’s “Hallelujah the Hills.”“A wild spoof on art movies by a new American director scored a surprise success Saturday at the New York Film Festival,” Eugene Archer reported in the New York Times in 1963, the festival’s first year.Returning to Lincoln Center for three shows, part of a series devoted to the early ’60s avant-garde, “Hallelujah the Hills,” may be the series’s most conventional selection — a feature-length movie with actors, some even professional, and a semblance of plot, shot in crisp black and white by Ed Emshwiller, an underground filmmaker of great technical expertise.The movie is romantic slapstick, set far from the bohemian Lower East Side in sylvan Vermont. Two guys, Jack (the intrepid photographer Peter Beard) and Leo (painter and assemblagist Marty Greenbaum) are infatuated with same young woman, Vera (“a lovely and enigmatic winter sprite” per Archer’s review). She is played by two different actresses (Sheila Finn and Peggy Steffans), both with a marked resemblance to Jean-Luc Godard’s muse Anna Karina. The rivals court Vera in different seasons over the course of seven years — a crisis arises when both show up for Thanksgiving.As its title suggests “Hallelujah” is nothing if not exuberant. Adolfas Mekas, the younger brother of Jonas Mekas and, like him, an immigrant from rural Lithuania, was in his late 20s when he made the movie. Pratfalls and drunken antics abound. Beard gives a particularly athletic performance — at one point bounding bare-assed through deep snow. (With his horn-rimmed glasses, Greenbaum seems more the Woody Allen type.)Jump cuts are common, too. Very much an American homage to the French new wave movie, “Hallelujah” suggests a frothy “Jules and Jim” made in the insouciant style of “Shoot the Piano Player.” Perhaps there was a two-way street. As “Hallelujah” was a hit at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival, reviewed by Godard, it’s not inconceivable that it was an inspiration for his 1964 “Band of Outsiders.”“Hallelujah” is not unduly sappy, although it does demand a tolerance for madrigal jazz (heavy on a tinkly harpsichord) and rampant cinephilia. “I haven’t seen a movie in 10 days,” Leo complains. The rivals play at being Kurosawa samurai. There are nods to not only Godard but the early cinema of Charlie Chaplin, Mack Sennett and W.C. Fields. Late in the movie, Mekas interpolates a celebrated bit of ice floe excitement from D.W. Griffith’s 1920 “Way Down East.” The sequence still works and so, in a more limited way, does “Hallelujah the Hills.”Actually, as fashionable as Mekas’s film once was it has an atavistic quality. Beneath the surface lurks a Lithuanian folk tale about rival princes and a princess (or goddess) linked to the changing seasons. Hallelujah indeed.Hallelujah the HillsJuly 29, Aug. 2 and 3, at Film at Lincoln Center, Manhattan, filmlinc.org. More

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      Events for Fans of Horror Films in New York City

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      For fans of scary movies, three horror series around New York just may keep you up all night.Forget the Bahamas, horror fans. This summer, New York is your paradise.That’s because three of the city’s highbrow cinema presenters are offering ambitious and adventurous horror movie series with scares enough for everyone, from squeamish newbies to hardened connoisseurs.The biggie is “Horror: Messaging the Monstrous,” which runs for a whopping 10 weeks at the Museum of Modern Art. With more than 110 features and short films, the series digs deep into sociopolitical horror cinema, with sections devoted to gender, race, sexuality and additional concerns.The other programs are equally enterprising. Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà, the esteemed Italian film studio, are partnering on “Beware of Dario Argento,” a 20-film retrospective of Argento, the horror movie master best known for “Suspiria.” The director himself will be at select screenings.And the Museum of the Moving Image is hosting “Films of the Dead: Romero & Co.,” an 11-film series dedicated to zombie movies by, and inspired by, the maverick horror filmmaker George A. Romero, who died in 2017. It’s a companion to “Living With ‘The Walking Dead’” (June 25-Jan. 1, 2023), an exhibition about the origins and impact of the AMC series. A second film program, “White Zombies: Nightmares of Empire,” follows in August.Caryn Coleman, a guest curator on the MoMA series, said it should be no surprise that all three organizations are turning to horror to “process the world.”“We’re certainly in a collective moment of turmoil, so it seems right on target for New York to be hosting horror programming as both a tool of discussion and celebration,” she wrote in an email.To make your decision-making less scary, here’s one horror lover’s guide to what to watch.From left, Debra De Liso, Michelle Michaels and Andree Honore in “The Slumber Party Massacre.”New World Pictures‘Horror: Messaging the Monstrous’ (June 23-Sept. 5)Museum of Modern Art, moma.orgThe Guilty Pleasure: ‘The Slumber Party Massacre’ (1982)What happens when a female director (Amy Holden Jones) and a feminist writer (Rita Mae Brown) team up to make a movie about a deranged murderer with a power drill who kills high schoolers on the night of a sleepover? You get this crazed classic from the golden age of slashers, a film that continues to inspire new generations of female horror moviemakers.The Must-See: ‘The Last House on the Left’ (1972)Wes Craven wrote and directed this rape-revenge film about two young women who are brutalized by psychopaths. This one’s a don’t-miss movie only for folks with a strong constitution and a morbid curiosity about a game-changing but troubling exploitation film. Consider this: Howard Thompson, reviewing for The Times, called it “sickening tripe,” and said he walked out before the film ended.The Find: ‘Jack Be Nimble’ (1993)A terrific rediscovery in the series is this horror-fantasy film from New Zealand. Directed by Garth Maxwell, it stars Alexis Arquette and Sarah Smuts-Kennedy as twins who reunite as adults after being separated and raised in broken homes. In his Times review, Stephen Holden called it a “superior” genre film with “hallucinatory power and psychological refinement.”The Throwback: ‘Def by Temptation’ (1990)The writer-director James Bond III stars as a young man who visits New York to see a friend (Kadeem Hardison), but instead falls under the spell of a succubus (Cynthia Bond). A supernatural investigator (Bill Nunn), a medium (Melba Moore) and a preacher (Samuel L. Jackson) all try to keep the evil at bay. For a low-budget horror comedy, the film takes a surprisingly frank look at Black Gen Xers and presents questions of friendship, sex and faith.Jennifer Connelly in “Phenomena.”DAC Film, via AGFA‘Beware of Dario Argento’ (June 17-29)Film at Lincoln Center, filmlinc.orgThe Must-See: ‘Phenomena’ (1985)Argento’s trippy psycho-thriller stars Jennifer Connelly as a young student at a Swiss girls school who discovers she has supernatural powers to control insects. Donald Pleasence is the scientist who helps her use that power to find a killer. The big screen is the best way to experience the film’s spectacular flesh-dissolving bug attack.The Begetter: ‘The Bird With the Crystal Plumage’ (1970)Argento’s directing debut, for which he also wrote the screenplay, is a stylish prototype of Italian giallo. Set in Rome, it’s a thriller about an American writer who gets entangled in a murder mystery after he witnesses a woman stabbed by an intruder inside a gallery. The gore is mild compared to Argento’s later films. But giallo’s visual signatures — plunging razors, menacing lighting, a killer in chic leather — are abundant.The New Kid on the Block: ‘Dark Glasses’ (2022)One of the films I’m excited to see is Argento’s latest, his first movie since the poorly received “Argento’s Dracula 3D.” Ilenia Pastorelli stars as a prostitute who struggles to adjust to a new life after being blinded during her escape from a killer. True to Argento form, the movie looks as sleek as it is deranged.Duane Jones in “Night of the Living Dead.”Janus Films‘Films of the Dead’ (June 25-July 30)Museum of the Moving Image, movingimage.usThe Must-See: ‘Night of the Living Dead’ (1968)When Romero’s black-and-white groundbreaker comes to the big screen, just go. Romero championed the oppressed, and for his first feature film he cast Duane Jones, a Black actor, as the man who protects a group of strangers trapped in a rural Pennsylvania farmhouse under siege by the flesh-chewing undead. Movies that view horror through a social justice lens, especially when it comes to American racism, bow to this one.The Batty Comedy: ‘One Cut of the Dead’ (2017)Shinichiro Ueda’s film is an absurdly gory horror-comedy about a film crew shooting a zombie movie that’s interrupted by actual hungry zombies. Instead of cutting and running, the director forces his cast and crew to keep rolling. What happens next is a meta-marvel of slapstick, butchery and, surprisingly, heart.The Guilty Pleasure: ‘Day of the Dead’ (1985)I have a soft spot for this talky doomsday story, written and directed by Romero. Set in a dystopian future America — one of Romero’s favorite places to visit — it’s about a group of literally underground scientists and soldiers (with fragile egos) who battle the zombies left above ground after an apocalypse. Tom Savini’s gruesome special effects gave me the heebie jeebies back in the day, and still do. More

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      New York’s Movie Theaters, From Art-House to Dine-In

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      New York is the nation’s moviegoing capital, especially for cinephiles who treasure archival prints, experimental cinema and concession stands that go far beyond the standard offerings. Below is a guide to the city’s art houses.Alamo DrafthouseFinancial District, 28 Liberty Street, Suite SC301, Manhattan. Downtown Brooklyn, 445 Albee Square West, Brooklyn. drafthouse.com.This dine-in chain, based in Austin, Texas, has a hip aesthetic and is noted for its brews, queso and screenings of cult classics, in addition to regular showings of new releases. A revived version of Kim’s Video has set up shop within the Manhattan location. A Staten Island theater is scheduled to open this summer.Angelika Film CenterAngelika Film Center, 18 West Houston Street, Manhattan. Cinema 123 by Angelika, 1001 Third Avenue, Manhattan. Village East by Angelika, 181-189 Second Avenue, Manhattan. angelikafilmcenter.com.The original Angelika Film Center is the downtown six-screen theater where you can catch art-house releases, like “Petite Maman” or “Anaïs in Love,” while the subway rattles underneath. The brand name has also been appended to the Village East, whose main auditorium is a gorgeous old Yiddish stage theater. In addition to showing new releases, it hosts “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and periodic revival screenings, and like its uptown sibling, the Cinema 123, it is equipped to show 70-millimeter film.Anthology Film Archives32 Second Avenue, Manhattan; anthologyfilmarchives.org.New York’s polestar of avant-garde film (and the preservation of it) for more than 50 years, Anthology was started by some of experimental cinema’s most important promoters (Jonas Mekas, P. Adams Sitney) and practitioners (Stan Brakhage, Peter Kubelka). In addition to retrospectives, the theater hosts a rotating series, Essential Cinema, that is free with membership; programming includes seminal narrative works by Alexander Dovzhenko and F.W. Murnau and medium-expanding nonnarrative films from Ken Jacobs and Michael Snow.Brooklyn Academy of Music30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn; bam.org.At any given time in the main BAM building in Fort Greene, three out of four screens show new releases, while one holds retrospectives, such as ones on films shot in New York City in the 1990s or others that place David Lynch’s work alongside movies he influenced. Occasional screenings take place at the BAM Harvey Theater a few blocks away.Film at Lincoln CenterElinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th Street, and Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street, Manhattan; filmlinc.org.Lincoln Center’s film arm, the hosting organization of the New York Film Festival, runs a year-round theater with one of the largest screens in town: the Walter Reade. There you can catch adventurous revivals, such as programs on the Hungarian director Marta Meszaros or the Japanese actress-director Kinuyo Tanaka, and contemporary series, like the annual Rendez-Vous With French Cinema. Across the street is the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, which houses two screens and a food-and-wine bar, Indie.Film Forum: Come for the popcorn; stay for the cinematic edification.Photo by Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty ImagesFilm Forum209 West Houston Street, Manhattan; filmforum.org.A New York institution for more than 50 years — it has been at its present location since 1990 and added a fourth screen in 2018 — Film Forum hosts some of the most extensive retrospectives in town, often showing dozens of films from a director or from stars like Toshiro Mifune and Sidney Poitier. Regular attendance constitutes a cinematic education in itself, and the popcorn, to which moviegoers apply sea salt themselves, is a delicacy.French Institute/Alliance FrançaiseFlorence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th Street, Manhattan; fiaf.org.This classy venue with excellent sightlines hosts screenings on Tuesdays. The programming consists of new and vintage films from France, with English subtitles, bien sûr. Series typically have a theme — it might be Wes Anderson selecting favorites by Ophüls and Truffaut or a program of recent French comedies.IFC Center323 Sixth Avenue, Manhattan; ifccenter.com.This Greenwich Village five-screen theater boasts four first-rate auditoriums (and one cubbyhole) and typically shows many more than five movies in a given week, usually with a short beforehand. Shows can start as early as 10 or 11 a.m. and, on the weekends, as late as midnight. The concession stand sells T-shirts that substitute directors’ names for those of heavy metal bands.Japan Society333 East 47th Street, Manhattan; japansociety.org.This theater’s annual Japan Cuts series is probably the largest single showcase of recent Japanese cinema on the New York cinephile’s calendar. For the rest of the year, new movies share screen space with classics, often shown on 35 millimeter.Light Industry361 Stagg Street, Brooklyn; lightindustry.org.This microcinema, which specializes in experimental film and typically holds screenings on Tuesday nights, hosted its final program at its longtime Greenpoint location in April. It will reopen by June on Stagg Street. Past screenings have varied widely; they’ve included early work by William Castle, a four-hour Mexican serial from 1919, Hollis Frampton and Owen Land films on 16-millimeter and a marathon of “Police Squad!” episodes.Maysles Cinema343 Lenox Avenue, Manhattan; maysles.org.This small (about 60 seats) Harlem venue specializes in documentaries — it was founded by the director Albert Maysles, of “Grey Gardens” fame. The programming often places an emphasis on social issues and local artistry.Metrograph7 Ludlow Street, Manhattan; metrograph.com.An ever-changing (and expensive!) selection of international candies, a nook of a bookstore and a high-class restaurant, the Commissary, are among the features of this Lower East Side two-screen venue, which opened in 2016. (Many don’t notice, but it sits across the street from the neglected Loew’s Canal Theater.) The retrospectives, such as a recurring series of the programmers’ favorites, organized alphabetically, have a correspondingly artisanal feel.Museum of Modern Art11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; moma.org.MoMA has been showing movies since the 1930s, when Iris Barry, the museum’s first film curator, helped advance the idea that films should be collected as art. Today the institution’s two main theaters screen films from its own collection and archives around the world (the annual series To Save and Project highlights recent preservation work). Admission to most screenings is free with membership.Museum of the Moving Image36-01 35th Avenue, Queens; movingimage.us.The high ceilings and blue wall padding give a faintly futuristic feel to the 267-seat Redstone Theater, the main auditorium in this museum in Astoria. That works well when a favorite like “2001: A Space Odyssey” is playing on 70 millimeter. More specialized fare sometimes is shown in the Bartos Screening Room down the hall.Nitehawk CinemaProspect Park, 188 Prospect Park West, Brooklyn. Williamsburg, 136 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn. nitehawkcinema.com.These stylish dine-in theaters have several screens that show new releases and perennial favorites (“Carrie,” “Face/Off”) from brunch time to midnight-snack time. Both venues have bars.The Paris Theater, once a destination for French film, is now leased by Netflix.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesParis Theater4 West 58th Street, Manhattan; paristheaternyc.com.Once a go-to destination for French cinema and films with a literary pedigree, the Paris briefly closed in 2019, but then was leased by Netflix, which uses it for theatrical runs of its streaming titles (like Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog”) and older movies intended to complement them. It’s one of the few remaining New York theaters with a balcony.Quad Cinema34 West 13th Street, Manhattan; quadcinema.com.When this Greenwich Village theater opened in 1972, having four screens was unusual. (“A new way to go to the movies,” boasted a New York Times ad on the first day.) It reopened in 2017 after a renovation that gave it bigger, comfier seats for viewing new art-house releases, like “A Hero” or “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.” Plus, there’s an adjoining bar.Roxy Cinema New York2 Sixth Avenue, Manhattan; roxycinematribeca.com.Located in the basement of the Roxy Hotel, this plush red screening room offers a mix of revivals (often on 35-millimeter film) and second-run programming — recent releases that have been in theaters awhile.Spectacle124 South Third Street, Brooklyn; spectacletheater.com.A grungy Williamsburg microcinema started in 2010, Spectacle has a calendar as eclectic as it is inscrutable. There’s horror and martial-arts fare that tends toward the obscure, along with a lot of international titles that never turn up in other New York venues.United Palace4140 Broadway, Manhattan; unitedpalace.org.One of the original Loew’s Wonder Theaters — movie palaces built in the late 1920s, with one in each borough except Staten Island (Jersey City got it instead) — this architectural marvel in Washington Heights is an attraction in itself. It’s now run by an organization that promotes interfaith artistic events, but the theater also hosts concerts and, generally once a month, movie screenings. Lin-Manuel Miranda, a neighborhood resident, chipped in for a new screen and projector. More

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      Father Doesn’t Know Best at New Directors/New Films

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      Returning to an in-person event, this year’s adventurous festival is filled with discoveries that use families to explore contemporary life.In a springy sign of optimism — illusionary or otherwise! — this year’s New Directors/New Films is returning to theaters full throttle. New York’s Covid numbers are creeping up again, but the festival, a joint venture of Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, has ditched the virtual for the physical. So, if you would like to check out the selections at the 51st edition, which runs through May 1, you will need to do so in person. And while masks are not required, they are recommended by the organizers.From its inception, New Directors has focused on younger or at least less-established filmmakers, many grappling with social and political issues. In a bad year, that means the event is little more than a grab bag of nice tries and misses. In a good year, though — and this is one — the event can feel like the unrulier, at times more adventurous younger sibling of the New York Film Festival. The strength of this year’s lineup is heralded by the strong opening-night selection, Audrey Diwan’s “Happening,” a gutsy, smart, involving French drama about a college student’s agonizing effort to secure an abortion in 1963, when the procedure was illegal. I’ll have more to say about the movie when it opens May 6.As usual, most of the slate has been culled from other festivals, including a half-dozen standouts from Sundance. Among these is Nikyatu Jusu’s “Nanny,” about a young Senegalese woman working for a white Manhattan family with an adorable daughter and the kind of nice, agonizingly polite, broadly smiling parents who, if they were any weirder, could have featured roles in a sequel to “Get Out.” With firm directorial control, an expressionistic palette and a transfixing lead turn from Anna Diop, “Nanny” shrewdly draws from African folklore and old-school Hollywood horror freak-outs to tell an emotionally engaging, up-to-the-second story of class, gender and race — which means it’s also about power.A scene from “Nanny,” which borrows from African folklore and Hollywood horror alike.Blumhouse ProductionsUnlike “Nanny,” most of the selections lack American distribution. That may change, of course, though it’s doubtful that most will secure a theatrical release given the fragile condition of foreign-language distribution in the United States. That makes an event like New Directors all the more necessary, and also gives it an air of quiet urgency. To that end, try to see Laurynas Bareisa’s “Pilgrims,” an eerie, impeccably controlled Lithuanian nail-biter about a man and woman revisiting the horrific murder of a beloved. As they retrace the crime, doggedly uprooting the past, exploring darkened cellars and confronting unwelcome bright faces, they exorcise personal demons, and the long shadow of World War II closes in on them.Another must-see is Sierra Pettengill’s “Riotsville, USA,” a mesmerizing documentary essay that tracks American anti-Black racism through a wealth of disturbing, at times super-freaky 1960s archival footage. The title refers to several strange Potemkin-like towns that the United States military constructed in the wake of the civil unrest of the era. There, against rows of cardboard storefronts with generic names, military personnel — some in uniform, others in civilian clothing — engaged in pantomimes of violence, exercises that were observed by local politicians who took lessons from these war games back to the home front. As the Johnson administration publicly grappled with the fires at home, including with the Kerner Commission that investigated the roots of the unrest, it was also stoking future conflagrations.There are predictable letdowns, too, notably “The Innocents,” from Eskil Vogt, who’s best known for the scripts that he’s written with Joachim Trier, including “The Worst Person in the World.” In theme and spooky vibe, “The Innocents” skews closer to one of their earlier collaborations, “Thelma,” about a woman with telekinetic powers. Set in a sinister, isolated housing complex next to one of those forests where the wind always blows ominously through the trees, “The Innocents” — the title seems to nod at the 1961 psychological horror film with Deborah Kerr — tracks the very, very bad things that happen to several children. The results are unnerving, pristinely crafted and altogether unpleasant.The documentary “Riotsville, USA” looks at “towns” the military built in the 1960s to stage exercises in the wake of civil unrest.CineticLike “Nanny,” some of the most memorable selections in New Directors use families to explore a constellation of ideas about contemporary life, its pressures and thorny complexities. In movies as distinct as “Father’s Day” (from Rwanda), “The Cathedral” (the United States) and “Shankar’s Fairies” (India), the family is at once an intimate unit and a microcosm of larger cultural and social relationships. An appreciable number of titles in the program are female-driven and, not coincidentally, patriarchy also looms — openly and otherwise — as a means of domestic control, as an arm of the state, as a virulent presence or as a structuring absence. Whatever the case, father definitely doesn’t know best.One of the most exciting discoveries, Kivu Ruhorahoza’s “Father’s Day” knits together three loosely connected stories that explore the anguished toll of historical and generational traumas. In one story, a hollow-eyed masseuse mourns the abrupt, outwardly random death of her son and the loss of her business to the pandemic as her wastrel husband dreams and schemes. Elsewhere a daughter takes painful stock of her dying father and his hold on her. In the brutal third story, a petty thief cruelly schools his young son (and be warned, some of these scenes can be difficult to watch). An unspoken malignancy, genocide haunts this movie, and while men trouble the present, women — hopefully, movingly — look to the future.Ricky D’Ambrose’s slow-boiling, visually striking drama “The Cathedral” tracks the coming-of-age of a boy — played by separate actors — who grows up in a lower-middle-class family that gradually falls apart year by year, one loss and disappointment at a time. Beginning in the 1980s, the story charts the family’s bleak disintegration through a series of precisely framed and staged chronological scenes in which nothing much seems to happen or everything does. With uninflected acting, explosions of fatherly violence and occasional nods at the outside world (the gulf war, a Kodak commercial), D’Ambrose brings together the personal and the political with lacerating cool and a boldly deployed anti-aesthetic.“Shankar’s Fairies” focuses on the daughter (Shreeja Mishra) of a wealthy family in 1960s India.Asian ShadowsBy vivid contrast, Irfana Majumdar’s quietly piercing drama, “Shankar’s Fairies,” uses beauty to sharp critical effect. Set inside the lush grounds of a sprawling estate in India, the story centers on the daughter of a wealthy family and one of its many servants. As news of the 1962 Sino-Indian war periodically drifts in, the movie charts the bonds and radically unequal lives of this child, with her British school and manners, and of her loyal, exploited caretaker. With scant exposition, flashes of breathtaking cruelty and banal moments bristling with meaning — a servant cuts the crusts off white-bread sandwiches while listening to Prime Minister Nehru on the radio — Majumdar takes measure of colonialism and neocolonialism alike.The tonally and visually distinct “Dos Estaciones” and “Robe of Gems” both take place in a contemporary Mexico consumed by violence. In “Dos Estaciones,” the director Juan Pablo González tethers the travails of the owner of an artisanal tequila factory to the ferocity of global capitalism: Her family’s legacy and her future are existentially imperiled by foreign competitors. In “Robe of Gems,” the director Natalia López Gallardo focuses on women from different classes whose lives are undone by shocks of barbarism, mostly domestic. Gallardo is too indebted to some of her art-cinema influences, Carlos Reygadas included. But she — like a number of this year’s other new and newish directors — is nonetheless a talent to watch.New Directors/New Films runs Wednesday through May 1. Go to newdirectors.org for more information. More

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      French Female Directors Continue Hot Streak at Rendez-Vous Festival

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      The series returns in-person with an especially strong slate of work by Frenchwomen — fitting, given their run of honors at top festivals.Sex and the city, false identities and love triangles feature prominently in this year’s Rendez-Vous With French Cinema, an annual showcase of contemporary French filmmaking held by Film at Lincoln Center.Since last year’s virtual edition, female directors from France have been making headlines, with two major European festivals awarding their top prizes to Frenchwomen: Julia Ducournau took home the Cannes Palme d’Or for her gender-bending love story “Titane”; and Audrey Diwan nabbed Venice’s Golden Lion for “Happening,” about a young woman in the 1960s seeking an abortion. Even the master filmmaker Claire Denis received one of her only competitive awards when she won best director for “Fire” last month at Germany’s Berlinale.“Fire,” a brooding melodrama, will be the opening-night film when Rendez-Vous make its return to in-person screenings on Thursday in New York. A pared-down pandemic production stocked with booming performances by Juliette Binoche, Vincent Lindon and Grégoire Colin, the film is Denis’s second collaboration with the screenwriter and novelist Christine Angot. Unlike their first effort, “Let the Sunshine In” (2018), a sly romantic comedy in which Binoche played an artist drifting through a succession of frustrating relationships, “Fire” is all Sturm und Drang. It focuses on the love lives of a late-middle-age couple with the kind of tempestuous passion befitting an adolescent affair. Though Denis obliquely weaves in broader social commentary with a subplot involving a troubled mixed-race son, the film’s shambolic qualities stoke the erotic follies at its core with transportive delirium.Anaïs Demoustier as the title character opposite Christophe Montenez in “Anais in Love.”Danielle McCarthy-Bole/Année ZéroAt Rendez-Vous, Denis is joined by other established French directors like Arnaud Desplechin (“Deception”), François Ozon (“Everything Went Fine”) and Christophe Honoré (“Guermantes”). But a newer generation of filmmakers is making a strong showing as well, and many of them are building on the great promise of the festival-winning streak for Gallic women.Three of the four feature debuts in the program are by women, including Constance Meyer’s “Robust,” a handsome-looking dramedy about an aging actor (Gérard Depardieu) who strikes up a friendship with his female bodyguard (Déborah Lukumuena). Though significantly less flamboyant, “Robust” takes cues from the 2012 interracial buddy blockbuster “Les Intouchables.”What may be the strongest debut in the lineup is Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s “Anaïs in Love,” which would make a fine double feature with “The Worst Person in the World”; both are about impulsive 30-somethings who fall in love and lust at the clip of a pop song. “Anaïs,” a jaunty summer story full of droll chatter and sparkling countryside vistas, follows its capricious heroine as she enters into an affair with an older man, only to find herself more interested in his novelist wife.Films like “Anaïs in Love” that relish the frisky humor and whimsy of modern romance without moralizing guilt would seem to fit squarely in the sexually liberated tradition that many see as central to France’s artistic heritage. The debate between a younger generation of feminists spearheading the country’s #MeToo movement, which has been gaining momentum after a feeble start, and elite figures who denounce the movement as extreme and puritanical continues to cast a shadow over the French film industry. This year’s Rendez-Vous selection certainly straddles the old and the new — though conspicuously absent is the Rendez-Vous regular Jacques Doillon, whose strong, if thorny, new film, “Third Grade,” concerns the playground intrigue between two children, one of whom sexually harasses the other. Nevertheless, the program keeps in step with the national penchant for sexual audacity.Jade Springer as the daughter of divorcing parents in “Petite Solange.”Aurora FilmsMale directors have rarely had any qualms about examining the intimate lives of women, and Jacques Audiard’s “Paris, 13th District,” a punchy drama in slick black and white about the messy dating lives of young Parisians, continues that tendency. It’s a pleasant surprise, though the auteurist theory explanation for a film’s success (or failure) is particularly questionable here. Consider the compelling performances by the film’s lead actresses: Noémie Merlant plays a law student whose life is thrown into shambles when her classmates mistake her for a popular camgirl; and Lucie Zhang makes her auspicious debut as a first-generation Franco-Chinese immigrant, a punkish, bedraggled young woman with a self-sabotaging romantic streak. Complex and not necessarily likable without falling into the “messy woman” archetype of so many pop feminist characters, the women of “Paris, 13th District” must have benefited from the august scriptwriting team — Audiard, Céline Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) and Léa Mysius — who temper the director’s penchant for vacuous stylization with grounded humor and pathos.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      In ‘Xiao Wu,’ a Wandering Pickpocket in the People’s China

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      Jia Zhangke’s debut feature, released in the United States in 1999 and newly restored, follows a nowhere man around his nowhere city in China.Made for a pittance with nonprofessional actors, officially unapproved in China and first shown in the United States in 1999, Jia Zhangke’s debut feature “Xiao Wu” depicted a deadbeat Chinese protagonist and a backwater milieu few Westerners had ever seen.That movie, revived by Film at Lincoln Center in a new 4K restoration, is both downbeat and transcendent.“Xiao Wu” is set in Jia’s hometown in central China, Fenyang. The title character is an aimless, alienated pickpocket — described in a New York Times review as “a nondescript young man in a shabby city who practices his trade without remorse, compassion or evident fear although he is known to the police.” Some critics were reminded of Robert Bresson, whose 1959 “Pickpocket” is a masterpiece of elliptical cinema.Observational, mainly in medium shot and almost plotless, “Xiao Wu” has a documentary quality. The titular character, played by Wang Hongwei, is introduced while waiting for a bus; once aboard, he beats the fare with the smirking claim he is a policeman, then casually picks the pocket of the passenger beside him.An unlikely tough guy — indeed, something of a loser with thick Woody Allen glasses and a cigarette-lighter that plays a few bars of “Für Elise” — Xiao Wu has his act down. The world, however, is changing. As local TV welcomes “the return of Hong Kong,” sleepy, half-urbanized Fenyang has begun to offer the fruits of the free market — karaoke, beauty salons, cheap sound systems.News reaches Xiao Wu that his former partner in crime, now a legitimate businessman trafficking in hostess bars and wholesale cigarettes, is about to marry. Xiao Wu is pointedly uninvited to the wedding and constitutionally unable to move on from his criminal life. The pickpocket is less a product of the new China than an antisocial element who fails to modernize. Asked by the karaoke hostess, Mei-Mei, whom he ambivalently courts, what he does for a living, he tells her that he’s “a craftsman who earns his money with his hands.”Mei-Mei is sufficiently impressed to encourage him to buy a beeper so she can alert him when she’s free. Xiao Wu buys her a ring as well. And each purchase, in its way, promotes his undoing. (Technology is part of the movie’s subtext. Anticipating Jia’s use of science fiction elements in his later, naturalistic films, TV subtly mediates crucial aspects of Xiao Wu’s life.)Remarkable for a movie made entirely with nonactors, “Xiao Wu” thrives on extended scenes of personal interaction — Xiao Wu with his former friend, his parents, the police and, mainly, the diffidently wooed Mei-Mei. Significantly, his single moment of liberation occurs when he finds himself alone in an empty public bath. In the film’s final scenes, society prevails. Xiao Wu himself becomes an object lesson, another commodity in the marketplace, contemplated by the crowd as a pop song asks, “Who is the hero?”As can happen with first films, “Xiao Wu” has a purity unique in its maker’s oeuvre. But it is also an auspicious beginning to one of the most impressive careers in 21st century cinema.Xiao WuJuly 23-Aug. 5 at Film at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; filmlinc.org. More