Maria Kochetkova prepares for her first independent show at the Joyce (photo by Magnus Unnar)
The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
July 16-21, $56-$96
212-242-0800
www.joyce.org
Ballerina Maria Kochetkova wasn’t kidding when she named her first solo project Catch Her If You Can; several of the shows, running July 16-21 at the Joyce, are already sold out, or nearly so. The thirty-five-year-old Moscow-born star trained at the Bolshoi and was a principal with San Francisco Ballet for eleven years, the last two overlapping as a principal here in New York City with ABT. She has spent the last year traveling the world as a guest dancer with such companies as Norwegian National Ballet, Staatsballett Berlin, and English National Ballet, but she has now teamed up with the Joyce Theater Foundation for the special program Catch Her If You Can, consisting of eight works by seven modern choreographers chosen by Kochetkova, joined by four other dancers. “Ballet can be different, ballet can be contemporary, ballet can be exciting, ballet can be theater. I want to show what ballet is now,” she says in a Joyce promotional video.
The evening consists of Bach Duet (from New Suite) by William Forsythe, danced by Kochetkova and Sebastian Kloborg; Painting Greys by Myles Thatcher, a solo by Carlo Di Lanno; Tué by Marco Goecke, a solo by Drew Jacoby; Degunino by Marcos Morau, a solo by Kochetkova; the Swan Lake Pas de Deux by David Dawson, with Di Lanno and Sofiane Sylve; Rachel, Nevada by Jacoby, with Kochetkova and Jacoby, At the End of the Day by Dawson, with Kochetkova and Kloborg; and Masha Machine, an intimate and personal solo piece by Jérôme Bel that Kochetkova promises will hold surprises. Kochetkova’s immersion into the world of contemporary dance will not bring an end to her ballet career; she’s schedule to perform in the fall with Norwegian National Ballet again and Dresden Semperoper Ballett, but Catch Her If You Can offers what should be an exciting look at what the future holds for this international favorite entering a new phase, eager to push the bounds of her abilities.
Summer Night, actor Joseph Cross’s directorial debut, offers a twist on the standard ensemble coming-of-age flick: Its protagonists are not a bunch of high school teens looking to get stoned and laid before leaving for college (or not) but a group of older twenty-somethings facing more serious choices about their future. The film, which opens this weekend at Cinema Village, still has to fight genre clichés and mundane digressions as it tells the stories of close-knit friends gathering at a music bar appropriately called the Alamo in their small-town American community on the last night of summer. Jameson (Ellar Coltrane) is the film’s centerpiece, an all-around-good dude with a sound perspective on life who surprises everyone that night by arriving at the show with the impossibly hot, black-leather-clad Harmony (Victoria Justice), who’s not the kind of woman he usually dates. The less-flashy Corin (Elena Kampouris), who is working the door at the Alamo, is more his speed, but as we will learn, most of the characters are deeper than the usual genre stereotypes.
The immigration and refugee crisis is at the heart of husband-and-wife filmmaking team Tenzing Sonam and Ritu Sarin’s The Sweet Requiem, opening July 12 at IFC. Unfortunately, the film gets bogged down in its agenda-driven narrative. Writer-director Sonam and producer-director Sarin, who were both born in India — Sonam’s parents were Tibetan refugees — have been outspoken regarding the treatment of Tibetans by the Chinese government, as depicted in such earlier works as 2007’s fictional 
Even at a mere ninety-seven minutes, Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying, having a weeklong revival July 12-18 at Film Forum in a 2K restoration, is a sweeping Russian antiwar epic, an intimate and moving black-and-white tale of romance and betrayal during WWII. Veronika (Tatyana Samojlova) and Boris (Aleksey Batalov) are madly in love, swirling dizzyingly through the streets and up and down a winding staircase. But when Russia enters the war, Boris signs up and heads to the front, while Veronika is pursued by Boris’s cousin, Mark (Aleksandr Shvorin). Pining for word from Boris, Veronika works as a nurse at a hospital run by Boris’s father, Fyodor Ivanovich (Vasili Merkuryev), as the family, including Boris’s sister, Irina (Svetlana Kharitonova), looks askance at her relationship with Mark. The personal and political intrigue comes to a harrowing conclusion in a grand finale that for all its scale and scope gets to the very heart and soul of how the war affected the Soviet people on an individual, human level, in the family lives of women and children, lovers and cousins, husbands and wives.
The time is ripe for a 4K restoration of the absurdist 1982 documentary The Atomic Cafe as President Trump deals with the nuclear capabilities and arsenals of Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, and Pierce Rafferty were searching archives for propaganda films when they discovered a treasure trove of military and government shorts about the atomic and hydrogen bombs and how the American people should face any oncoming threats. The three filmmakers, who will be at Metrograph on July 13 at 6:30 to introduce a special screening of the 2018 restoration, weaved sensational footage together into an hour and a half of clips that range from the hysterically funny to the dangerously outrageous. Young students are taught to “duck and cover.” Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets Jr. describes how easy it was to fly over Hiroshima and drop the bomb but then admits his shock over the eventual destruction it wrought. Presidents Harry S Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower discuss the impact of the bombs. A radio duo makes jokes about the decimation. Scenes of the horrific damage to Japanese victims are shown in silence. Vice Admiral W. H. P. Blandy defends the Bikini Atoll test, where island residents are assured everything will be fine — as are soldiers who will be in the vicinity of various tests.