https://independent-magazine.org/2023/01/31/new-york-jewish-film-festival-january-12-23/
Obsessed with Independent Film Since 1976
Obsessed with Independent Film Since 1976
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 »
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 »
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 »
‘The city that never sleeps’ has awakened to two renamed institutions since the onset of Covid: The 92nd Street Y is now known as 92NY, signaling a momentous decision to begin streaming much of its top-drawer cultural programming to the world. And the former Tribeca Film Festival’s 22nd season of multiple events on a myriad… Read more »
A major international hotel chain some years ago positioned its appeal to travelers as “the best surprise is no surprise.” The premise was that most vacationers want the predictability of home wherever they go. That line didn’t play well in Manhattan, where surprise is the order of every day. Most of us moved here to… Read more »
Signs of spring are budding through New York City. Cartier just debuted the season’s most welcome ad campaign, with scores of residents in all five boroughs weighing in on why they wouldn’t live anywhere else. The citywide infection rate has plummeted from a perilous 22% in January to a far safer 1.3% (Feb. 25). And… Read more »
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the movies—maybe it’s not. Especially if, like this viewer, you’ve been isolated with days and nights of fever and chills this month—what’s turned out to be a “light” Covid breakthrough. While major national film festivals like Sundance and Palm Springs have gone virtual or… Read more »
It was once possible to view everything in any of New York’s six major film festivals, sometimes even before they opened. Curators limited their selections to 25-30 features and a handful of shorts. Your critic gladly sat through most everything with other press/industry, usually in advance theatrical showings a week or two (or more) before… Read more »
In 1954, social protocols in a big single-screen theater were a lot simpler. At the Ritz in Indianapolis, a neighborhood showplace where this author worked part-time in high school, the main job of the ushers was making sure all patrons—especially dating teens—kept both feet on the floor at all times. This kid’s duties beside changing… Read more »
Dale Bell’s Woodstock (Rare Bird Books, 2019) is a day-by-day, event-by-event diary by Bell, the associate producer, and 22 other professional volunteers who put together the Oscar-winning Best Documentary of 1970. As Martin Scorsese writes in a brief forward, “the second half of the 1960s is the only time I’ve ever heard people talk about… Read more »