While this blog concentrates on film events in New York City proper, the entire region (from northern Connecticut to southern New Jersey) is quite lively with film and media celebrations all season long. One of the most vital and diverse of these launches this evening in the historic city of Danbury, Connecticut.
The Connecticut Film Festival, one of the most dynamic regional showcases of its kind, opens this evening with a fundraising event accompanied by a work-in-pro...
The specialty theatrical scene in New York City is about to get a new jolt with the highly anticipated expansion by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, among the city's most prestigious film institutions. The long-awaited Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center is a gloriously modern 17,500 square-foot venue, will house two theaters, an amphitheater and a café, adding a potential for 4 different screens at the same time (including the Walter Reade Theater, the Film Society's current showca...
OK......let me set up the scene. You and your slacker roommate are living in a cheap rent apartment in one of San Francisco's less tony neighborhoods. One night, you hear an argument of torrential rage coming from behind the paper-thin walls from the apartment next door. Night after night, you are captivated by the hilarious and insidious darkness of the epithets being thrown from one person to the other, and then the bright idea strikes you.......record the madhouse melee for your fr...
While this year's 40th edition of New Directors/New Films, the showcase of debut directors co-presented by New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, is certainly international in scope, several of the films on tap have a decidedly Spanish accent. For a festival that has in the past 40 years uncovered a strong array of Spanish and Latin American talents, this year's Spanish-accented films are among the strongest in the program.
Films from Pe...
678 (Mohamed Diab, Egypt)
There is no doubt that we are living in historic times. The political and social upheaval in the Middle East and northern Africa are among the most stunning events of the new millennium, and it still remains unclear whether this will herald a period of unprecedented stability and its complete opposite. Helping us to understand the turmoil and the inner lives of those cultures, four films in the New Directors/New Film series, entering its first weekend...
New Directors/New Films, the program of film discoveries co-presented by New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, has been a strong launching pad for debut directors over the past four decades. In its 40 years, the event has introduced such leading international cinema auteurs as Chantal Akerman, Pedro Almodóvar, Guillermo Del Toro, Agnieszka Holland, Wong Kar Wai, George Miller and Christopher Nolan, as well as such important American film talen...
It has been a long accepted article of faith that music can transcend time and space and jog the mind to realizations and awakenings. Music therapy has become one of tools used by professionals to treat those with memory loss due to disease, braiin tumors or simply old age. The power of music to heal is at the core of the new American indie film THE MUSIC NEVER STOPPED, the directorial debut of producer-turned-director Jim Kohlberg. The film made its local premiere last Thursday as a...
While Hollywood films are the last thing on the minds of the Japanese people as they confront the most challenging period in their modern history since the end of World War II, the effect and response from the US entertainment industry has been swift. Japan represents a huge chunk of the international dollars made mainly by Hollywood films and animation projects. As much as 20% of international revenues for Disney comes from the island nation, and the major studios all have large pres...
When cold weather descends on New York City, our local meterologists generally lay the blame at the door of our massive neighbor to the north. They refer to a cold air mass as a "Canadian front" and when it is in the forecast, be prepared for your bones to chill.
Well, another Canadian front is on the horizon, but this one is much more benign, in fact it is downright welcome. Canadian Front 2011 is the yearly showcase of new Canadian cinema that starts tomorrow at New ...
THE SLEEPING BEAUTY (Catherine Breillat)
Kathryn Bigelow may have broken through the glass ceiling with her historic Best Director Oscar win last year for THE HURT LOCKER, but the door was not pushed wide open for women directors in the American film industry. Despite strong work by such American indie stalwarts as Lisa Cholodenko (THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT) and Nicole Holofcener (PLEASE GIVE), and the emergence of a number of debut directors (chief among them Debra Granik with WIN...
Even in a year where indie films made considerable noise during the just-concluded awards season, the odds have never been as difficult for quality American indies to reach the big screen as they are now. While distributors are certainly on the lookout for the next WINTER’S BONE or THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT, many films simply disappear after an anemic theatrical opening or never make it to first base at all.
This comes to mind with the opening this month of one of the stronger fi...
It is a longstanding amour fou......the crazy love New Yorkers have for all things French, and the French appreciation of New York as its cultural cousin. For both sides, the yearly Rendez-Vous With French Cinema program, which is now running in several venues around New York City, is both an erotic embrace and a dazzling dance. For francophiles and film buffs, it is a film feast.
Presented by the Film Society at Lincoln Center and Unifrance, the 16th edition offers its customary ho...
Brooklyn…..get ready for some true glamour. Catherine Deneuve, the grande dame of French cinema will receive a career retrospective starting on Friday, March 4 at the BAMcinématek, Brooklyn’s leading art house cinema. In the month-long tribute, 25 films from the great actress’ varied career over five decades will be showcased. The program is co-presented by Unifrance, in collaboration with Music Box Films, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, and Institut Français. BAM...
A real, honest-to-goodness movie star will grace the agonizingly chic borough of Brooklyn when screen goddess (and serious actress) Susan Sarandon is feted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this coming weekend. Starting on Thursday and running through Sunday, the aptly titled The Susan Sarandon Picture Show (a hommage to Sarandon's breakout role in the cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show) at BAMcinématek presents a 13-film salute to the movie star and committed social activi...
Figures are now emerging of the Top Ten international titles that saw the light of day in theatrical venues in the US and Canada in 2010. As one would expect, most of the films share the English language and come from the United Kingdom. Of the ten films cited in order of their theatrical box office take, three comprise the Swedish-language adaptations of the phenomenally successful Stieg Larsson trlogy. One film with French production origins (BABIES) and one title from Italy (I AM ...
He may not walk away with the trophy for Best Director at this year's Oscar ceremonies, but David O. Russell's film THE FIGHTER will certainly go down for the count as one of the important cinema experiences of the year. A critical and box office success, THE FIGHTER has also revitalized the career of its iconooclastic director, who comes back after a seven year hiatus with a force that is sure to be felt for many moons to come. To celebrate this special moment and to explore his en...
How fortunate are we film-crazy New Yorkers to have such a cinematic treasure as the Film Forum in our midst. The three-screen arthouse complex in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan has been an indispensable New York institution for over 40 years. As the only remaining independent not-for-profit arthouse theater (in a city that used to be pocketed with them), the Film Forum presents an enviable mix of the classic and the obscure, the heralded and the newly discovered. The le...
Films that feature well known figures from history are always intriguing, whether they reflect actual fact or are mere figments of the director's feverish imagination. In the delightfully dishy MAHLER ON THE COUCH, the filmmaking team of Percy Adlon (pere) and Felix Adlon (fils) have made a delicious historical "did-it-ever-happen" that features such historical characters as the classical composer Gustav Mahler, the psychotherapist Sigmund Freud and the Bauhaus design foun...
The fine arts have always had a solemn embrace with the art of film since the days of silent movies. As the "art form of the 20th century" began to cement its reputation in the first two decades, artists (many with a surreal bent) experimented with the new form of moving image to give kinetic motion to their individual visions. Salvador Dali, Fernand Leger, El Lisitsky, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Strand and others collaborated with budding film artistes to expand the...
You cannot talk about world cinema of the 1970s and 1980s without mentioning (and lionizing) the name of Peter Weir. A key innovator of the Australian New Wave of those decades, and one of the few who made major successes in both his native land and in the wilds of Hollywood, Peter Weir is being celebrated this weekend at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, with a showcasing of some of his most important works and a preview screening of his latest film.
From the outback of his n...
In New York culture, all roads eventually lead to Andy Warhol. The pop prince, whose doodles now sell for millions at art auctions around the world, was prescient in so many ways about 21st century culture. He was a man of his times but also a prophet of sorts for the democratization and obsessive nature of celebrity (forget 15 minutes of fame......a spotlight can last a mere 15 seconds and still be a license to print money....paging Bristol Palin).
The celebrity of those famous...
With a rare Christmas weekend blizzard extending the holiday in the Northeast corridor of the United States, and before Christmas dinners are completely digested, it is time to clear the palate for a smorgasboard of Jewish-themed films. The Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center will present the 20th annual New York Jewish Film Festival at the Film Society's Walter Reade Theater, The Jewish Museum, and The JCC in Manhattan from January 12 to 27. In all, 36 features and sh...
Dooman River (China, Zhang Lu)
The New Year opens a window onto the world as the 2011 Global Lens festival is again presented by New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Global Film Initiative (GFI). The eighth annual touring film exhibition conceived to encourage filmmaking in countries with developing film communities will present nine films, each from a different country, which have received seed money from GFI. The series runs January 13–28, 2011 at the Roy and Niuta...
Returning for its 18th edition, the popular series Spanish Cinema Now is currently being presented at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, one of New York's film treasures. First presented in 1992, the series has followed the renaissance of Spanish filmmaking over the past two decades. Inspired by the international successes of such filmmakers as Pedro Almodovar, the Spanish industry is producing a record number of films which are finding favor on theatrical screens and at film festiv...
LITTLE ROCK (Mike Ott, USA)
In anticipation of the Gotham Independent Film Awards, the first significant awards show of the season that has been dubbed the "indie Oscars", the Film Department of the Museum of Modern Art will again host public screenings of the five indie nominees in the awards category Best Film Not Playing At A Theater Near You.
As the title suggests, this category is devoted to films that have not yet been seen in theaters and may never find tra...
