NYFF51: Revivals
As Martin Scorsese has put it, there will be no future for cinema if we don’t preserve its past. These 11 wondrous films were made between 1946 and 2000, each one was in serious need of attention, and each one is here to discover…or re-discover.
MILLER’S CROSSING
Title: MILLER’S CROSSING ¥ Pers: BYRNE, GABRIEL ¥ Year: 1990 ¥ Dir: COEN, JOEL ¥ Ref: MIL032AH ¥ Credit: [ 20TH CENTURY FOX / THE KOBAL COLLECTION / PERRET, PATTI ]…
The Age of Innocence
Director Martin Scorsese, actress Winona Ryder, and editor Thelma Schoonmaker in person!
20 years later, this stunning adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel seems like one of Scorsese’s greatest—a magnificent lament for missed chances and lost time.
Boy Meets Girl
Leos Carax’s debut feature, a lush black-and-white fable of last-ditch romance drawn from a cinephilic grab bag of influences and allusions, instantly situated the young director as a modern-day heir to the great French Romantics.
The Chase
This crazily plotted 1946 adaptation of Cornell Woolrich’s The Black Path of Fear, the very essence of “film noir,” features Robert Cummings as an everyman vet whose life is turned upside down when he finds a wallet that belongs to a sadistic gangster. Screening with Mark Kausler and Greg Ford's It's the Cat and Some Other Cat (total running time: 7m).
The Lusty Men
“The kind of love I have for the film,” said Nicholas Ray of The Lusty Men, “is not as a filmmaker adoring a child, it’s as a part of the literature of America.” Set in the punishing, rootless world of the rodeo circuit, this is one of Ray’s very best films, and Robert Mitchum’s Jeff McCloud is its sad, busted, but still beating heart.
Manila in the Claws of Light
As Todd McCarthy wrote, it was Pierre who “single-handedly brought the work of the late Filipino director Lino Brocka to the world’s attention.” This searing melodrama, with Bembel Roco and Hilda Koronel as doomed lovers, is one of Brocka’s greatest.
Mauvais Sang
Leos Carax’s swoon-inducing portrait of love among thieves offers an ecstatic depiction of what it feels like to be young, restless and madly in love.
Mysterious Object at Noon
Q&A with Apichatpong Weerasethakul on May 6
In Apichatpong’s first feature—part road movie, part folkloric exercise, part surrealist party game—a camera crew travels through Thailand asking villagers to invent episodes in an ever-expanding story that ends up incorporating witches, tigers, surprise doublings, and impossible reversals.
Providence
Alain Resnais’s first film in English, featuring John Gielgud, is a “documentary about imagination,” set on a Victorian-era estate known as Providence; inside we’re privy to the fevered dreams and emotional reckonings of an aging writer whose body is succumbing to cancer.
Sandra
With Sandra, Visconti traded The Leopard’s elegiac grandeur for something grittier and pulpier—the Electra myth in the form of a gothic melodrama, starring Claudia Cardinale as a woman who returns to her ancestral home in Tuscany and has a reckoning with her family’s dark wartime past.
They Live by Night
Nicholas Ray's widow, Susan Ray, will be present at the screening!
Nick Ray’s feature debut, adapted from Edward Anderson’s 1935 novel Thieves Like Us, is at once innovative, visually electrifying, behaviorally nuanced, and soulfully romantic.
Try and Get Me
Introduced by Eddie Muller, representing the UCLA Archive and the Film Noir Foundation!
Cy Endfield’s coruscating 1950 film, based on a true story about two men from San Jose who were lynched after their arrests for kidnapping and murder, is animated by an acute awareness of class and economic pressures and builds to a harrowing climax.
