New Yawk New Wave has been running at Film Forum since January 11 but still has a couple of precious days of life left. In a way, it’s one of the more ambitious curatorial projects to emerge from the theater’s august archivists. The series isn’t bound to a single era (it encompasses the period from 1953 to 1973), genre (everything from madcap comedy to downcast drama makes an appearance), or even style (there’s New Wave, cinema vérité, post-noir, and whatever you want to call Robert Downey Sr.’s still-photos-plus-voiceovers oddity, Chafed Elbows). Besides New York origins, the main thing this wildly …

Second #2914, 48:34 1. In the aftermath of the assault, Dorothy calls Jeffrey Don, her kidnapped husband’s name. Jeffrey tenderly corrects her. “No,” he says. She doesn’t seem to hear him: “Oh Don. Hold me.” Frank, Jeffrey, and Don, the three men circulating in Dorothy’s imagination. Don. Donny. “Little” Donny. The largely off-camera presence of the Donnys governs the logic of the film. 2. In David Mamet’s 1994 play The Cryptogram, Donny (“a woman in her late thirties”) has this exchange with Del (“a man of the same age”), in which she tells him that sometimes she wishes she was …

While theaters all across America have been raiding the vault to bring us horror favorites throughout the month of October, there’s just nothing like catching something gory, bloody, spooky or flat out disgusting on Halloween night, sweating in your topical costume and getting sugar-high on candy corn. Here are my All Hallow’s Eve picks from a few special theaters around the country, and if you don’t happen to reside in one of the cities below, there is always Netflix and Amazon streaming, several options on demand, and a typically killer lineup on Turner Classic Movies, including Lady Vengeance favorite Village …

The ending of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out hits you in the chest like a hammer. It’s not supposed to be this way; American studio movies don’t end like that. But of course it’s the heartbreaking denouement that has partially helped to make the film endure in the 30 intervening years since its commercially disastrous release, though one can certainly fathom how it alienated audiences at the time (for the record, some critics were passionate defenders; it’s just that most viewers don’t savor being implicated in the spectacle of violence as it is quickly transformed into tragedy). As De Palma …

This week on the blog I wrote a post asking what independent films made young audiences fans of independent film. Below are responses from writer, actor, director and musician Evan Louison. Buffalo ’66. I was 15. Particularly for the quiet, for the musical numbers, and for the paleness and stillness of the winter depicted. Particularly for the dinner table scene. I felt like I understood, or better like someone else did. I was in private school, and wrote a paper on it that got me called in after class. I don’t know what happened. They had a thing with strange …