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      ‘Force of Circumstance’ Comes to MoMA

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      Liza Béar’s deadpan anti-thriller returns to the Museum of Modern Art for a limited engagement.A young Moroccan woman slips into Washington, D.C., hoping to provide a journalist with intel on the United States’ clandestine involvement in a war for the contested Western Sahara. Once there, she crosses paths with two clownish compatriots looking to purchase a Washington safe house for the king of Morocco.Shot in 1984, unreleased until 1990, and revived decades later in the Museum of Modern Art’s annual restoration series “To Save and Project,” Liza Béar’s deadpan anti-thriller, “Force of Circumstance,” returns to MoMA for a limited engagement.A triumph of low-budget production design, the movie opens in a North African shantytown, impeccably realized in a vacant East Village lot. Thanks to the film composer Mader’s evocative score and ambient sound that Béar recorded in Casablanca, the scene, which introduces the young courier Mouallem (Boris Major), has a hyperreal authenticity.Cut to Washington, Mouallem peers through a taxi window as the Watergate complex whizzes past. This strange landscape, through which she is shadowed by the royal envoy (Eric Mitchell) and his bodyguard (Filip Pagowski), takes another form when her hotel room TV broadcasts — what else?—“Casablanca.”“Force of Circumstance” can’t sustain this suavely contrived mixture of dis- and reorientation. Still, Béar’s spectacle of downtown artists playing spy vs. spy in an assortment of Washington locations — a descendant of Louis Feuillade’s World War I serials in which fantastic crimes were staged on the streets of Paris — transcends the soggy plot, created in collaboration with the East Village writer Craig Gholson.Mysteries proliferate and evaporate like puddles after summer rain. The envoy and the bodyguard wander through Georgetown searching for a colonial mansion. Mouallem, always wearing a new outfit, is never far away, hoping to contact the feisty journalist Katrina (Jessica Stutchbury), who is having an affair with Hans (Tom Wright), the dissolute rich boy looking to unload his ancestral home.Béar, a central figure in New York’s 1980s art world, has said that her film was inspired by the Casablanca bread riots in 1981. The movie is dated less by its historical references than by its green-character-displaying computer screens and a cast seemingly culled from a Club 57 theme party: Major (a member of Squat Theater); a pre-Hollywood Steve Buscemi; the musician Evan Lurie; the scene-maker Glenn O’Brien; the performance artist Rockets Redglare; and the filmmaker Eric Mitchell, who cast both Stutchbury and Wright in his own downtown movies. Capped with a fez, speaking some sort of French patois, Mitchell brings his own campy aura to the movie, including the portentous punchline: “Choice is a Western concept.”The New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin, who had little sympathy for the film, wrote that “the avidity with which Ms. Béar, absorbs and mimics big-budget clichés is a lot more impressive than the way those clichés have been used.” Indeed, “Force of Circumstance,” which appropriates a title used by both W. Somerset Maugham and Simone de Beauvoir, is more an art object than a conventional movie, even ending with a screen full of actual documents, as a conceptual piece from the early ’70s might.This faux “thriller” has a sustained look, an intriguing cast, an entertaining attitude and a propulsive score. Its main flaw is the script — which, given the current Writers Guild of America strike, makes it all the more timely.Force of CircumstanceThrough May 30 at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan; moma.org. More

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      At New Directors/New Films, See the World Through Perceptive Filmmakers’ Eyes

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      “Earth Mama,” “Tótem” and other strong entries offer proof that the art form is flourishing regardless of what’s happening in Hollywood.Like the vernal equinox, New Directors/New Films is a sign that winter and the soul-crushing slog known as awards season have finally ended. Now in its 52nd year, the festival, opening Wednesday, is a great place to recharge and revive. With a slate largely drawn from recent international film festivals — from Berlin and Locarno to Sundance — the 12-day event is also a nice way to travel the world by proxy while previewing work before it begins percolating into art theaters and onto streaming services.Each edition of New Directors — a presentation of Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art — is partly shaped by the competition from other events. It’s also shaped by its programmers’ tastes and orthodoxies, including ideas about what constitutes a festival movie, which, much as at Cannes and elsewhere, tends to mean gravely serious, non-genre work. That can get monotonous, but at its best, New Directors offers enduring proof of cinematic life beyond the corporate bottom line: The festival’s commitment to film art is a galvanizing article of faith.This year’s program consists of 27 features, about half of which are North American premieres, along with some dozen shorts. Among the strongest is the opener, “Earth Mama,” the terrifically assured feature debut from the writer-director Savanah Leaf, a former Olympic volleyball player. Set in the Bay Area, this contemporary drama tracks the heartbreaking, frustrating, at times exasperatingly self-sabotaging daily travails of Gia (a lovely Tia Nomore), a young, single, heavily pregnant woman, as she tries to regain custody of her son and daughter, who are in foster care. Every conceivable odd has been stacked against Gia, including the degradations of systemic oppression.Anchored by Leaf’s empathy and by her precise, confident visual style, the story unfolds during the last stretch of Gia’s pregnancy. With naturalistic dialogue that largely avoids exegesis — as well as with expressionistic flourishes and subtle camerawork that often reveal what the characters don’t or can’t say — Leaf skillfully engages with larger social issues while steering clear of the kind of sermonizing that too often seeps into similarly themed dramas. In Leaf’s hands, Gia isn’t a case study or object lesson. She is instead a woman who’s both singular and much like any other — a human being, in other words, struggling to find a place and a sense of sovereignty amid the onslaughts of everyday life.Cole Doman, left, and Lío Mehiel in “Mutt,” directed by Vuk Lungulov-Klotz.Courtesy of Quiltro LLC“Mutt,” another festival highlight, this one set in present-day New York, follows its heart-stealing title character across a single exceedingly eventful and emotionally fraught day. Written and directed by Vuk Lungulov-Klotz, it centers on Feña, a young man who has recently transitioned (played by the charismatic Lío Mehiel, who, like the filmmaker, is trans), as he crisscrosses the city and through the labyrinthine complexities of his life, including his tricky, sometimes confusing relationships with friends and family. With fluid cinematography, deft narrative pacing and swells of feeling, Lungulov-Klotz creates an urgent, of-the-moment portrait of a young man who’s at once distinct and movingly, rightfully ordinary.Like most movies on the contemporary festival circuit, the selections in New Directors tend to draw on a hodgepodge of different realist traditions (Hollywood, the European art film, Sundance, etc.). This year, more than a few selections also incorporate fantastical interludes — from brief hallucinations to alternative worlds — that productively complicate and on occasion destabilize their realism. One of the boldest, most extensive uses of the fantastic occurs in “The Maiden,” a dreamy, gentle story of loss and mourning from the Canadian writer-director Graham Foy. Set in the hinterlands of Alberta, the movie focuses on several teenagers, both living and dead — a haunting that feels like a generational cri de coeur.I’m still puzzling through the far-out, what-in-the-what finale of “Astrakan,” a drama from the French writer-director David Depesseville about a watchful 12-year-old, Samuel (the appealing Mirko Giannini), who’s been placed in a foster family that seems supremely ill-equipped to deal with his trauma. For most of its running time, the movie embraces a familiar if somewhat stylized realism only to abruptly veer into full-blown symbolism. Like some of the other movies in the lineup, “Astrakan” owes a conspicuous debt to established filmmakers — the boy at times evokes François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel while the filmmaking nods at Robert Bresson via Bruno Dumont — although at its strongest, it stands on its own.The cinematic touchstones are just as obvious elsewhere in the program, which isn’t necessarily a negative. The influence of the Ukrainian auteur Sergei Loznitsa clearly informs the dramatic tumult, political pessimism and elegantly flowing camerawork of “Pamfir,” a visually striking drama from the writer-director Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk about a smuggler who’s recently returned home. There’s certainly some of the Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes’s DNA in “Tommy Guns,” a far-out tale from Carlos Conceição that opens in Angola (where he was born) during the tail end of that country’s war of independence. The movie opens powerfully and gathers dramatic momentum as it begins to blur the time frame, only to lose its sting (and focus on subjugated Angolans) when it drifts into self-conscious surrealism.Naíma Sentíes in “Tótem,” the second feature from writer-director Lila Avilés.Courtesy of Limerencia FilmsEnergetic, sweeping and feminist to the bone, the Iranian drama “Leila’s Brothers,” from the writer-director Saeed Roustaee, traces its title character through the claustrophobic tumult of her life, family and world. Leila (Taraneh Alidoosti, vivid and grounded) is trying to balance her desires with the competing, clamorous needs of her squabbling brothers and impoverished, traditionally minded parents. Organized around a series of encounters, the movie fuses the personal with the political. It opens with a protest that soon turns violent, an overture that sets the tense, fractious mood and telegraphs the story’s trajectory. Then, scene by scene, it lays bare the complexities of contemporary Iran.“Chile ’76,” Manuela Martelli’s visually and tonally meticulous exploration of political resistance and conscience, takes place in the brutal years after the 1973 American-backed coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power. Soon after it opens, Carmen (Aline Küppenheim), a doctor’s wife with expensive taste who’s decamped to her family’s vacation home, is asked by a priest for help with a wounded stranger. Before long Carmen is drawn into a shadowy world of passwords and strange noises on the phone, and this unnerving feature has turned into a veritable horror movie. When a body washes up on a beach, Carmen tells her grandchildren to avert their eyes; by then, though, hers have been pried open.There isn’t a false note in the tender Mexican drama “Tótem,” which follows the 7-year-old Sol (Naíma Sentíes, suitably luminous) as she navigates the chaos and indifference of her sprawling family during celebrations for her ailing father. With intricate staging, lapidary camerawork and an expressionistically warm palette — along charming appearances from the natural world — the writer-director Lila Avilés creates a richly textured, deeply compassionate portrait of a family that’s falling apart as one of its youngest members comes into consciousness. “Tótem” is only Avilés’s second feature — her first, “The Chambermaid,” screened at the 2019 festival — but it’s also one of the finest movies you’ll see this year.“Tótem” is also the kind of movie that I think one of the festival’s early programmers, the writer Donald Richie, had in mind when he told The Times in 1972 that the inaugural New Directors “will introduce deserving films that perhaps otherwise might not have exposure here.” It was an honorable idea then; it still is. If anything, the fragility of the art-film exhibition, which has only been worsened by the pandemic, makes the festival’s support of movies like “Tótem” feel even more necessary than it did back then. And if I haven’t convinced you to get off the couch, then consider that this year the festival has sweetened its offerings with a smartly priced package of five movies for $50 — a cinephile carrot that’s as good as it gets.New Directors/New Films runs from Wednesday through April 9. For more information, go to newdirectors.org. More

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      Claudia Cardinale Gets MoMA Tribute for Film Career

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      Ahead of a MoMA retrospective, the actress reflected on her career, which includes over 100 films and many classics of Italian cinema.On a recent afternoon in Rome, Claudia Cardinale recalled the many heartthrobs she worked with during her more than six-decade movie career, and let out a full-throated laugh.“And they also wanted to make love with me,” she said, “but I always refused.”Over the years, the fresh-faced beauty — who David Niven, her co-star in an early “Pink Panther” movie, once described as Italy’s best invention besides spaghetti — had given the cold shoulder to more than one famous screen Casanova, Cardinale said in an interview. “They tried,” she added. “I turned down seducers.”Then she laughed her mischievous laugh again.Cardinale, 84, was in Rome last month for the Italian presentation of a newly restored version of Luigi Comencini’s 1963 film “La ragazza di Bube” (“Bebo’s Girl”), about a small-town girl who stands by her man, even after he is convicted of a crime and goes to jail.“Bebo’s Girl,” which earned Cardinale her first prestigious acting award, Italy’s Nastro d’Argento for best actress, will be shown on Friday at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first in a 23-film retrospective honoring the Tunisian-born Italian actress that runs through Feb. 21. It is one of a handful of times that the museum has presented a tribute to a living actor in its more than 90-year history.“Beautiful actresses come and go,” Joshua Siegel, a MoMA curator, said in video message shown at the Rome screening. “But they usually don’t endure over a period of some 60, 65 years.”Cardinale with Fabio Rinaudo at the opening night of “8 ½,” in Rome, in 1963. Archivio Luce CinecittàCardinale said she would not be in New York for the retrospective; she no longer travels like she used to. It tires her — she now uses a cane to get around — and she prefers to stay out of the limelight.Cardinale was in the public eye long enough, starring in more than 100 films since 1956. For many film buffs, she is best remembered for her roles in Italian cinema classics: as the young wife Ginetta in Luchino Visconti’s “Rocco and His Brothers”; as Angelica, a commoner whose vitality and beauty seduces Sicilian aristocracy in Visconti’s “The Leopard”; as the enigmatic Claudia in Federico Fellini’s “8 ½,”; or as the feisty Jill, the widow with a ranch to protect in Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West.”She also has boasting rights from her star turn in Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo,” a legendarily difficult movie that was shot in the Peruvian jungle and described in The New York Times as a favorite of “connoisseurs of production disasters,” and the movie and its making as “fables of daft aspiration.”Cardinale has said that “Fitzcarraldo” was the adventure of her life, but during an interview last month, she said she had no particular favorites. “My God, I’ve done some many, I don’t know which one I prefer,” she said, and laughed again. “Maybe ‘Once Upon a Time in the West,’” she said, “and then so many others.”Cardinale in “Once Upon a Time in The West.”Paramount Pictures, via Everett CollectionThe MoMA tribute, organized with Cinecittà, Italy’s national film company, includes some of Cardinale’s better known performances. But for the occasion, Cinecittà also restored three works less likely to be known to American audiences: “Bebo’s Girl,” but also Marco Ferreri’s 1972 “The Audience,” about a man’s obsession with meeting with the pope, and Pasquale Squitieri’s 1990 “Atto di Dolore,” about a widow whose son is a drug addict.Though Cardinale’s name will forever be associated with classics of Italian cinema, she spoke little Italian when she first set foot there in 1957.Cardinale was born in Tunisia in 1938, into a family of Sicilian immigrants that had settled there decades before. “I still feel a little bit Tunisian,” Cardinale told the news agency ANSA in May at a ceremony to name a street in her honor in the port town La Goulette, near Tunis.In 1957, she won the Most Beautiful Italian in Tunisia contest, which came with what turned out to be her ticket to stardom: a trip to the Venice Film Festival.Cardinale on the set of the film “Austerlitz” by Abel Gance (1960).Archivio Luce CinecittàIn “Claudia Cardinale: The Indomitable,” a book published by Cinecittà and Electa to coincide with the MoMA tribute, the author and critic Masolino D’Amico recalls being at that festival and seeing Cardinale for the first time, “splendid in all her youthfulness,” wearing an emerald green bikini and posing for the paparazzi.“She seemed to think that small shower of camera clicks was like a game,” Masolino writes. “She was not — I understand this clearly now — trying to be sexy, and maybe not even attractive. She was simply happy to be there.”In Venice, she caught the eye of Franco Cristaldi, at the time one of Italy’s most important producers, who, in Pygmalion fashion, transformed the young ingénue into an in-demand movie star. He also became her life partner, adopting her son, Patrick Cristaldi. Now 64, he was initially passed off as her brother so as not to crack her “virginal feel and glow,” or to scandalize society, Cardinale’s daughter, Claudia Squitieri said.Stardom had a price. Cristaldi demanded hard work and discipline, and in 1962 drafted a contract that oversaw every aspect of the actress’s life, professional and private. She accepted, if reluctantly: Her family depended on her, and she had a child to raise.That life ended when she met the director Pasquale Squitieri in 1973 on the set of “I guappi,” (“Blood Brothers”) and the two fell madly in love. Their careers took a hit: Cristaldi was a powerful producer in Italy whom industry people feared crossing.“Claudia Cardinale: The Indomitable,” a book published by Cinecittà and Electa to coincide with the MoMA tribute. via Puntoe VirgolaCardinale would make nine films with Squitieri, even after she moved to Paris and he remained in Rome. Never married, they eventually split, but remained close.Claudia Squitieri and Patrick Cristaldi now live with their mother in a house near Fontainebleau, France, where Cardinale has created a foundation to support two causes close to her heart: women’s rights and the environment. Cardinale has been a UNESCO good will ambassador since 2000, for campaigning work to improve the status of women and girls, and she is the honorary president of Green Cross Italy, an environment advocacy group that sponsors an award for sustainable films at the Venice Film Festival. The foundation is “something to continue her shine,” said Squitieri, who runs the organization for her mother.Cardinale said she was very close to Squitieri. “I am lucky to have this daughter, who I adore,” she said. “She looks after me; she looks after everything.”Because Cardinale won’t be in New York this week, Squitieri will do the honors. On Friday, the “Bebo’s Girl” screening will be followed by “Un Cardinale donna” (“A Woman Cardinal”), a whimsical short featuring the actress, produced for the retrospective by Manuel Maria Perrone.Speaking at the film’s Rome premiere, Perrone said that “dealing with an idol, with such a strong icon, is something extremely difficult, even fragile.”“She’s been doing this her whole life,” he said. “Being an icon is her job.”Claudia CardinaleFeb. 3 through Feb. 21, at the Museum of Modern Art; moma.org. More

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      Adrienne Mancia, Influential Film Curator, Dies at 95

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      Her choices for exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Academy of Music gave foreign directors and newcomers valuable exposure in New York.Adrienne Mancia, who scoured the world for significant films and brought them to New York as a longtime curator at the Museum of Modern Art and later at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, died on Sunday in Teaneck, N.J. She was 95.Her niece Francine Pozner Ehrenberg confirmed the death, in a care center.Ms. Mancia was instrumental in giving audiences some of their earliest looks at work by Wim Wenders of Germany, Manoel de Oliveira of Portugal and other notable directors, and helped rediscover archival gems and introduce subgenres like European animation and Cinema Novo from Brazil.She joined MoMA in 1964 as the secretary to Richard Griffith, the curator of the museum’s film department. Soon she was given the title of curatorial assistant and began organizing exhibitions; she rose to associate curator and then, in 1977, curator. She held that title until 1998, when she left for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which was opening the BAM Rose Cinemas and moving into film programming.Her choices were crucial in expanding the horizons of American cinephiles, particularly in her early decades at MoMA.“As this was before the age of videotape, internet and niche movie channels,” Jon Gartenberg, a curator of MoMA’s film archive for part of her tenure and a longtime friend, said by email, “the recognition for the films that she curated at MoMA garnered an outsized importance in terms of the New York film culture and beyond.”Other museums would take their cues from the programming at MoMA and in the New Directors/New Films series sponsored by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Film festivals throughout North America would pick up on Ms. Mancia’s finds, and her vast influence led to awards from foreign governments.“Adrienne Mancia has probably contributed more than any other person to the introduction of Italian cinema in America,” Renato Pachetti, the president of the RAI Corporation, which has financed numerous Italian films, said in 1988 when Ms. Mancia received the Order of the Republic of Italy. Four years earlier, France had given her similar recognition, naming her a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.Ms. Mancia traveled extensively in her search for worthy films, both new and old. The film critic J. Hoberman, who knew her for decades and worked with her as a curator on a 1991 exhibition, “Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds,” said Ms. Mancia had not been content with simply accepting the film packages that other countries would send.“She loved to work in archives,” he said in a phone interview. “She didn’t want them to tell her which films to show. She wanted to pick them out herself.”Her interests were not limited to foreign films, or to the highbrow end of the cinematic spectrum.“She was a cinephile,” Mr. Hoberman said, “but she was not a snob.”In 1979 she organized a seemingly un-MoMA-like retrospective of films from American International Pictures, which in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s specialized in low-budget, quickly made movies for the drive-in crowd like “Girls in Prison” (1956) and “Beach Party” (1963). It wasn’t just an exercise in kitsch.“It’s extraordinary to see how many filmmakers, writers and actors — now often referred to as ‘the new Hollywood’ — took their first creative steps at American International,” she said at the time.“Low budgets can force you to find fresh resources,” she continued, adding that there was an “energy to these feisty films that capture a certain very American quality.”In 1985 she presented an exhibition of films featuring Bugs Bunny and other Warner Bros. cartoon characters. Again, nostalgia wasn’t the point; the artistry represented by predigital film animation was.“This exhibition makes me very happy and very sad,” she told The New York Times. “It makes me happy because I love it and sad because it might very well be the end of a great era, the end of complete animation, done frame by frame with great care, approaching art.”Adrienne Phyllis Johnson was born on June 5, 1927, in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her father, Harry Johnson, owned a furniture store, and her mother, Fae (Weintraub) Johnson, was a homemaker.She grew up in Paterson, N.J., and graduated from Eastside High School in 1944 after skipping a few grades. She received a bachelor’s degree at the University of Wisconsin at 20, and later earned a master’s degree at Columbia University.Her niece said that she married Umberto Mancia in Italy, where she spent much of the 1950s. The marriage ended in divorce.At MoMA, she helped establish Cineprobe, a program that from 1968 to 2002 presented works by independent and experimental filmmakers and hosted discussions with them. Though many of Ms. Mancia’s exhibitions were more mainstream, she especially enjoyed spotlighting new and little-known works and directors.“To discover people who have new ways of saying things with film is thrilling,” she told The Daily News of New York in 1987. “It keeps the idea alive that there are still surprises out there.”Ms. Mancia, who lived in Manhattan, is survived by a sister, Merle Johnson Pozner.Those who worked with her said that filmmakers weren’t the only ones who benefited from Ms. Mancia; she also influenced many younger curators.“For me, Adrienne was a major bridge between creation and curation,” Mr. Gartenberg said. “Early in my career, working at such an august institution as MoMA, Adrienne pulled me aside and reminded me that without filmmakers, none of us would have any jobs. She instilled in me a sense of humbleness that my mission was to support their creativity in my curatorial work.”Upon her death, Ron Magliozzi, a longtime MoMA staff member who is now a curator in the film department, sent an email to colleagues.“If only a little of Adrienne’s unmatched passion for cinema rubbed off on you,” it said, “it was enough to fuel your career.” 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