New York Film Festival

Subterms

    Latest story

    138 Shares199 Views

    Waiting Hours for 3 Minutes in the Criterion Closet (Well, Van)

    by

    A mobile version of movie fans’ favorite stockroom drew hundreds of New York Film Festival visitors eager to experience what celebrities do in popular videos.The hottest event at this year’s New York Film Festival isn’t a film at all. It’s a van.Parked next to Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, the mobile version of the Criterion Closet — a tiny space stocked with the prestigious DVDs and Blu-rays of films in the Criterion Collection — attracted a line that wrapped around the block.It was a chance for festivalgoers to enact their own version of the Closet Picks videos, in which celebrities like Bill Hader, Ayo Edebiri and Willem Dafoe visit a product-filled closet in the company’s Manhattan office. They pick out their favorite titles and evangelize about their choices while not so coincidentally on tour promoting their latest projects. (Dafoe’s haul included Luchino Visconti’s “The Leopard” and the actor’s own “The Last Temptation of Christ”; Edebiri left with Wes Anderson’s “Bottle Rocket,” among other titles, and Hader’s selections included the western “My Darling Clementine.”)Criterion said some 900 people visited the van.Graham Dickie/The New York TimesFor the company’s 40th anniversary, it adapted the experience to the inside of a delivery van and opened it up to the public, starting with the first two weekends of the New York Film Festival (which concludes Oct. 13). The next stop, scheduled for Oct. 26 and 27, will be in Brooklyn Bridge Park in collaboration with St. Ann’s Warehouse.Visitors to the van are invited to film their own Closet Picks videos and pull titles from the shelf to gush about for the camera. Unlike the celebrities, they do have to pay for their picks, but with a 40 percent discount.“It was something no one ever thought we could do,” said Rainna Stapelfeldt, 26, a Bed-Stuy resident who took home “Sid and Nancy,” “Midnight Cowboy” and “Memories of Murder” after a 10-hour wait in line.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

    More stories

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Pavements,’ ‘My Undesirable Friends’ and Other Documentaries at New York Film Festival

      by

      In epic takes like “My Undesirable Friends” and playful biopics like “Pavements,” the vital art of the documentary is on full display.Documentaries face a great paradox in 2024: They proliferate, but most nonfiction filmmakers will tell you they’re also harder to get made. Streaming services groan under the weight of true crime and biographical films, but most feel fast, formulaic and shoddy, designed specifically to throw on while watchers scroll on their phones. Meanwhile, directors who aspire to challenge audiences and craft art from reality say that they struggle to find money and distribution — and that it’s gotten markedly tougher in just the past few years.That’s why the festival circuit is so important to independent and international documentarians. It can be their best shot at reaching audiences and, perhaps, finding a distributor. But I notice that at many major film festivals, nonfiction can feel like a second-class citizen, unless a celebrity is involved. The films are often programmed in documentary-specific categories, as if they need to be kept away from the “real” movies. Some festivals, like Cannes, barely program any nonfiction at all.Thankfully, the New York Film Festival is not one of those. This year’s edition includes 18 feature-length (and longer) documentaries and 10 nonfiction shorts, and they’re placed alongside fiction in various sections rather than siloed. And while the festival, which rarely features world premieres, has only two this year, both are nonfiction.Technically there are two celebrity-focused documentaries on the slate (unless you count the delightful botanist Mark Brown, of the equally delightful “7 Walks With Mark Brown,” as a celebrity). The more conventional is “Elton John: Never Too Late,” directed by R.J. Cutler and David Furnish, the singer’s husband. The other is Alex Ross Perry’s gonzo “Pavements,” about the indie-rock band Pavement, which involves a little reflection and history from the band but mostly a bunch of elements that mess with the audience: footage from a Pavement jukebox musical that was briefly mounted downtown in 2022 (I saw it) specifically for this movie; a dramatic movie about the band, starring Joe Keery (“Stranger Things”) as the lead singer Stephen Malkmus, that may or may not actually exist; a museum exhibition of Pavement memorabilia. It’s terrifically strange and entertaining even if you (like me) have never really been a fan — and you’ll get a lightly satirical skewering of the whole musician biopic genre, to boot.“Youth (Hard Times) is one of two films from Wang Bing showing at the festival.via NYFFBut where “Pavements” is goofy and doesn’t take itself too seriously, several other documentaries tackle serious subjects with aplomb, and run times to match. “Exergue — on Documenta 14,” directed by Dimitris Athiridis, is a whopping 14 hours, presented in chapters. It’s a riveting and often dryly funny film about Adam Szymczyk — the artistic director of the 2017 edition of Documenta, the highly influential every-five-years exhibition of contemporary art — as he works with his team of curators to put together that show. While there’s a specific event at its center, “Exergue” is also a formidable survey of the challenges facing the contemporary art world as it wrestles with racism, colonialism, politics and power.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

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      New York Film Festival Pitches Its Ever-Expanding, Global Tent

      by

      Standout selections include “Nickel Boys,” the Mumbai-set “All We Imagine as Light” and the documentary “Dahomey,” about African repatriation.Every year, the New York Film Festival sets up a big tent at Lincoln Center and invites its hometown to the greatest show on earth, or at least to watch some of the finest movies from across the globe. This year is no different, with standout selections that include the opening-night attraction, “Nickel Boys,” RaMell Ross’s tender, beautifully expressionistic adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel; “All We Imagine as Light,” Payal Kapadia’s delicately observed, stirring drama about three women living in Mumbai; and “Dahomey,” Mati Diop’s intellectually electrifying documentary about the fraught complexities of repatriation.Over the decades, the festival’s tent has grown larger and its attractions more expansive. The main lineup and the Spotlight section feature a mix of established and lesser-known auteurs, as well as a smattering of stars. This is where you can find the recommended latest from Mike Leigh (“Hard Truths”) and Pedro Almodóvar (“The Room Next Door”), as well as the second and third parts of Wang Bing’s absorbing documentary trilogy about young people in China — “Youth (Hard Times)” and “Youth (Homecoming)” — which together run a whopping 378 minutes, about an hour longer than Julia Loktev’s 324-minute “My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow,” about journalists in today’s Russia.Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths.”Creativity MediaIn 1963, its inaugural year, the festival presented 21 new feature films, and created a major stir. Not everyone on Lincoln Center’s board had been happy about the prospect of movies sharing space with the performing arts, with one member carping, “What’s next, baseball?” The festival programmers pushed on, and the film lovers came running. A critical and financial success, the ’63 iteration even made the cover of Time magazine, which trumpeted that the event “may well mark for Americans a redefinition of what movies are and who it is that sees them.” Six years later, the cultural legitimation of movies hit another milestone with the formation of what’s now known as Film at Lincoln Center, which runs the festival.Given that such snobbism about movies now seems quaintly absurd, and given too the ubiquity of festivals, it can be difficult to convey what the New York Film Festival meant when it was founded. Although Cannes and Venice had been around for decades, festivals hadn’t yet emerged as the crucial international distribution network that they are now for smaller, less mainstream work. In 1963, the big Hollywood studios were releasing bloated epics like “Cleopatra,” and art houses and audiences were both quickly growing. Yet the movies still had a maddening reputation problem. In an editorial titled “The Film as Art” published the day the first festival opened, The New York Times made a sweetly sincere case for the event.“Moviegoers and moviemakers are divided into two unequal parts in this country,” the editorial began. “The vast majority of the moviegoers go to see what the moviemakers call ‘product.’” The selections in the festival, by contrast, the editorial continued, “dignify movies in this country; tell the world that we too are interested in cultural efforts.” I’ve quoted these words before, and I’m sure that I laughed the first time I read them. Even so, they bear repeating given the state of the art and industry, especially in the United States, where movies are still referred to as product (and content) and the Oscar race tends to generate more attention than the movies do. These days, any defense of art bears repeating.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

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Festival Winners Crowd New York Film Festival Main Slate Lineup

      by

      Top titles from Cannes and Berlin, like Sean Baker’s “Anora” and Mati Diop’s “Dahomey,” join new work by Pedro Almodóvar, Steve McQueen and RaMell Ross.This fall’s New York Film Festival will feature celebrated prizewinners from Cannes and the Berlinale, organizers announced Tuesday, unveiling a main slate that will join new works from the filmmakers Pedro Almodóvar, Steve McQueen and RaMell Ross.The festival, which runs Sept. 27 to Oct. 14, will screen films from 24 countries and include two world premieres, five North American premieres and 17 American premieres.Ross’s film, “The Nickel Boys,” is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel about two Black teenagers in a Jim Crow-era Florida reform school. It’s the opening-night selection. Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door,” about a rekindled friendship between women played by Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, will be the centerpiece. And the festival will close with Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” starring Saoirse Ronan as a working-class single mother in London who gets separated from her 9-year-old son during World War II.Winners from Cannes and the Berlin Film Festival feature heavily in the festival’s main slate lineup.Cannes imports include the Palme d’Or winner “Anora,” from Sean Baker; the Grand Prix winner “All We Imagine as Light” from Payal Kapadia; best director winner Miguel Gomes’s “Grand Tour”; the two best-director winners from the Un Certain Regard section, Roberto Minervini with “The Damned” and Rungano Nyoni with “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”; and special prize winner “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” from Mohammad Rasoulof.Berlinale veterans playing in New York include the Golden Bear prizewinner “Dahomey,” a documentary from Mati Diop about the complicated postcolonial legacy of artifacts from the former African kingdom; Philippe Lesage’s Quebecois coming-of-age drama, “Who by Fire”; and the documentary “No Other Land,” about the destruction of West Bank villages by the Israeli military, made over five years by a Palestinian-Israeli collective.Two festival mainstays, the filmmakers Hong Sang-soo and Wang Bing, will each have two films playing this fall.Hong is bringing “By the Stream,” about a former film director, and “A Traveler’s Needs,” which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale and stars Isabelle Huppert as an inexperienced French teacher in a Seoul suburb. (Hong also showed two films last year.)The second and third parts of Wang’s observational nonfiction “Youth” trilogy, titled “Youth (Hard Times)” and “Youth (Homecoming)” and focused on migrant textile workers in the Chinese district of Zhili, will also screen at the festival. The first part of the trilogy, “Youth (Spring),” was included in last year’s lineup.“The most notable thing about the films in the main slate — and in the other sections that we will announce in the coming weeks — is the degree to which they emphasize cinema’s relationship to reality,” the festival’s artistic director Dennis Lim said in a news release. “They are reminders that, in the hands of its most vital practitioners, film has the capacity to reckon with, intervene in and reimagine the world.” More

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      When Did the Plot Become the Only Way to Judge a Movie?

      by

      At the New York Film Festival, auteurs conjure up moods and sensory experiences that show why the story isn’t always the thing.It’s time to take a stand against the tyranny of “story.” In Hollywood these days, “story” and “storyteller” are privileged terms, seemingly interchangeable with “films” and anyone who makes them — a distressing development considering the medium’s wild range of possibilities.The “story” framing used to feel fresh, anchored, however tenuously, to the effort to bridge racial and gender diversity gaps in the industry. It’s not just one kind of story, this line of thinking goes, but all colors and stripes of good stories that matter.As I sunk into my first week of screenings at this year’s New York Film Festival, which runs through Oct. 15, this sentiment didn’t feel wrong, per se. Just insufficient. To think of, say, a full-body sensory experience like Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” as merely a story about a Nazi family; or Raven Jackson’s “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” which consists of lush memory fragments, as merely a story about a Black woman’s coming-of-age, would feel dismissive of the filmmakers’ full intentions.I can’t imagine a single director in this year’s beautifully eclectic lineup who would call themselves a “storyteller” with a straight face — outside of a pitch meeting with investors. One film even satirizes the connection between moviemaking and corporate brand marketing. I’m looking at you, Radu Jude (“Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World”).That’s because movies aren’t just stories. Narrative can play a part, but the medium also encompasses feelings, moods, distortions of time and logic. The movies are exercises in freedom.From right, Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel in “The Taste of Things,” by Tran Anh Hung.IFC Films“The Taste of Things,” by the French Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung, is, at face value, a conventional Belle Époque-era romance about a gastronome (Benoît Magimel) and a cook (Juliette Binoche) who together create sumptuous multicourse meals. Over half of the film is entrenched in the raw physicality of their work, the textures of the foods they wash, boil, chop and sear into magnificent forms. The film doesn’t rely much on dialogue because the couple’s passion is transmitted through a decadent display of food porn. In one scene, a voluptuous poached pear gives way to a shot of Binoche’s disrobed derrière. It conveys an ineffable quality: that of loving and being loved through the act of cooking.When I think about what makes a good story — a tale that traces out a plot and a path from A to B — the answers don’t always square with the parts of movies I love best. I’m not super hot on Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic, “Maestro,” but the scenes in which Lenny conducts are magnificent and powerful, like being thrown into the middle of a sonic storm. The rest — the tortured-genius bad-wife-guy intrigue — sometimes felt like homework. I often found myself thinking, “Let’s get back to the music.”That’s because the best things in life are gratuitous, like sex — kinky sex, weird sex, sex whose finer details you’d think twice before sharing. Joanna Arnow’s deadpan dramedy “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed” relishes all of the above. The 30-something Brooklynite played by Arnow herself (in a perpetual Garfield the cat scowl) goes on dull dates and powers through a numbing office job. The focus is her sex life, specifically the submissive role she plays in a B.D.S.M. relationship with a divorced lawyer (Scott Cohen). These scenes are cringey and absurd, but there’s something compelling about choosing the conditions of your own humiliation — and having some fun with it.The images in Steve McQueen’s “Occupied City” are of Amsterdam during the pandemic lockdown, but the narration is about the Nazi occupation in the 1940s.A24Steve McQueen’s postmodern ghost story, “Occupied City,” which clocks in at a whopping four and a half hours, forces us to rejigger and expand our understanding of how movies communicate meaning. The film takes an almost pointillist approach to the telling of history. Based on a book by McQueen’s wife, Bianca Stigter (a Dutch filmmaker and historian whose research into the Holocaust also yielded one of last year’s most astounding nonfiction movies, “Three Minutes: A Lengthening”), “Occupied City” consists of hundreds of mostly static shots of Amsterdam during the pandemic lockdown. With each shot, an impassive narrator (Melanie Hyams) details the corresponding crimes that took place in each location in the early 1940s, when the Nazis invaded the country.The conceit is willfully repetitive, and its simple, matter-of-fact approach departs from the manipulations of empathy-generating narratives that tend to dominate the subject matter. Often, my mind wandered throughout the film’s countless enumerations, which triggered pangs of guilt and also putting things in perspective: It’s distressingly easy to forget, to lose focus, in the face of horrors whose size and scope are impossible for the human brain to fully process.Every year I try to take in a few films from the Revivals section, which features restorations of vintage titles, many of them previously inaccessible. “Un rêve plus long que la nuit” (A Dream Longer Than the Night), by the French American artist Niki de Saint Phalle, stood out. Years ago I had visited a de Saint Phalle exhibition where one of the most striking pieces was a door-sized vaginal opening nestled between a behemoth pair of legs. Silly, beautiful, and terrifying all at once, the film is a pagan fever-dream that envisions a feminist revolution through the eyes of a young girl, and its best qualities are in the details: the sheer diversity of papîer-mache penises is astounding.Also playing in Revivals is a program of shorts by Man Ray, the artist best known for his photographs, but whose films — dizzying experiments with light and movement — turn familiar objects into alien entities. For Man Ray, conventional photography was about capturing reality, meaning his work would manifest images only possible in fantasies and dreams. Now, in the vertiginous age of the internet, with increasingly sophisticated film technologies at artists’ disposal, it’s worth considering films with similar ambitions: those that make legible the unreal. In “The Human Surge 3,” the director Eduardo Williams uses a 360-degree camera to capture the roamings of a multicultural group of friends, each from a different part of the world: Peru, Taiwan and Sri Lanka. Using uncanny, stretched-out images that resemble those on Google Earth, Williams’s remarkable vision of digital interconnectivity collapses borders and language barriers in wondrous, psychedelic fashion.“Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell,” from Thien An Pham, tracks a man’s journey through rural Vietnam.Kino LorberFor more brain-breaking adventures, I recommend scouring the shorts and midlength programs. Preceding Deborah Stratman’s “Last Things,” an eerie, science-fictional take on evolution (from the perspective of rocks!), is a gem: “Laberint Sequences,” by the visual artist Blake Williams, the only 3-D film in the lineup. This 20-minute short is thrillingly destabilizing, and its considered yet adventurous employment of 3-D makes Hollywood’s innovations look juvenile by comparison. Also of note for their beautifully baffling subversions of the cinematic status quo: Ross Meckfessel’s modernist horror jaunt “Spark From a Falling Star,” Onyeka Igwe and Huw Lemmey’s “Ungentle,” in which a disembodied narrator (Ben Whishaw) ruefully remembers his past — part gay awakening, part spy thriller — over banal shots of contemporary England.A descendant of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s ethereal excursions, Thien An Pham’s transportive feature “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell” tracks a man’s journey through rural Vietnam after the sudden death of his sister. You could say the film is about faith, the anxiety of fatherhood, or the existential unease of mortality itself, but plot is beside the point.What matters is the riveting sensuality, the way the images ensorcel you, vesting quivering landscapes with an almost divine power. It’s the kind of film that makes our culture’s devotion to movies click: It’s not about watching stories, but inhabiting worlds they have not told us of.For more information on the New York Film Festival, go to filmlinc.org. More

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Film Festival Season Comes to New York

      by

      Wanda ProductionsIn the mood for something shorter? The New York Shorts International Film Festival has over 300 films, including “Booksmart” (shown here, 3 minutes, France), “Quico” (12 minutes, United States), “Genius Artist” (8 minutes, China) and “Bienvenidos A Los Angeles” (15 minutes, United States). More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

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

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      A Master of Mixing and Matching Movies Gets a Citywide Tribute

      by

      Amos Vogel is considered America’s seminal film programmer. The New York Film Festival and other institutions are paying their respects on his centenary.Inside every movie buff lives a film critic. Inside every critic lives a film programmer. And inside every programmer’s heart is a place for Amos Vogel.Vogel was America’s seminal film programmer, and so it’s fitting that for his centenary he’s the subject of a citywide tribute now at the New York Film Festival and moving to other theaters later in the season. His New York Times obituary from 2012 begins with the blunt statement that he “exerted an influence on the history of film that few other non-filmmakers can claim.” In 1947, he and his wife, Marcia Vogel, founded Cinema 16, the most important membership film society in American history; after its demise, he directed the New York Film Festival for the first five years of its existence.After being forced out or resigning (accounts vary), Vogel then wrote a book, “Film as a Subversive Art,” an encyclopedic cinematic cabinet of wonders that — with chapters like “The Power of the Visual Taboo” and a still from Dusan Makavejev’s outrageous “WR: Mysteries of the Organism” on the cover — is something like the programmer’s bible. (A revised edition will be available next month from Film Desk Books.) The book is “inexhaustible,” the New York Film Festival’s current director of programming, Dennis Lim, told me via email. “It’s an endless source of ideas but also a reminder of the possibilities of film exhibition and curation.”A child of Vienna’s ninth district — the neighborhood of Freud and Schoenberg — Amos Vogelbaum was one of the many cultural gifts thrust upon America when the Nazis took power in Central Europe. Vogel and his parents lived for six months under Nazi rule before escaping Vienna for New York, by way of Cuba.His initial impulse was to study agriculture and move to a kibbutz. Disillusionment with Israel’s development prompted him to stay in the United States and found another sort of utopian society, Cinema 16. Inspired by the example of the avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, the Vogels began exhibiting a range of movies — experimental psychodramas, poetic documentaries, abstract animations, banned French bedroom farces and forgotten classics, complete with notes. Cinema 16 originally charged admission but switched to yearly subscriptions so as to avoid New York State’s draconian censorship laws.Vogel’s book “Film as a Subversive Art” is “a reminder of the possibilities of film exhibition and curation,” said the New York Film Festival’s director of programming, Dennis Lim.Paul CroninAt its height, in the late 1950s, Cinema 16 had some 7,000 members and regularly filled a 1,600-seat auditorium. It also doubled as a distributor for filmmakers as difficult as Kenneth Anger and Stan Brakhage. In addition to promoting the “beat” cinema of “Pull My Daisy” and “The Flower Thief,” Cinema 16 provided American premieres for Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game” (introduced by Renoir), several of Luis Buñuel’s Mexican films, and movies by the great Japanese directors Yasujiro Ozu and Nagisa Oshima. Cinema 16 also showed the first short films by Agnès Varda and Melvin Van Peebles, among many others.As a programmer, Vogel was a master of the mix and match. One particularly great show included Carl Theodor Dreyer’s expressionist horror film “Vampyr” (1932), Kenneth Anger’s homoerotic home movie “Fireworks” (1947) and George Franju’s surreal abattoir documentary “Blood of the Beasts” (1949). Vogel’s programs typically juxtaposed avant-garde work and short documentaries with scientific fare. (As befits his Viennese roots, he had a fondness for psychiatric shorts like “Experimental Masochism” or “Unconscious Motivation.”)The young Vogel liked to present himself as a firebrand. In a 1961 Village Voice cover story headlined “‘I Step on Toes From Time to Time,’” it was part of his bold declaration that “I’ll show anything — political, homosexual, religious, erotic, psychological — which needs to be seen.” Indeed, Cinema 16 was the first New York venue to present the full-length version of Nazi propaganda films like “Triumph of the Will” as objects of study.When I met Amos, some 20 years after the Voice article, he was less combative than amiably avuncular. Gently, he reprimanded me for having written a purposelessly contentious piece about a long-ago contretemps occasioned by his refusal to show Brakhage’s “Anticipation of the Night” at Cinema 16. “One decision should not define a career,” he told me, words that might serve as a film critic’s motto.Carl Theodor Dreyer’s horror film “Vampyr” was part of one of Vogel’s adventurous programs.The Criterion CollectionHe had a profound sense of mission. During his time at the festival, he fought budget cuts and strove to create something like the American Film Institute at Lincoln Center. He was opposed to any sort of commercialization, genuinely shocked that what was then known as the Film Society of Lincoln Center might accept money from Philip Morris, aghast that the year he quit, the opening film was a trendy Hollywood comedy, “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.”Upon joining the festival selection committee, I naïvely suggested distributing free tickets to avant-garde filmmakers and other needy types. “Amos used to do that” came the disapproving answer. The Vogel festival was generous. It was ridiculously easy to crash the press screenings and there were dozens of sidebar screenings and discussions at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts that, if memory serves, were virtually free.“We show what can be done if certain cultural elements and the serious art or documentary are brought together,” Vogel had told the Voice in 1961. “There lies the basis for a film culture. But who knows in America if such a condition will ever spread and really take hold?”If it has, the esteem in which Vogel is held by his successors can be gauged by the unprecedented attention paid his centennial. The festival has been presenting a seven-part “Spotlight” series dedicated to Vogel’s programming, recreating specific shows and presenting favorite movies. Later this month, Anthology Film Archives will show eight reconstructed Cinema 16 bills, and the Museum of Modern Art will screen five programs with a science and nature theme. In November, Film Forum is reprising a tribute to Cinema 16 shown in 1986. The Museum of the Moving Image, Metrograph and Light Industry are also taking part, drawing on “Film as a Subversive Art.” Outside New York, the Arsenal in Berlin and the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna have organized similar multipart events.“Vogel” is German for “bird.” With due respect to Charlie Parker, the message this season is Vogel Lebt, “Bird Lives!” More

    • 175 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      The Future of Movies Collides With the Past at the New York Film Festival

      by

      Memory and storytelling are intriguingly intertwined in work by world-class filmmakers that confounds and intrigues.For almost six decades, the New York Film Festival has offered a glimpse of the movie future. That has certainly been true this year, with the Lincoln Center screening rooms populated and a busy season of streaming and theatrical releases ahead. Over two autumn weeks — the 59th edition of the festival runs through Sunday — New York cinephiles are treated to a series of sneak previews, early chances to see films that will make their way into the wider world over the next few months.Part of the function of the event is to spark word of mouth and media coverage, to tease the Oscar race and handicap the art-house box office, and to see what people are inclined to argue about. Will it be the lurid provocations of Julia Ducournau’s “Titane”? The wide-screen western psychodrama of Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog”? The aching, low-key intimacy of Mike Mills’s “C’mon C’mon”? There has been something reassuring about the ritual of those questions, and about the conversations, blessedly unrelated to pandemics or politics, that they promise.But the excitement of novelty has been tinged with nostalgia. Apart from the required masks and proof of vaccination, this New York festival seemed a lot like the earlier ones. The blend of favored auteurs and up-and-comers felt familiar, and not in a bad way. We expect to see Todd Haynes, Wes Anderson, Bruno Dumont and Hong Sangsoo in this setting, and also to stumble into discoveries and reappraisals. I didn’t know what to expect from “What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?,” from the Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze. After having seen it — a slow-moving, semi-magical romance with a ruminative voice-over and leisurely shots of the town of Kutaisi — I’m still not sure what to make of it. That, too, is a quintessential festival experience.A scene from the Bucharest-set “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn.”Silviu Ghetie/Micro FilmAfter watching most of the main slate and a handful of other offerings — and dealing with the inevitable regret about what I’ve missed — my main takeaway is a feeling of comfort. This is unusual, and in the past I might have seen that as a form of disappointment. What I tend to look for, what I believe in to the point of dogmatism, is art that is challenging, difficult, abrasive, shocking. I saw a few attempts at that, including “Titane,” which in spite of its bright colors, extreme violence and sexual aggression didn’t quite succeed for me, and Radu Jude’s “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” which very much did.Jude shot his film on the streets of Bucharest in 2020, where people are masked, anxious and rude. Like that setting, the story — of a schoolteacher caught up in a culture-war sex scandal — is unpleasantly contemporary, and the overall mood of the picture is rough and dyspeptic. This is the opposite of escapism, and while I can’t say “Bad Luck Banging” is a lot of fun, it has a purgative, present-tense power. This is how we live, and it’s awful.What’s the alternative? Or, more precisely, is there a kind of aesthetic relief from current reality that doesn’t amount to a denial of it? An answer that seems to appeal to many filmmakers at the moment is to treat the medium as a vehicle of memory, to use its tools to construct a record of the past with room for its ambiguities, blank spaces and clashing perspectives.Tilda Swinton is an Englishwoman living in Colombia in “Memoria.”NeonThe most radical and overt gesture of this kind comes, aptly enough, in “Memoria,” from the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Like his earlier features (including “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives”), this one is dreamy and elusive, less a story than a succession of moods and existential puzzles. Tilda Swinton plays an Englishwoman living in Colombia who starts hearing a loud noise inaudible to anyone else. She asks a young sound engineer to help synthesize what she hears, which turns out not to be the only strange phenomenon she encounters.In a small town in the mountains she meets a man with the same name as the engineer who claims to remember everything that has ever happened to him. Not only that, he can decode “memories” of past events stored in rocks and other inanimate objects. His consciousness is so saturated, he says, that he has never left his hometown, and never watched any movies or television. His new acquaintance is surprised, and tells him some of what he’s been missing. Sports. News. Game shows.It doesn’t sound very persuasive. What would he do with those images? But I don’t think “Memoria” is dismissing its own technology so much as it’s reminding the audience how much more there is to reality than our attempts to represent it. The film is mind-blowing in its ambition and strangeness, but also decidedly modest, as if it were one of those stones packed with information that we might someday learn to unlock.The most memorable films about memory at the festival felt similarly (though also specifically, uniquely) open-ended, inconclusive. Joanna Hogg’s “The Souvenir Part II,” like “Memoria,” evokes memory in its title, and looks through a double rearview mirror. Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), a London film student in the 1980s, recovers from the death of her lover (Tom Burke, as seen in “The Souvenir”) by turning their relationship into the subject of her thesis project. That movie is also called “The Souvenir,” which makes “Part II” a kind of making-of pseudo-documentary as well as a memoir, a coming-of-age story and a time capsule of the later Thatcher years.Milena Smit, left, and Penélope Cruz in Pedro Almodóvar’s “Parallel Mothers.”Sony Pictures Releasing InternationalPedro Almodóvar’s “Parallel Mothers” moves both forward and backward, with love and politics on its mind. It follows the entwined lives of its two main characters, women (played by Milena Smit and Penélope Cruz) who give birth in the same hospital, over a period of several years. Their fates unfold under the shadow, at times imperceptible, at times unavoidable, of the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship that followed. The intersection of historical trauma and individual destiny isn’t an uncommon theme in contemporary cinema, but Almodóvar handles it with characteristic elegance and a profoundly melancholy humanism.Almodóvar, the avatar of Spain’s youthful post-Franco awakening, is now in his early 70s. His film will close the festival this weekend, bookending a triptych of major work by his generational cohort. Joel Coen, born in 1954, and Jane Campion, born in 1957, both came on the scene, like Almodóvar, in the 1980s, and are both asserting their seniority by breaking out in new directions: Coen with his swift-moving, stirring “The Tragedy of Macbeth” (his first film without his brother, Ethan) and Campion with the tragic “Power of the Dog.” These movies look like throwbacks — “Macbeth” to the black-and-white Shakespeare of Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier; “Power” to sprawling Technicolor epics like “Giant” — but they are also signs of life. And portents, maybe, of the future. More