Metrograph Theater (Manhattan, NY, Movie Theater)

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    ‘Pink Narcissus’: A Home Movie Both Abject and Erotic

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    Originally released anonymously, this homoerotic fantasia by James Bidgood gets its first theatrical run in 54 years at Metrograph.As its title suggests, “Pink Narcissus” is something of a hothouse flower. A feature-length movie, shot over a period of seven years on eight-millimeter film and elaborate sets constructed in the filmmaker’s tiny Manhattan apartment, it’s also a labor of love — focusing largely on a single actor.Originally released anonymously, this homoerotic fantasia created by the photographer James Bidgood, newly restored by the film and television archive at the University of California, Los Angeles, gets its first theatrical run in 54 years at Metrograph, starting April 11.The breathtaking opening sequence in which a full moon is glimpsed through a tangled forest is as fastidious as a late 1930s Disney animation, an association supported by a musical track heavy on program music like Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain.” Soon, amid busy butterflies and fluttering flowers, Bidgood’s young star, known as Bobby Kendall, makes his first appearance.The movie has no dialogue and, so far as I can tell, no women. Dressed variously in tight white jeans and short kimonos, but most often posed as a nude odalisque, Kendall plays a kept rent-boy whose fantasies provide a succession of set pieces, as when he imagines himself as a matador whose bull is a hard-charging biker. Kendall also participates in a toga party and is entertained by a provocative belly dancer in a male seraglio.Sex acts are implied and full nudity coyly veiled. Explicit yet decorous, “Pink Narcissus” is founded on a dialectic between the erotic and the abject. The rococo apartment and an idealized natural world of rosy sunsets vie with a dank public urinal and an invented, garbage-strewn Times Square where pushcarts sell vibrators and other sex toys. Charles Ludlam can be glimpsed among the denizens of this sordid domain, but more than Ludlam’s “ridiculous” theater, Bidgood’s precursors are taboo-breaking movies like Jack Smith’s “Flaming Creatures” and Kenneth Anger’s “Fireworks.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Bona’: A Filipina Superstar Wreaks Vengeance in a Two-Fisted Melodrama

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      Recently rediscovered and now digitally restored, Lino Brocka’s 1980 movie, starring Nora Aunor, opens for a week at Metrograph.The title character in “Bona,” a stark tale of selfless devotion by the Filipino director and prominent political activist Lino Brocka (1939-1991), is a middle-class Manila schoolgirl who develops a fierce, morbid attachment to a narcissistic movie extra — a fantasy all the more desperate for being set and shot on location in the miserable slum where her idol lives.Made in 1980, thought lost, recently rediscovered and now digitally restored, “Bona” was featured in the most recent New York Film Festival and begins a weeklong run at Metrograph on Friday.As mordant in its way as the slyly subversive movies Luis Buñuel made in Mexico, Brocka’s two-fisted melodrama is a hellish, compelling work by a director whom the French critic Serge Daney, then editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, called “the great filmmaker of the ’70s.”“Bona” opens with a high-angle shot of a screen-filling crowd, participants in a Philippine religious spectacle, the Feast of the Black Nazarene. Glimpsed among the masses, Bona (Nora Aunor) is next seen as a star-struck spectator to a movie shoot whose extras include the handsome Gardo (Phillip Salvador, an axiom of Brocka’s cinema). Diminutive and determined, Bona cuts school to continue watching the production and, after a beating from her father, runs away to become Gardo’s devotee — an unpaid live-in maid.Bona had plastered her room with pictures of Gardo. His image is similarly ubiquitous chez Gardo, a shack without plumbing in Manila’s largest slum, Tondo. Reporting on the 1982 Manila Film Festival, the journalist Elliott Stein noted that as the area was officially off-limits for film production, “Bona” was not simply a movie but “an admirable act of civil disobedience” — fitting for a movie in which “obedience” is key.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Metrograph Theater Starts a Film Magazine

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      A throwback publication courts cinephiles with stories featuring Ari Aster, Maggie Cheung, Daniel Clowes, Clint Eastwood and Ann Hui.At a time when print media is on the way out and streaming technology has slashed into box office returns, a band of downtown cinephiles in New York has started a film magazine.The Metrograph, a biannual publication from the art-house theater of the same name, will make its debut in December. The first issue, priced at $25, includes an in-depth interview with Clint Eastwood, a critical appraisal of the Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui, an essay on Filipino action movies and an analysis of a single shot of Maggie Cheung from the 1996 film “Irma Vep.”“This magazine is meant to be an extension of what happens at Metrograph, and everything about Metrograph is intended to enhance moviegoing and the seductiveness of cinema,” Annabel Brady-Brown, the magazine’s editor, said. “We want this magazine to evoke that feeling you get when you go to Metrograph on a Saturday afternoon with a friend or on a date.”The photo on the cover — showing the cinematographer Ed Lachman standing next to the director Jean-Luc Godard in the early 1980s — conveys the idea that this is a publication for devout film fans.The issue features a wide-ranging conversation between Ari Aster, the director of “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” and the graphic novelist Daniel Clowes. Steve Martin also interviews the two men behind Deceptive Practices, a consultancy founded by magicians that has advised a number of film productions, including “Ocean’s Thirteen” and “The Prestige.”The editorial team takes a look at the coming issue soon after it went to print.Graham Dickie/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Want to Turn Your House into the Art House? Try Metrograph at Home.

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      The Metrograph theater in New York has expanded to include a streaming platform that spotlights foreign, art house, independent, classic and documentary selections.When the Metrograph theater opened on New York’s Lower East Side in spring of 2016, it wasn’t just a cinema; it was an experience, offering up two screens of new independent films, archival screenings and special events, as well as an on-site bar, restaurant and bookshop. In the years that followed, Metrograph’s reach continued to grow, as did the opportunities for film lovers to patronize the theater beyond its walls, thanks to the establishment of Metrograph Pictures (a distribution company restoring and championing archival releases) and the Metrograph Journal (featuring thoughtful film writing from a variety of contributors).But like so many other theaters, particularly independent ones, Metrograph faced a crisis in the spring of 2020, as Covid forced the doors to close at 7 Ludlow St. But that July, the company launched what was initially known as Metrograph Digital, with an ambitious calendar of live screening events developed and curated by the theater’s programming team, featuring new releases and repertory titles supplemented by guest introductions and interviews. Those events were initially limited to Metrograph members, but that October, the program expanded to include screenings that were available to nonmembers à la carte.In the years that followed, the service — rechristened Metrograph at Home — expanded from the theater’s website into the streaming platform space, transforming a pandemic stopgap into a specialty streamer spotlighting foreign, art house, independent, classic and documentary selections and monthly verticals. Like similar services we’ve spotlighted here, the library may not be gigantic (it currently boasts 158 feature films, 10 short films, and 55 original videos), but the curation is excellent, the interface is easy to use and the audio and video quality are top-notch. Best of all, it’s affordable; access is bundled with a Metrograph Membership, which is only $5 per month or $50 annually (and which also includes discounted tickets, special events and other perks for in-person members).Here are a few recommendations from their current library:‘The French’: One of Metrograph Pictures’s proudest discoveries is this 1982 documentary from the expatriate American photographer and filmmaker William Klein, who was the first director ever granted permission to shoot at the French Open. He captures the 1981 tournament, in which Bjorn Borg defeated Ivan Lendl, in cinéma vérité style; we see plenty of action on the courts, including Borg’s dramatic victory, but Klein seems less interested in the spotlight than the margins, and the most fascinating footage finds sports gods hanging out and talking shop in the locker room, or trading strategy and gossip in the stands. (There are also plenty of opportunities to observe John McEnroe being a brat.) It’s a panoramic view, keenly observed, and serves as a valuable time capsule of the sport in an earthier and less corporatized era.Isabelle Adjani and Michael Hogben in “Possession.”Gaumont‘Possession’: When Andrzej Zulawski’s psychological horror drama was first released in the United States in 1983, it was in a badly butchered cut, excising much of the film’s weightier material to appeal to a straightforward horror audience that dismissed it. It was all but impossible to see in its original form for years, but Metrograph Pictures oversaw a new 4K restoration, which was the first film screened at the theater when it reopened in the fall of 2021. It’s a deeply unsettling picture, which begins with the marriage of its focal couple (played to the hilt by Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill) in total disrepair, and things go steeply downhill from there; suffice it to say that Adjani’s subway miscarriage is one of the most stunning pieces of acting ever committed to film, a scene that remains indescribable in spite of its notoriety and meme-ability.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Robert Gottlieb’s Books Go Up for Sale

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      Robert Gottlieb didn’t just edit books. He voraciously read and collected them.On Saturday, a portion of his personal library — his books on show business — were sold at a fair in the lobby of the Metrograph theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.When Mr. Gottlieb, who died last June at 92, wasn’t heartlessly lancing thousands of words out of Robert Caro’s biographical volumes or marking up the manuscripts of Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie, he loved watching movies. Along the course of his career, he built a vast collection of books on Hollywood’s golden age.His family was unsure what to do with the collection until earlier this year, when they started talking with Metrograph, a two-screen cinema that is a pillar of the downtown art house scene.Visitors lined up to buy “My Life with Chaplin,” “Fasten Your Seat Belts: The Passionate Life of Bette Davis,” “Little Girl Lost: The Life & Hard Times of Judy Garland” and hundreds of other books. When they opened them, they found a stamped seal reading “From the Library of Robert Gottlieb.” The books were priced around $15 to $40.Reinaldo Buitron, 28, a documentary filmmaker, flipped through a book about the Italian director Roberto Rossellini.“Being able to touch the same books Gottlieb had in his own home is surreal,” he said. “I see we admired the same films, and that makes me think we might have gotten along. That we could have sat for dinner and talked cinema and about his opinions on semicolons.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Fear and Desire’: Kubrick’s First War

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      Stanley Kubrick’s called his first feature, which is getting a new run at Metrograph, “boring and pretentious.” Instead, it is a revelation.Seen in retrospect, a first feature by a major filmmaker can be a revelation particularly if, as with Stanley Kubrick’s low-budget war movie “Fear and Desire,” it concerns a career-long preoccupation — and even more so if the filmmaker has attempted to suppress it.An independent production which, although fictional, premiered in the documentary section of the 1952 Venice Film Festival, “Fear and Desire” is getting a weeklong run at Metrograph, 70 years after its release in the United States.Kubrick, 23, had left his job as a staff photographer for Look magazine when he undertook the project, crediting himself as director, photographer and editor, as well as producer. The means were modest; the story, written by a high-school buddy, Howard Sackler, was epic. A portentous voice-over locates the action “outside history.” Four universal — albeit obviously American — soldiers, trapped six miles behind enemy lines, battle their respective demons in an attempted return to base.In addition to its allegorical framework, the film partakes in then fashionable existentialism. The same actor (Kenneth Harp) is cast as both the squad’s loquaciously philosophical lieutenant and an equally introspective enemy general. The soundtrack is heavy with the men’s internal musings. The new digital restoration includes nine minutes, mostly post-dubbed dialogue, cut after Venice when the film’s title was changed from “The Shape of Fear” by the distributor Joseph Burstyn, the pre-eminent U.S. importer of Italian neorealist films who also released the independent classic “Little Fugitive” in 1953.However arty, “Fear and Desire” is squarely in the American B-movie tradition. The situation — a cutoff platoon — and the pragmatic use of close-ups suggest Samuel Fuller’s Korean War quickie “The Steel Helmet,” which opened in 1951. Instantly notorious for depicting an American war crime, it is a movie Kubrick might well have seen.In Fuller’s film, an enraged soldier shoots an unarmed North Korean prisoner of war. In Kubrick’s, an unbalanced recruit (the future director Paul Mazursky) abuses and ultimately kills a local woman (Virginia Leith) who, having stumbled upon the four soldiers, is bound to a tree, and left in his charge. The sequence which juxtaposes Mazursky’s babbling with the woman’s petrified silence is the movie’s heart of darkness. Although Leith has virtually no dialogue, her image was featured in the movie’s ads.“Fear and Desire” is clumsily dubbed but strikingly photographed. A.H. Weiler’s New York Times review was both sympathetic and supportive, crediting Kubrick and Sackler with “a moody, often visually powerful study” of men under stress. The movie was not, however, a success. Nor was it a fond memory for its maker.When “Fear and Desire” was revived at Film Forum in 1994, Kubrick had a Warner Bros. publicist bombard local critics with letters expressing Kubrick’s feeling that the movie was nothing more than a “bumbling amateur film exercise,” written by a failed poet (an unkind reference to Sackler, who some 25 years after “Fear and Desire” was awarded a Pulitzer for his play “The Great White Hope”).Kubrick characterized “Fear and Desire” as “a completely inept oddity, boring and pretentious.” While undeniably pretentious, the movie is neither inept nor boring. Its oddity lies in its being both a prelude and footnote to Kubrick’s remarkable career.Fear and DesireSept. 22-29, Metrograph in Manhattan, metrograph.com. More

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      ‘Millennium Mambo’: A Lush, Mysterious Tale From Taipei

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      A 4K restoration of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s thrumming, visually bold movie about a self-destructive club girl retains its capital-L look.Sordid yet transcendent, bathed in neon haze and set to a relentless techno-beat, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Millennium Mambo” — the tale of a teenage Taipei club girl — is not only the most pop movie the great Taiwanese filmmaker has ever made but, intermittently, among the most astonishingly beautiful.The movie has a capital-L look, and the 4K restoration, opening at Metrograph in Manhattan on Dec. 23, does it justice.“Millennium Mambo” premiered at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, where it was given a mixed reception and an award for sound design. Hou’s first feature since his exquisite period piece “Flowers of Shanghai,” the movie marked his entry into contemporary territory occupied by two of his younger admirers, the filmmakers Olivier Assayas and Wong Kar-wai.Hou’s frequent cinematographer, Mark Lee Ping-bin, had just shot Wong’s “In the Mood For Love,” and he reprised its voluptuous imagery: Cigarettes are orange points of light in the blue-on-blue disco where Vicky (Shu Qi) spends her nights; the cramped, cruddy apartment she shares with her emotionally abusive boyfriend, a DJ wannabe (Tuan Chun-hao), is a perfumed miasma. The pad’s lush mise-en-scène sets up a shock cut to a gyrating butt in the hostess bar where Vicky has taken a job and where she meets her sometime protector, a benign gangster with a Buddhist streak (Hou regular Jack Kao).Some took “Millennium Mambo” as Hou’s misguided attempt to connect with a younger generation, perhaps forgetting that he had begun his career as a commercial filmmaker and made more than a few “youth films” — notably the not dissimilar and initially underappreciated “Daughter of the Nile.”According to Maggie Cheung, Hou had originally wanted her to play Vicky, opposite Tony Leung, her co-star from “In the Mood for Love.” Shu Qi is a less subtle actor than Cheung, but the movie is stronger for it. Stunningly photogenic, remote and self-destructive, alternately passive and hysterical, Shu Qi’s character lives in a trance, reminiscent of the Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick. As the New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell wrote in his mildly favorable review, “the insistence of high-throb electronica calls out to Vicky, so that she pounds the thoughts out of her head.”Vicky’s neurotic behavior makes “Millennium Mambo” almost a case history or, given her repetitive voice-over narration, a kind of ballad. At the same time, like other Hou films, it is a temporal pretzel. Vicky narrates her story, apparently set in the year 2000, from a point 10 years in the future. Not infrequently we hear about events before we see them.Most mysterious are the brief sequences set in the sleepy, snowy Japanese island of Hokkaido — an alpine environment far different from steamy Taipei. Are these unmotivated scenes a flash-forward to Vicky’s untroubled future? A deliberately unconvincing happy ending à la Douglas Sirk? A fantasy triggered by her chance encounter, while clubbing, with two Japanese brothers?That the director is something of a Japanophile — and that, in a spasm of narrative ambiguity, Vicky finds herself in the snowbound town that hosts the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival — could support any of these theories.Millennium MamboOpens Dec. 23 at Metrograph, Manhattan; metrograph.com. 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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      France’s Colonial Conflict, Filmed From Both Sides

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      “The Olive Trees of Justice,” a neorealist take on the Algerian War made with nonprofessional actors, is newly restored and still resonates today.Shot in Algeria on the eve of independence, “The Olive Trees of Justice” is the only fiction film by the American documentarian James Blue and, based on a novel by the French Algerian writer Jean Pélégri, one that acknowledges colonial oppression as well as post-colonial displacement.Blue’s movie, which had its United States premiere in 1963 as part of the first New York Film Festival, has been revived at Metrograph, newly restored and still resonant.Unsurprisingly, “Olive Trees” has a strong neorealist component. A pre-credit statement announces it as a movie without professional actors. The protagonist Jean (Pierre Prothon) is a young pied-noir — a settler of European descent — who has returned to Algiers from France to be with his dying father (played by Pélégri, who also wrote the screenplay). Some of the strongest scenes follow him through the city’s barricaded streets, hillside slums and bustling markets. In a moment that feels more stolen than staged, French soldiers shut down traffic to check an abandoned shopping bag for explosives. Evidently, the production was itself targeted by right-wing settlers.The movie also has an existentialist aspect. Like the antihero of Camus’s “The Stranger,” also set in Algiers, Jean experiences the death of a parent and views himself as a foreigner in his native land. Prothon has the anguished blankness of a Robert Bresson principal. (Not coincidentally Pélégri had just played the police detective in Bresson’s “Pickpocket.”) Maurice Jarre’s solemn, modernist score adds the underlying angst, as do the helicopters hovering over the city, which, midway through the film, shuts down for Ashura, an Islamic day of mourning.Jean’s return is a trip into his past, shown in extended flashbacks. His dying father, a self-made man, is not so much nostalgic for his lost vineyard (taken by creditors) as for a world “where everyone knew their place.” Jean’s memories are now tainted by a relative’s desire to hold on to her farm by any means necessary and the news that his childhood best friend has joined the National Liberation Army in the mountains.The pervasive sense of impending conflict evoked an unusually personal response from the New York Times reviewer Howard Thompson. Self-identified as a “moviegoer from Dixie who has never set foot in North Africa,” Thompson wrote that the portrait of French settlers forced to enclose their vineyards with barbed wire “suggests trouble clouds scudding over a placid but firmly run plantation of yore.” This nostalgic characterization of slavery notwithstanding, Thompson praised the film’s balance. And indeed Blue is a sympathetic witness to a zero-sum conflict.Having won an award at Cannes in May 1962, “Olive Trees” opened in Paris that June, eight months after hundreds of Algerians were massacred in the city, with French revanchists still planting bombs. The war had come home. Some found the film’s measured gravity a palliative. The Times correspondent Cynthia Grenier reported its praise by critics across the political spectrum who “seemed to have but one regret: that no Frenchman had the courage to make such a film” — perhaps with good reason. The movie utterly failed to attract a French audience.“Olive Trees” is steeped in ambivalence — a dilemma manifest in the abrupt, impulsive decision Jean makes in the movie’s final moments.The Olive Trees of JusticeFriday-Sunday, in person and streaming at Metrograph, Manhattan; metrograph.com. More