Posts By: John Rodzvilla

Man and Woman in front of large window.

New Directors New Films March 29-April 9

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Late Friday afternoon March 13, 2020, Bill Wolf, the preeminent 94-year-old senior critic of the New Directors/New Films press corp, and this writer scurried out of the Museum of Modern Art on West 53rd St. We’d just finished watching Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, a gorgeous 150-minute Chinese epic, the last film of the first… Read more »

Woman in city.

The Life, the Light, and the Shadows: The Stroll

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The world premiere of “The Stroll,” a documentary from directors Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker (“Transparent,” “The Lady and the Dale,” “Framing Agnes”) at the Sundance 2023 Film Festival offered festival goers an unforgettable experience of walking through New York City as way to acknowledge the trans experience over the last three decades of the… Read more »

Black girl at ballet class.

Rendez-Vous with French Cinema March 2-12

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Film for film, performance for performance, there’s no more pleasurable way for cinephiles to weather a Manhattan winter than to rendez-vous for ten days and nights in early March on West 65th Street. Audiences at the Walter Reade and Munroe theaters are civilized and mostly masked, there’s popcorn but the carpeting’s never sticky, no one… Read more »

Elegance Bratton

Elegance Bratton Receives Coolidge Breakthrough Artist Award

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On Friday, Jan. 27, the Coolidge Corner Theater, a cornerstone for independent cinema, honored the award-winning writer, director, and producer Elegance Bratton with the Coolidge Breakthrough Artist Award. The award was created to “recognize emerging voices in film and spotlights the next generation of young film artists” by the independent art house theater. “The Inspection”… Read more »

CHILDREN READING TABLOID

New York Jewish Film Festival, January 12–23

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The cautionary alerts are everywhere throughout Manhattan. At the Center for Jewish History on West 16th just off Fifth Avenue, president Gavriel Rosenfeld writes that to understand “growing antisemitic threats facing American Jews, examining the past is indispensable for understanding the present.” At Bloomberg Philanthropies, former NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg introduced showings of Arthur Miller’s… Read more »

Noah Cowan in 2018.

Noah Cowan, Independent Film Festival Executive, Dies at 55

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Noah Cowan, film festivals executive and independent film distributor, died on Wednesday, January 25 after a 38-year-long career in the independent film festival world. Cowan’s work had a large impact on independent film through his work with the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and San Francisco Film Society/SFFILM. He started working for TIFF in 1984… Read more »

60th New York Film Festival, September 30 to October 16, 2022

New York Film Festival, Sept.30-Oct.16

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Above is Nan Goldin’s photo that’s become the poster for this 60th NYFF.  Talk about a picture being worth a thousand words. It celebrates movies as they once were in the 1960s (and long before), when Irving Shulman’s 1947 The Amboy Dukes was the coming-of-age novel for NYC bonehead teens and wayward young adults. Youths… Read more »

A person walking through the destruction from a volcano.

DOC NYC Nov. 9-27

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No, your reviewer didn’t actually haul a sleeping bag into the IFC Center, Cinepolis Chelsea or the SVA Theatre (16 screens in total). And even if the most fanatic cinephiles had elected all-day, all-night viewing—cinema-crawling from lower 6th Avenue up to West 23rd Street and back, then home-viewing til dawn—they’d have missed some of the… Read more »