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      Film Forum Director Karen Cooper to Step Down After 50 Years

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      Karen Cooper, who took over the nonprofit cinema in 1972 and transformed it into a $6 million-a-year operation, will step down in July after five decades.When Karen Cooper took over Film Forum in 1972, the theater was a projector and 50 folding chairs in a loft on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, showing what were then known as underground films. The annual budget was $19,000. Cooper projected the films — sometimes herself — on a single 16-millimeter machine no larger than a microwave.“I’d say to someone, ‘I show independent films,’ and they’d say, ‘You mean pornography?’” Cooper, 74, recalled with a laugh in a recent conversation at the nonprofit art house cinema’s offices, now located across the street from the theater in Greenwich Village.But now, Cooper, who has become synonymous with Film Forum — which has grown into a four-screen space with a $6 million-a-year budget and an influence that reaches far beyond New York City — is stepping down from the director role she’s filled for half a century, the organization announced on Monday.“I’ve thought about this for years,” said Cooper, whose last day will be June 30, though she will remain on staff as an adviser. “I wanted to have a smooth transition.”Succeeding her will be Sonya Chung, 49, the theater’s deputy director, who began working at Film Forum in 2003 as the director of development. Chung, who has a master’s degree in fiction writing from the University of Washington, in Seattle, left in 2007 to write and publish two novels (she also taught literature and writing for three years at Columbia University and for nine years at Skidmore College, both in New York). She returned in 2018 as a programming consultant and a member of the advisory committee, and was hired as deputy director in February 2020.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Meet the Newer, Bolder Michelle Williams: Why she made the surprising choice to skip the supporting actress category and run for best actress.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies like Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.‘Glass Onion’ and Rian Johnson: The director explains why he sold the “Knives Out” franchise to Netflix, and how he feels about its theatrical test.Jostling for Best Picture: Weighing voter buzz, box office results and more, here’s an educated guess about the likely nominees for best picture.“Sonya has great taste and a way of articulating it,” Cooper said. “It immediately occurred to me when I met her — unbeknownst to Sonya — that she had the ability to be the director of the theater.”Cooper has been the director of Film Forum since 1972.Emma Howells/The New York TimesCooper was a newly minted 23-year-old Smith College graduate when she took over the theater founded by two film buffs, Peter Feinstein and Sandy Miller, in 1970. Over her 50-year tenure, she built a beloved cultural institution that has introduced the work of now-prominent filmmakers to American audiences, earning the affection of critics and patrons alike.She has led the theater through three relocations — Film Forum moved to its current space on West Houston Street in 1989 — and oversaw a $5 million expansion and renovation in 2018 that upgraded the seating, legroom and sightlines in all screening rooms and added a fourth, which increased the venue’s capacity to nearly 500 seats.Cooper said she was most proud of working to broaden the scope of Film Forum’s programming, introducing audiences to major German filmmakers of the 1970s like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders. She was also honored to have programmed the New York premieres of ambitious documentaries such as “Asylum,” Peter Robinson’s 1972 look inside the psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s therapeutic community of people with schizophrenia living together in a group home in London; and Spike Lee’s “Four Little Girls” (1997), about the children killed in the 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham, Ala.It’s the meticulously curated slate of new films — which Cooper, Chung and the artistic director Mike Maggiore map out on a dry erase board in the cinema’s offices as far as six months in advance — that serves as part of the draw for Film Forum’s approximately 200,000 visitors each year, along with a robust lineup of classic films programmed by the repertory artistic director Bruce Goldstein, a concession stand menu of decadent baked goods and a robust lineup of talkbacks with filmmakers.Chung says the biggest challenge facing Film Forum, which is one of the few theaters regularly to feature independent movies in New York, is competition from streaming services. It can be tough, she said, to convince people who’ve become used to watching at home to bundle up, take the subway to the theater and pay $15 for a night out.One solution, she said, is creating a memorable experience that people can’t get anywhere else. They recently hosted Q. and A. events with the filmmaker Lizzie Gottlieb, who directed the documentary “Turn Every Page — The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb,” and the film’s subject, the book editor and her father Robert Gottlieb; as well as with the Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, whose dark tale about the life of a donkey, “EO,” has been shortlisted for an Academy Award. Both events sold out, she said.“Especially post-pandemic, when we have so much streaming overload, younger people are antsy for an IRL experience,” she said, using the acronym for “in real life.”Chung also wants to cultivate a younger and more diverse audience, with a particular focus on people of color from outside the theater’s white, more affluent neighborhood. For the last several years, she has created a young members program and developed partnerships with cultural and community-based organizations like Girls Write Now, a creative writing and mentoring nonprofit for young people from underserved communities in New York City; and ArteEast, a nonprofit that presents work by contemporary artists from the Middle East, North Africa and their diasporas.And now, starting this month, the theater’s internship program — which places three college students each semester in roles in the theater’s repertory program, outreach and administration departments — will be paid.“We decided we should pay them in order to attract a more diverse group of young people to be able to work here,” Chung said.As for Cooper, a longtime resident of the far West Village who walks to work each day, she will remain an active member of the organization’s programming team. She’ll continue to represent Film Forum at the Berlin and Amsterdam film festivals. She intends to maintain her schedule of watching at least 500 films per year. She’ll continue to focus on fund-raising for the nonprofit, which raises approximately $3 million of its operating budget each year.“I never thought I’d stay here 50 years,” she said. “But where would I go? What do they say — the hedgehog knows one thing, the fox knows many things?“I’m a hedgehog,” she said. “I know one thing — how to run a movie theater.” More

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      ‘The 400 Blows,’ a Directing Debut That Still Astonishes

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      In 1959, François Truffaut premiered his first film, about a Parisian boy playing hooky, and moviemaking hasn’t been the same since.One of the most impressive debuts in film history, François Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” created a sensation at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival and elsewhere. It was voted the best foreign film of the year by New York film critics — a movie that “brilliantly and strikingly reveals the explosion of a fresh creative talent,” Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times.Showing for two weeks at Film Forum in a new 4K restoration, the movie is not only crucial to one’s film education but well worth revisiting.“Amazingly, this vigorous effort is the first feature film of M. Truffaut, who had previously been (of all things!) the movie critic for a French magazine,” Crowther noted. As a critic, Truffaut was particularly harsh on French “quality” films — so much so that Cannes denied him accreditation in 1958. Revenge was swift when he returned the following year and won the award for best director. (Marcel Camus’s “Black Orpheus” received the Palme d’Or. The third French film in competition, Alain Resnais’s “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” came up empty.)“The 400 Blows” has two stars. One is the then-14-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud, who plays Truffaut’s alter ego, Antoine Doinel, and thus began a career as the embodiment of the French new wave. The other is the city of Paris — gray, grimy and glorious — the arena for Antoine’s fleeting joys and petty crimes.Antoine is an unwanted child, as was Truffaut. Punished by his teacher, rejected by his self-centered mother (Claire Maurier), he plays hooky, runs away from home, steals a typewriter, gets busted trying to return it, is booked by the cops and winds up in reform school. The movie is full of actual incidents from Truffaut’s childhood, including his fabricating his mother’s death as an excuse for truancy. Few movies have been so personal.“The 400 Blows” is dedicated to the critic André Bazin, Truffaut’s mentor, who died just as the movie began shooting. The early scenes of the boy’s classroom misadventures strongly recall “Zero de Conduite,” the 1933 sendup of French education, directed by Truffaut’s great influence, Jean Vigo. There are other, more inside references, including the unlikely notion that Antoine’s parents might see a quasi-underground work-in-progress by Truffaut’s colleague Jacques Rivette, “Paris Belongs to Us.”“The 400 Blows” is a landmark film for several reasons. It was likely the first openly autobiographical commercial feature, and as such caused Truffaut’s parents considerable distress. It also introduced one of the 1960s’ most resilient clichés — the concluding freeze-frame close-up. Truffaut got the idea from Harriet Andersson’s accusatory stare at the end of Ingmar Bergman’s “Summer with Monika” (as noted when Antoine steals a lobby card of Andersson’s “Monika”). But building on the wistful refrain that runs throughout, “The 400 Blows” ends on a note of sadness all its own.Truffaut and Leaud returned several times to the character of Antoine Doinel. Film Forum is showing “The 400 Blows” with rotating screenings of later films like “Stolen Kisses” and “Love on the Run.” The character survives and even thrives. Yet it is the heartbreaking last shot of “The 400 Blows” that will fix his identity for as long as there are movies.The Four Hundred BlowsSept. 23 through Oct. 6 at Film Forum in Manhattan; filmforum.org More

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      Still Charming at 50: Luis Buñuel’s Greatest Hit

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      “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois” is a comedy of frustrations in which a sextet of super-civilized haute bourgeois repeatedly attempt and fail to sit down at dinner.Luis Buñuel is a filmmaker with few peers and a unique career trajectory. A hardcore Surrealist in 1920s Paris and a propagandist for Republican Spain during the Civil War, Buñuel found refuge in the Mexican film industry before making a triumphant, late-life return to France and the art cinema pantheon.“The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois” was Buñuel’s greatest commercial and critical success, capped with the 1972 Oscar for best foreign film. Given a new 4K digital restoration, it has been revived for a two-week run at Film Forum.Buñuel, who died in 1983, intended “The Discreet Charm” as his last film (it was not), and it recapitulates certain career-long concerns. The movie is typically described as a comedy of frustration in which a sextet of well-heeled, super-civilized haute bourgeois (five French people and the ambassador from an imaginary South American country) repeatedly attempt and fail to sit down at dinner. As such, it elaborates on the thwarted desires that fuel two earlier masterpieces of his: “L’age d’Or,” made with Salvador Dalí in 1930, and Buñuel’s penultimate Mexican production, “The Exterminating Angel” (1962).The movie is suavely irrational, predicated on interlocking dreams (and dreams within dreams), as well as assorted terrorists, gangsters and army officers, along with an extremely obliging bishop (Julien Bertheau). It is also an avant-garde sitcom. The men are ruling-class criminals — although the ambassador (Fernando Rey) is far craftier than his French buddies (Paul Frankeur and Jean-Pierre Cassel). The two older women (Delphine Seyrig and Stéphane Audran) are ferociously poised fashion police; the group’s youngest member (Bulle Ogier) is a bit of a wild card. Much of the humor relies on their inane observations and absurd sang-froid in a succession of increasingly awkward social situations. (Imagine a smart tearoom running out of tea!)A few scenes of torture notwithstanding, American critics swooned for “The Discreet Charm.” Andrew Sarris called it “clearly the film of the year.” Vincent Canby’s New York Times review hailed it as “the unique creation of a director who, at 72, has never been more fully in control of his talents, as a filmmaker, a moralist, social critic and humorist.” While it is hard to disagree with this assessment, it’s possible to prefer Buñuel’s less digestible works — particularly “Viridiana” (1961), which sneaked past Spain’s fascist censors, and the low-budget Mexican films that were, of necessity, directed against the grain.“The Discreet Charm” is not without its pleasures. Seyrig, Audran, and Ogier are magnificent farceurs. Buñuel might be shooting fish in a barrel, but French manners have seldom been so expertly ridiculed. A few of the movie’s pranks (an inconvenient death disrupts one dinner) still shock; others (Ogier parading around in Napoleon’s hat) remain laugh-out-loud funny. It’s fascinating to see Buñuel’s engagement with the Godard of “La Chinoise” and “Weekend” and even, in the casting of Rey, “The French Connection.”And yet, while “The Discreet Charm” is not exactly complacent, neither is it unreconciled. For all its unpatriotic and anticlerical jibes, the movie is too expansively genial to be truly discomfiting. The Oscar is the tip-off, even if Buñuel did suggest that his producer had bribed the Academy to get it.The Discreet Charm of the BourgeoisieThrough July 7 at Film Forum in Manhattan; filmforum.org. More

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      Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Masterpiece of Existential Angst

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      His moody 2004 film, ‘Distant,’ about an unemployed factory worker in Istanbul, has been revived for a short run at Film Forum in Manhattan.The miracle of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Distant” is that it is continually absorbing, even when not much is happening — which is most of the time. A photographer before he became the dean of Turkish filmmakers, Ceylan is a master of existential angst and transfigured dailiness whose movies invite contemplation.Revived for a week at Film Forum in a new digital restoration, “Distant” — which opened in the United States in 2004, having won the second-highest prize at Cannes — looks even better than I remembered.The brief precredit sequence is emblematic of Ceylan’s style. A tiny figure trudges across a snowy field in what feels like real time, accompanied by ambient sounds. This is followed by a slow pan to the road, slightly in advance of the vehicle that will take him to Istanbul. Immanence is all.An unemployed factory worker, Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak) arrives in the city with vague hopes of shipping out to sea. While shambolically looking for a job, he stays with his older cousin Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir), a commercial photographer with abandoned artistic aspirations. (If Mahmut might be the director’s unflattering self-portrait, Yusuf was played by Ceylan’s actual cousin, tragically killed in a car crash before the movie’s release.)Sufficiently affluent to indulge his alienation, Mahmut has a decent apartment in a nice neighborhood, but his emotions are as frozen as the snow that blanket the city. “Distant” often feels directed by the weather. (Ceylan’s next film, about a marital breakup in which he co-starred with his wife, was titled “Climates.”)Each frustrated in his own way, the cousins can barely relate. Yusuf is a bit of a bumpkin. Mahmut is a grouch who spends most evenings sacked out in front of his TV (switching from a Tarkovsky movie to — when Yusuf leaves the room — porn). Mahmut’s immobility is parodied by the sticky tape he puts down nightly in hopes of trapping the mouse that lives in his kitchen.Although his mood of rapt sadness is his own, Ceylan has affinities to Michelangelo Antonioni (feel for bourgeois estrangement), Yasujiro Ozu (exquisite, unshowy compositions), Robert Bresson (precise use of sound) and even Jacques Tati (deadpan humor).Pervaded with a sense of apprehension, “Distant” seems to promise a crime — not least because Yusuf has a practice of following women in the street. In one mordant joke, he trails a woman into a park, inadvertently makes eye contact with another lurker, then hastily conceals himself when the woman’s date shows up.The transgression finally comes from an act of omission, rather commission, so mean and petty as to seem earthshaking. As the fate of the mouse suggests, Ceylan has a feel for understated symbols. The New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell, although generally unenthusiastic (“almost like a droll take on ‘The Odd Couple’”), did acknowledge that “Distant” required a second viewing “to work its spell.”In the final scene, Mahmut sits alone by the harbor, smoking a cigarette from a pack Yusuf left behind. His anguish is palpable. There’s no particular reason to feel sorry for this guy except he’s human and alone.DistantMay 20-26 at Film Forum in Manhattan; filmforum.org. More

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      Fun Things to Do in N.Y.C. This May 2022

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      Looking for something to do in New York? Go see the Asian Comedy Fest at Stand Up NY and Caveat or the British singer Nilüfer Yanya at Webster Hall. Take the kids to Our First Art Fair, as part of NADA New York. Or you can still catch “Hangmen” on Broadway and the Jacques-Louis David blockbuster at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Comedy | Music | Kids | Film | Dance | Theater | ArtComedyJes Tom, above at Union Hall in Brooklyn in February, will be among the performers in this weekend’s Asian Comedy Fest.JT AndersonAsian Comedy FestFriday at 6, 8 and 10 p.m. at Stand Up NY, 236 West 78th Street, Manhattan; standupny.com. Saturday at 6, 8 and 10 p.m. at Caveat, 21A Clinton Street, Manhattan; caveat.nycFor the third straight year, Ed Pokropski, a writer and producer at NBCUniversal, and the producer and comedian Kate Moran have assembled dozens of performers for this festival, and like last year, they’re right on time to celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. The six shows will feature Julia Shiplett, Michael Cruz Kayne, Usama Siddiquee, Karen Chee with the puppeteer Kathleen Kim, the podcasters from “Feeling Asian,” and Yuhua Hamasaki from “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Friday’s 8 p.m. lineup includes perhaps the festival’s buzziest performer: Jes Tom, a nonbinary trans comedian who co-stars in the new Hulu rom-com “Crush.” (Tom will also headline their own show on May 14 at the Bell House.) Tickets start at $25 per show ($65 for an all-night pass) and are available at asiancomedyfest.com. SEAN L. McCARTHYMusicDarius Jones, above at the Winter Jazzfest in 2018, has programmed this year’s MATA Festival, which concludes at National Sawdust this weekend.Jacob Blickenstaff for The New York TimesClassical MusicMATA FestivalFriday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at National Sawdust, 80 North Sixth Street, Brooklyn; live.nationalsawdust.org.This year’s iteration of the annual contemporary music blowout known as the MATA Festival has been programmed by the composer and alto saxophonist Darius Jones. For the festival’s final two nights, Jones has put together a set of works by younger artists on Friday and one of his own on Saturday. Friday’s concert will feature notable artists like Travis Laplante, who is scheduled to play his solo tenor saxophone opus “The Obvious Place.” And Saturday’s performance will offer the world premiere of Jones’s piece “Colored School No. 3,” which references a Brooklyn building once used as a segregated school for Black children into the early 20th century. Tickets for each night are $25. SETH COLTER WALLSNilüfer Yanya will headline at Webster Hall on Saturday.Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesPop & RockNilüfer YanyaSaturday at 7:30 p.m. at Webster Hall, 25 East 11th Street, Manhattan; websterhall.com.Though as a teenager she was tapped to be in a girl group assembled by Louis Tomlinson of One Direction, Nilüfer Yanya chose a self-determined path over the prospect of pop stardom. The British singer’s debut album, from 2019, contained notes of jazz and indie pop but leaned predominantly into alt-rock, showcasing the guitar chops she had honed since picking up the instrument at age 12. Yanya’s sophomore effort, released in March, follows suit but pares her sound down to essential components: wafty melodies, crisp beats, circuitous guitar work reminiscent of Radiohead. Ironically titled “Painless,” the album is spiked with thorns, its lyrics tackling the complicated, damaging side effects of desire. On Saturday, Yanya heads a bill that also features two other singer-guitarists: Ada Lea and Tasha. Tickets start at $25 and are available at axs.com. OLIVIA HORNKidsOur First Art Fair at Pier 36, sponsored by the New Art Dealers Alliance and the Children’s Museum of the Arts, will feature works by children 12 and under. Above, a display from an after-school class at the museum in 2019.Children’s Museum of the ArtsOur First Art FairThursday from 4 to 8 p.m.; Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at NADA New York, Pier 36, 299 South Street, Manhattan; newartdealers.org.Learn More About the Metropolitan Museum of Art$125 Million Donation: The largest capital gift in the Met’s history will help reinvigorate a long-delayed rebuild of the Modern wing.Recent Exhibits: Our critics reviewed exhibits featuring the drawings of the French Revolution’s chief propagandist and new work by the sculptor Charles Ray.Behind the Scenes: A documentary goes inside the Met to chronicle one of the most challenging years of its history.A Guide to the Met: From the must-see galleries to the lesser-known treasures, here’s how to make the most of your visit.While the New Art Dealers Alliance has always catered to the business’s youngest members, it would be hard to find exhibitors younger than some appearing at this year’s NADA New York exposition. They’re the entrepreneurs 12 and under participating in Our First Art Fair, presented by the alliance and the Children’s Museum of the Arts. Here, youngsters display and price their creations, receiving all proceeds. Little artists who missed the April submission deadline can still contribute by completing a required form and delivering it, along their work, to the fair. On Saturday from 2 to 4 p.m., museum educators will also attend, providing art supplies and helping with last-minute entries. What doesn’t sell goes to the museum’s permanent collection — no small distinction. NADA passes start at $40; they’re free for children. LAUREL GRAEBERFilmThuy An Luu and Frédéric Andrei in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s “Diva,” which is screening at Film Forum starting on Friday.Rialto Pictures‘Diva’Ongoing at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, Manhattan; filmforum.org.You’ve seen Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out”? “Diva” is the other major film of 1981 (released in the United States in 1982) that involves a protagonist with a hot-potato audio recording, or technically two: Jules (Frédéric Andrei), a postman and opera fan, secretly records a star vocalist, Cynthia Hawkins (the real-life soprano Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez), who makes a point of only singing live, at a performance in Paris. Soon after, he unwittingly comes into possession of another tape that could expose an international drug-and-sex-trafficking operation.But the crazy convolutions of the plot are hardly the point. “Diva,” directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix, who died in January, is perhaps the film most identified with a trend in France that became known as the cinéma du look, movies for which visual style and attitude left the prevailing impressions. In a print showing at Film Forum, the shades of blue are dazzling, and an elaborate chase through the Paris Metro is pretty exciting, too. BEN KENIGSBERGDanceValerie Levine of Ice Theater of New York performing “Arctic Memory” by Jody Sperling on Governors Island in February.Josef PinlacIce Theater of New YorkFriday and Saturday at 7 p.m.; Monday at 6:30 p.m. at Sky Rink, 61 Chelsea Piers, Manhattan; chelseapiers.com.After pivoting to pavement during the pandemic, Ice Theater of New York returns to its true milieu, which is also a fitting place to reflect on climate change. As part of its home season, the company will present the premiere of the choreographer Jody Sperling’s “Of Water and Ice,” which draws on her research in the Arctic and is set to music by D.J. Spooky. It will be joined on the program by 10 other works, many of them also new, with soundtracks ranging from Philip Glass to Rachmaninoff to Madonna. Don’t expect a string of Nathan Chen-like acrobatic feats, though; the company, founded in 1984, is rooted in the art of ice dancing, which combines the ethos of concert dance with the speed, momentum and strength of ice skating. Two of the form’s best-known practitioners, the British champions Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, will be honored at Monday’s gala performance. Tickets start at $25 and are available at icetheatre.org. BRIAN SCHAEFERTheaterDavid Threlfall, center, with, from left, Richard Hollis, Ryan Pope, John Horton and Alfie Allen in Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy “Hangmen” at the Golden Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCritic’s Pick‘Hangmen’Through June 18 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan; hangmenbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.In Martin McDonagh’s Olivier Award winner, set in the 1960s, a menacing mod from London (Alfie Allen of “Game of Thrones”) walks into a grim northern English pub run by a former hangman (David Threlfall). Pitch-black comedy ensues. Directed by Matthew Dunster, this production was a prepandemic hit downtown. Read the review.‘Plaza Suite’Through June 26 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan; plazasuitebroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker revel in physical comedy as they play two married couples and a pair of long-ago sweethearts in the first Broadway revival of Neil Simon’s trio of one-act farces, a smash at its premiere in 1968. John Benjamin Hickey directs. (Onstage at the Hudson Theater. Limited run ends July 1.) Read the review.Critic’s Pick‘American Buffalo’Through July 10 at Circle in the Square, Manhattan; americanbuffalonyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.Laurence Fishburne, Sam Rockwell and Darren Criss team up for David Mamet’s verbally explosive tragicomedy, set in a Chicago junk shop where an inept pair of small-time criminals and their hapless young flunky plot the theft of a rare nickel. Neil Pepe directs. Read the review.Hugh Jackman as Harold Hill in the Broadway revival of “The Music Man” at the Winter Garden Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘The Music Man’At the Winter Garden Theater, Manhattan; musicmanonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.Hugh Jackman, a.k.a. Wolverine, returns to the stage as the charlatan Harold Hill opposite Sutton Foster as Marian the librarian in Jerry Zaks’s widely anticipated revival of Meredith Willson’s classic musical comedy. It’s a hot ticket, and one of Broadway’s more stratospherically priced shows. (Onstage at the Winter Garden Theater.)Read the review.Art & Museums“The Oath of the Tennis Court” (1791), a presentation drawing in “Jacques-Louis David: Radical Draftsman” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, depicts a foundational event of the French Revolution.RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NYCritic’s PickJacques-Louis David: Radical DraftsmanThrough May 15 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org.“Radical Draftsman,” a momentous and deadly serious exhibition, assembles more than 80 works on paper by this prime mover of French Neo-Classicism, from his youthful Roman studies to his uncompromising Jacobin years, into jail and then Napoleon’s cabinet, and through to his final exile in Brussels. It’s a scholarly feat, with loans from two dozen institutions, and never-before-seen discoveries from private collections. It will enthrall specialists who want to map how David built his robust canvases out of preparatory sketches and drapery studies. But for the public, this show has a more direct importance. This show forces us — and right on time — to think hard about the real power of pictures (and picture makers), and the price of political and cultural certainty. What is beautiful, and what is virtuous? And when virtue embraces terror, what is beauty really for? Read the review.Critic’s PickJonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always RunningThrough June 5 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; 212-423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org.A Lithuanian refugee who landed in New York City in 1949, Jonas Mekas became a founder of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Film Culture magazine and Anthology Film Archives. He also made scores of collagelike “diary” films. “The Camera Was Always Running” is Mekas’s first U.S. museum survey, and its curator, Kelly Taxter, approached the daunting task by mounting a high-speed retrospective projected on a dozen free-standing screens.Most of the films in the exhibition are broken up into simultaneously projected pieces, so that the full program of 11 takes just three hours. Many are diary films — abstract kaleidoscopic records of Mekas, his brother Adolfas, also a filmmaker, and the SoHo bohemians and Lithuanian transplants of their circle. Since the point of all this, even more than documenting the variety of Mekas’s life in particular, is to capture the magical incongruity of life in general, Taxter’s inspired staging may even make the works more effective. Read the review.Painted fabric hangings behind the sculpture “The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro,” 1976. This entire installation originated as part of a performance piece.Faith Ringgold/ARS, NY, DACS, London and ACA Galleries; Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesCritic’s PickFaith Ringgold: American PeopleThrough June 5 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, Manhattan; 212-219-1222, newmuseum.org.Ringgold’s first local retrospective in almost 40 years features the Harlem-born artist’s figures, craft techniques and storytelling in inventive combinations. And it makes clear that what consigned Ringgold to an outlier track half a century ago puts her front and center now. The show begins with a group of brooding, broadly stroked figure paintings from the 1960s called “American People Series.” All the pictures are about hierarchies of power; women are barely even present. Ringgold referred to this early, wary work as “super realist.”In the ’80s, an elaboration on the painted quilt form, called “story quilts,” brought Ringgold attention both inside and outside the art world. It is the vehicle for Ringgold’s most formally complex and buoyant painting project, “The French Connection.” Overall, it feels, in tone, like a far cry from the “American People” pictures, but there’s politics at work in the French paintings, too. Read the review. 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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      How Film Forum Became the Best Little Movie House in New York

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      It’s just before 8 p.m. on a recent Friday night in Manhattan, and a crowd of moviegoers is lined up to see “Great Freedom” (2021), an Austrian film that tells the tender and terrible story of a concentration camp survivor in Germany who’s repeatedly imprisoned for his sexuality. Sebastian Meise, the film’s director, and its star, Franz Rogowski, will be giving a Q. and A. after the showing, so there’s a palpable sense that this is an event.Outside on West Houston Street, the glow of the marquee — “Film Forum” written in curving, blue neon letters — beckons like a spaceship. Upon seeing it, I feel the thrill of catching a movie in an actual cinema: It’s my first visit to Film Forum since it reopened in 2021 following a nearly 13-month closure on account of Covid-19.In the lobby, there’s anticipatory chatter: film students talking into their phones and older Greenwich Village and SoHo locals (like me) discussing the state of the world. The reserved seating system — a measure instigated during the pandemic — ended this month, and the first-come-first-served rule resumed, bringing back with it the kvetching about grabbing a preferred seat. The theater director, filmmaker and painter André Gregory, a devout Film Forum fan, once left sweaters on a pair of chairs while he and his wife, the filmmaker Cindy Kleine, went for chocolate egg creams in the lobby and returned to find people sitting in them. “The woman said, ‘I don’t care. We’re not moving,’ and [her companion] threw my sweater in my direction,” Gregory says with a laugh. In 2018, the theater underwent a renovation — prompted in part by a common refrain, “Love the movies, hate the seats,” from guests in an audience survey two years earlier — and upgraded its chairs, which are now softer, wider and infinitely more comfortable.The rest of the interior is also welcoming, with big red columns, and walls hung with movie posters, film schedules and original art. At the lobby concession stand, there’s good espresso and great snacks, both the requisite popcorn and baked goods, including a particularly delicious orange-chocolate Bundt cake. The theater’s director, Karen Cooper, who has been in charge of Film Forum for 50 of its 52 years, may be fiercely political in her choice of films — tonight’s movie was her discovery — but she’s all doting mother when it comes to the sweets, most of which come from Betty Bakery in Brooklyn.The view from inside theater 1, which, since Film Forum’s 2018 renovation, features wider seats.Blaine DavisA corkboard display case in the lobby shows current and future screenings and events.Blaine DavisThe story of movies as art, especially in Manhattan is, in part, a tale of the rise and fall of independent cinemas. When I was a child, there was the Art on 8th Street, the 8th Street Playhouse and the Bleecker Street Cinema, all within blocks of one another. By the end of the 1990s, though, these had all shut down. But Film Forum, which opened in 1970, has always been special and thrives to this day, playing as many as 400 or 500 films every year (a fourth screen was also added in the renovation).It has spawned and nurtured a real community of cinephiles, who come to laugh, cry and argue. Sometimes, the audience feels like a part of the show — I once heard a fight break out in Russian in the back row. And before a screening of “Amazing Grace,” the 2018 concert documentary of Aretha Franklin’s 1972 gospel performances in a Los Angeles church, I witnessed a lobby packed with middle-aged women of all races singing “Respect,” as if they were teenagers about to enter a rock concert.For many, Film Forum is also a place to get an education. Peter Nelson, a cinematographer and director, most recently of the acclaimed honeybee documentary “The Pollinators” (2019), says, “In the early ’80s, when I was at N.Y.U. film school, their incredibly diverse program of indies, foreign movies and classics provided access to films that were often not shown anywhere else in town.” Nelson adds, “From time to time, I would do a ‘cinema binge,’ where I would finish watching a film, leave the theater and line up for a different one, often with a delicious brownie to hold me over.” Gina Duncan, the president-elect of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is also a fan. “Anyone who wants to run their own cinema imagines a place like Film Forum: a dedicated audience, good concessions and great programming,” she says. “It’s unpretentious, and I think that’s got a lot to do with Karen Cooper.”Karen Cooper, Film Forum’s longtime director, stands in a theater and against one of the space’s instantly recognizable red columns.Blaine DavisCooper was a newly minted Smith College graduate when she arrived back in her native New York City in 1970 and started looking for a job in the arts. In 1972, she became director of the nascent Film Forum, then located in a small loft space on West 88th Street with 50 folding chairs. “My annual budget was about $19,000,” she says. “And I made the coffee.” She’s held the same title ever since. In 1975, Cooper moved Film Forum downtown to the Vandam Theater; in 1980, she built a two-screen cinema on Watts Street. In 1990, Film Forum moved once more, this time to its current location between Varick Street and Sixth Avenue. Today, Cooper’s budget is around six million.At 73, Cooper, who lives in the far West Village and walks to work every day, is vividly articulate and fast moving, a dynamo who oversees a staff of 50 (give or take), the cinema’s fund-raising (Film Forum is a nonprofit with a board of 24) and much of programming. It’s Cooper who, along with the programmer Mike Maggiore and the deputy director Sonya Chung, looks after the new indie films and documentaries, while repertory director Bruce Goldstein handles revivals with the associate repertory programmer Elspeth Carroll. Cooper attends at least a couple of international festivals each year, and she’s rubbed elbows with everyone in the business from Werner Herzog to Robert Redford, but never name drops. “No one really knows celebrities,” says Cooper. “I wouldn’t pretend otherwise.”She believes the best documentaries can help change the world. “I grew up in the 1960s, during the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement — all essentially about human rights — and they move me deeply,” she says of the nonfiction narratives.The view of theater 1 from inside the projection booth.Blaine DavisCooper has brought in films like Spike Lee’s “4 Little Girls” (1997), about the children killed in the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church, and, in March, Christine Turner’s “Lynching Postcards: ‘Token of a Great Day’” (2021), a documentary short about 20th-century postcards depicting scenes of murdered Black Americans and bloodthirsty white onlookers — once souvenirs — and the way Black activists repurposed them to combat the horrors of lynching.Sergei Loznitsa’s “Babi Yar. Context,” the devastating 2021 documentary on the 1941 Nazi massacre of tens of thousands of Jews over two days at the Babi Yar ravine on the edge of Kyiv in Ukraine, is slotted for an April 1 showing, but was programmed months before the current Russian invasion. No doubt, Gregory, who was born in France and fled Europe with his Russian Jewish parents just before the Nazi invasion, will catch it. “I have a similar interest in films about fascism,” he says. Cooper confirms this: “André has seen every one of my Nazi movies,” she says, “and that’s saying a lot.”10 Movies to Watch This Oscar SeasonCard 1 of 10“Belfast.” More

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      ‘Bronco Bullfrog’: Hello Young Lovers

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      Barney Platts-Mills’s 1969 feature about aimless East End teenagers in love comes to Film Forum after a cinematic rediscovery.An auspicious first feature, Barney Platts-Mills’s “Bronco Bullfrog” fell between the cracks — a belated example of British “kitchen sink” naturalism that arrived in 1969 before the wave of disaffected youth films by Mike Leigh and Alan Parker.Still, the writer-director Platts-Mills lived to see his movie restored and revived, if not to enjoy its American rediscovery, heralded by a weeklong run at Film Forum in New York.Platts-Mills intended “Bronco Bullfrog” as a British equivalent of Italian neo-realism: A cast of nonactors recruited from the streets of London’s depressed East End enact a story that might have been their own. Indeed, the movie grew out of a short documentary, “Everybody’s an Actor, Shakespeare Said,” that Platts-Mills made about an improvisatory workshop established by the radical theater artist Joan Littlewood in the neighborhood.The camera tilts down from smoky factories to a world of grimy alleys, dreary housing projects and aimless teenagers, who are introduced smashing into a cheap cafe to find nothing more than a few pence and some stale cakes — the first of many disappointments. A similarly barren establishment is where diffident Del (Del Walker), 17, an apprentice welder with a bad Beatles haircut, first courts discomfited Irene (Anne Gooding), a gawky 15-year-old schoolgirl in a micro mini.The couple’s awkwardness is compelling. According to Platts-Mills — who at 25 wasn’t much older than his actors — the movie was largely improvised because the cast hadn’t bothered to read the script. Del and Irene are frequently at a loss for words but, in the Littlewood tradition, Platts-Mills gives their relationship a Shakespearean framework. Irene’s mother loathes Del as instinctively as Del’s father hates Irene. What brings the couple closer is precisely their inability to find a place to be together.The fantasy of escape is underlined by the movie’s title. Bronco Bullfrog (Sam Shepherd) is the neighborhood hero — newly escaped from reform school to embark on a dead-end career of petty larceny. Del and Irene suggest lumpen mods; Bronco is a suedehead with wide suspenders and polished work boots. He has style but no sense, happily hiding out amid cartons of stolen consumer goods he is unable to fence.Movies are part of the daydream. In a rare liberating moment, Del pays for a movie ticket then opens a theater’s side door for a small crowd of crashers that includes a jolly grandmother. A corresponding scene has Del and Irene venture into London’s West End to discover they don’t have enough money to see “Oliver!,” a candy-color musical treatment of criminalized youth.Platts-Mills’s film is unpretentiously atmospheric: The thick Cockney accents require subtitles, and Audience, an East End prog band, supplies a credible score. Its understatement impressed the New York Times critic Roger Greenspun who, appreciative, wrote that, “It takes a while, with ‘Bronco Bullfrog’ to realize that you are witnessing a love story, so free is it from the rhetoric of love, or love stories.”“Bronco Bullfrog” is essentially a study in frustration — economic, sexual, even cosmic. (Del matures at the very moment that his life unravels.) But its bleak ending is mitigated by the energy of the cast and the spirit of the filmmaking.Bronco BullfrogPlays Friday, March 25 through Thursday, March 31 at Film Forum, Manhattan; filmforum.org. More