Partners Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens explore the many aspects of fire in latest documentary
PLAYING WITH FIRE: AN ECOSEXUAL EMERGENCY (Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens, 2025)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Saturday, October 10, 7:30
Sunday, October 11, 4:00 anthologyfilmarchives.org sprinklestephens.ucsc.edu
There’s an important warning at the start of Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens’s Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency: “This film contains environmental destruction, explicit ecosexuality, and performance art.”
It sure does.
In the film, longtime life and professional partners Sprinkle, a former sex worker turned feminist performance artist and sex educator, and Stephens, an artist, filmmaker, and art professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, explore both the beneficial and detrimental aspects of fire. The topic became forefront in their minds after they survived the devastating CZU Lightning Complex Fire of 2020; not everyone in their tight-knit community of Boulder Creek, California, was so fortunate.
In such chapters as “The Inferno,” “The Return,” and “Some Like It Hot,” they meet with a wide range of people who work with fire, from ceramicists Laurie and Dan Hennig, musicians Kate Freeman and Hillary Kay, and permaculturalist Aaron Allen to Forestry & Fire Recruitment Program cofounder Brandon Smith, artistic directors and curators Melonie and Melorra Green, and burlesque queen Lady Monster. Fire is seen as a necessary part of the Earth as it is used in rituals, art, weddings, and healing.
Therapist and witch Deborah Oak shares her “10 Top Tips for Staying Sane in Insane Times.” Indigenous sustainability professor Melissa Nelson explains, “Fire is a destroyer, it’s a great destroyer, but it’s a great regenerator.” Artists and game designers Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou and Huntrezz Janos display one of their projects as the latter says, “We want to showcase pleasure in a world of pain, and we want to help people dealing with catastrophe and survival.”
After her house is completely destroyed, Agz Rags owner Agnes De Lucchi says, “More than my own home, I worried about the trees.”
Sprinkle and Stephens, whose previous films include Water Makes Us Wet,Goodbye Gauley Mountain, and Playing in the Garden, also introduce us to their dog, Butch, and their remarkable white peacock, Albert, who became a symbol of Boulder Creek’s resilience. Their positive outlook on life is infectious, and more than a little woo-woo, as they delve into the connection between environmental fires and social fires through a trans rights march, playful animation (including animals talking and texting), discussions of consumption, and, ultimately, cremation.
“Not only do we believe that art can help our society evolve, we also believe in the power of love and pleasure,” Beth says, getting to the heart of ecosexuality.
Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency is screening October 10 at 7:30 and October 11 at 4:30 at Anthology Film Archives as part of the series “The Cinema of Gender Transgression”; Sprinkle and Stephens will perform the ten-minute “Ecosex 101” before each show. In addition, they will participate in a Q&A with Urban Tantra and The Book of Ecstasy author Barbara Carrellas on October 10 and A Body to Live In director Angelo Madsen on October 11; there will also be a reception and book signing on Sunday, celebrating the milestone birthdays of adult entertainment legends Veronica Vera and Veronica Hart, cofounders of the pornstar support group Club 90. Attendees are strongly encouraged to dress up in fire or ecosex costumes for both screenings.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
The remarkable journey of Bristol Foster, Robert Bateman, and the Grizzly Torque is fondly detailed in The Art of Adventure
THE ART OF ADVENTURE (Alison Reid, 2025)
New Plaza Cinema @Macaulay Honors College
35 West Sixty-Seventh St. between Central Park West & Columbus Ave.
Sunday, October 11, 4:45 theartofadventuremovie.com newplazacinema.org
“Life is an adventure. It’s mystical. It’s magical. I’d like to be twenty-five years old again, but I’m glad I had all those life experiences,” biologist and naturalist Bristol Foster says at the beginning of Alison Reid’s utterly fabulous documentary, The Art of Adventure. “In those days, it was just raw nature, raw and beautiful. I think of how much things have changed and how damn lucky we were to do it then.”
Artist and naturalist Robert Bateman adds, “I think I’m basically the same kid that I always was. I always wanted to do adventures and speak up, spread the word about nature. . . . It was like a dream trip in a way.”
In 1957, Foster and Bateman, both Canadians in their twenties, began an eighteen-month journey covering more than fifty thousand miles, visiting nineteen countries across four continents in a brownish-yellow 1957 Series I Land Rover that they dubbed the Grizzly Torque. They drove it through mud and desert, had it transported (not so safely) by sea and air, and lived in it, sometimes surrounded by curious indigenous people and animals. They were originally in search of birds, but their discoveries quickly became far more anthropological and wide-ranging.
Fortunately for the world, they extensively detailed the trip, with copious photographs, movies, and a detailed journal, and Bateman added a small painting of each nation they visited to a mural around the Grizzly Torque. What they found on their route is remarkable; what is even more remarkable is that they survived, and now, in their nineties, best friends for eight decades, they’re sharing their story.
Reid’s previous feature documentary, The Woman Who Loves Giraffes, is about Canadian zoologist Anne Innis Dagg, who worked with Foster and is credited as a producer on The Art of Adventure; she died in 2024 at the age of ninety-one. In this follow-up, Reid and editor Dave Kazala interweave stunning footage of Bateman and Foster’s travels with new interviews of Bateman and Foster, members of their families, and such others as geographer and naturalist Briony Penn, writer and art curator Paul Gilbert, artist and naturalist Erik Thorn, anthropologist and writer Wade Davis, Haida leader and political activist Gidansda Guujaaw, environmental activists David Suzuki and Tara Cullis, and Land Rover collector Alan Simpson. Gilbert, the author of The Rover Boys, gets significant screen time; he was also one of Bateman’s high school art students and helped form the Bateman Foundation. Together they paint a loving picture of these two extraordinary men who have dedicated their lives to protecting and saving the environment, well before it was a cause célèbre or hot-button political issue.
“This is not a trip that you could do today. They saw the world at a time when it was transitioning from almost the Middle Ages to the modern world, and they saw it as it was,” Gilbert says. Bateman surmises, “In a tiny way, I guess people might view Bristol and I as adventurers in another era.”
Robert Bateman and Bristol Foster recount their old and new adventures in award-winning documentary
It’s also a poignant look at aging, as the film shifts between shots of the two rugged, handsome, well-built young men and their current selves, walking slowly, facing medical problems, but never giving up on their goals, both still doing whatever they can to help get us out of the mess we’ve created. Cinematographer Dale Hildebrand captures the two elderly men in gorgeous vistas of beautiful landscapes whose very existence is in jeopardy, but even then, hope conquers fear.
The last part of the film focuses on what became of the Grizzly Torque, which comes to represent everything to the men. “This Land Rover symbolizes nature, like a magic carpet to get into magical places,” Bateman says.
And, in its way, The Art of Adventure is like a cinematic carpet, taking us into magical places.
The Art of Adventure is screening October 11 at 4:45 at New Plaza Cinema, followed by a Q&A with Reid and Wild Tomorrow cofounder and COO and Columbia adjunct professor Wendy Hapgood.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
TRAINS: LOCAL ROUTES
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
October 3 – November 1 metrograph.com
In her new book, Trains (Fordham University Press, October 6, $18.99-$70), New School associate professor Genevieve Yue writes about the connection between trains and cinema around the world in four chapters: “How It Feels to Be a Woman on a Train (Itinerary: London to Venice),” “Ends of the Line (Itinerary: Los Angeles to Rhinecliff),” “Phantom Rides (Itinerary: Shanghai to Hong Kong),” and “Strangers on Trains.” In conjunction with the publication of the book, Yue is guest-curating the two-part Metrograph series “Trains: Local Routes,” running October 3 through November 1. The seventeen films range from Louis Lumière’s 1896 L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat to Payal Kapadia’s 2024 All We Imagine as Light, including works by Chantal Akerman, Martin Scorsese, Sergei Dvortsevoy, Alfred Hitchcock, Chris Marker, and Bruce Conner.
“The humble journeys of the short-range rail rarely get their due. The subway ride, the suburban commute, and the municipal railways that encircle daily life: these are spaces we typically associate with boredom and routine, unlike the adventure of their long-distance cousins,” said in a statement. “The history of film, however, tells a different story. From the Lumière brothers’ train of early cinema, rolling into the station at La Ciotat — and, by some accounts, headed straight into the audience — to the wind that sweeps through the Mumbai local in Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (2024), the short line has been a place where working people have crowded together and discovered, sometimes, romantic possibility, unnerving encounters, and opportunities for existential self-interrogation. For women especially, like the housewives in David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) and Yasujirō Ozu’s The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice (1952), the train offers a space of reflection and relative freedom, even as its berth is narrow, its passages fleeting.”
Below is a closer look at several of the films, not all of which have been scheduled yet. Each review is followed by a quote from Yue, who will attend several screenings for introductions and book signings.
Walter Matthau tries to get to the bottom of a bizarre subway heist in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE (Joseph Sargent, 1974)
Metrograph
Saturday, October 3, 2:30
Friay, October 9, 2:00 metrograph.com
Loosely adapted from the book by John Godey, Joseph Sargent’s underground thriller, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, wonderfully captures the cynicism of New York City in the 1970s. Four heavily armed and mustached men — Mr. Blue (Robert Shaw), Mr. Green (Martin Balsam), Mr. Gray (Hector Elizondo), and Mr. Brown (Earl Hindman), colorful pseudonyms that influenced Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs — hijack an uptown 4 train, demanding one million dollars in one hour from a nearly bankrupt city or else they will kill all eighteen passengers, one at a time, minute by minute. The hapless mayor (Lee Wallace) is in bed with the flu, so Deputy Mayor Warren LaSalle (Tony Roberts) takes charge on the political end while transit detective Lt. Zachary Garber (a great Walter Matthau) and Inspector Daniels (Julius Harris) of the NYPD team up to try to figure out just how in the world the criminals expect to get away with the seemingly impossible heist.
Sargent (Sybil) offers a nostalgic look back at a bygone era, before technology radically changed the way trains are run and police work is handled. The film also features a very funny, laconic Jerry Stiller as Lt. Rico Patrone and the beloved Kenneth McMillan as the borough commander. It was remade as a television movie in 1998, starring Edward James Olmos, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Lorraine Bracco, and as an embarrassingly bad big-budget bomb in 2009 by Tony Scott.
Genevieve Yue, who will introduce the October 3 screening with film scholar Erika Balsom and will sign copies of her book after the film: “Featuring one of the grittiest New Yorkers ever seen on film: the ruddy-cheeked wino who, despite the commotion on her hijacked 6 train, sleeps through the entire ordeal.”
A group of men try to find kidnappers in Akira Kurosawa’s tense noir / police procedural
HIGH AND LOW (TENGOKU TO JIGOKU) (Akira Kurosawa, 1963)
Metrograph
Sunday, October 4, 1:15
Saturday, October 10, 10:20 metrograph.com
On the verge of being forced out of the company he has dedicated his life to, National Shoes executive Kingo Gondo’s (Toshirō Mifune) life is thrown into further disarray when kidnappers claim to have taken his son, Jun (Toshio Egi), and are demanding a huge ransom for his safe return. But when Gondo discovers that they have mistakenly grabbed Shinichi (Masahiko Shimazu), the son of his chauffeur, Aoki (Yutaka Sada), he at first refuses to pay. But at the insistence of his wife (Kyogo Kagawa), the begging of Aoki, and the advice of police inspector Taguchi (Kenjiro Ishiyama), he reconsiders his decision, setting in motion a riveting police procedural that is filled with tense emotion. Loosely based on Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novel King’s Ransom, Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, photographed by longtime Kurosawa cinematographer Asakazu Nakai, is divided into two primary sections: The first half takes place in Gondo’s luxury home, orchestrated like a stage play as the characters are developed and the plan takes hold. The second part of the film follows the police, under the leadership of Chief Detective Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai), as they hit the streets of the seedier side of Yokohama in search of the kidnappers.
Known in Japan as Tengoku to Jigoku, which translates as Heaven and Hell, High and Low is an expert noir, a subtle masterpiece that tackles numerous socioeconomic and cultural issues as Gondo weighs the fate of his business against the fate of a small child; it all manages to feel as fresh and relevant today as it probably did back in the ’60s. Spike Lee remade the film as Highest 2 Lowest in 2025 but failed to capture the intricacies of the story and characters.
Genevieve Yue: “High and Low has one of the most iconic train scenes of all time. And though it’s only one of many segments, the entire, wildly careening film has the feeling of a train in the slow-motion throes of derailment.”
Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) explore an extramarital affair in Brief Encounter
BRIEF ENCOUNTER (David Lean, 1945)
Metrograph
Saturday, October 10, noon
Friday, October 23, 1:50 metrograph.com
“Don’t hurry. I’m perfectly happy,” Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) tells her rather boring husband, Fred (Cyril Raymond), as he returns to his crossword puzzle one night. “How can I possibly say that?” she then thinks to herself. “‘Don’t hurry. I’m perfectly happy.’ If only it were true. Not, I suppose, that anybody’s ever perfectly happy, really. But just to be ordinarily contented, to be at peace. It’s such a little while ago really but it seems an eternity since that train went out of the station, taking him away into the darkness. I was happy then.” In David Lean’s Brief Encounter, one of the greatest romantic films ever made, Laura, a housewife and mother, can’t stop herself from falling for dapper doctor Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), who is also married. As they explore a potential physical relationship, Laura is wracked with guilt, especially as she keeps bumping into nosy gossip Myrtle Bagot (Joyce Carey). But the two potential lovers are so drawn to each other, filling the holes in each other’s lives, that they consider risking all they have for just one more moment together.
Winner of the 1946 Palme d’Or at Cannes, Brief Encounter is told in flashback in Laura’s voice as she goes over every wonderful and terrifying detail in her mind while contemplating whether to spill the beans to the generally oblivious Fred. Written by Noël Coward based on his 1936 one-act play, Still Life, the film features terrifically subtle performances by Johnson and Howard as the daring couple; you can’t help but root for them, despite the possible consequences. Lean, who earned the first of his seven Best Director Oscar nominations for the heartbreaking film, keeps things relatively, well, lean, getting right to the point in less than ninety minutes; he would go on to helm such sprawling epics as The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and A Passage to India before his death in 1991 at the age of eighty-three.
Genevieve Yue: “The trains are mercilessly exact in Brief Encounter — there’s only three minutes between the departures of the trains that take Laura and Alec away from each other, and they’re never late.”
Opposites attract in strange ways in Alfred Hitchcock’s STRANGERS ON A TRAIN
STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951)
Metrograph
Friday, October 16, 2:15
Friday, October 23, 3:50 metrograph.com
Metrograph’s “Trains: Local Routes” continues with one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most multilayered, complex tales, the 1951 psychological double-murder thriller Strangers on a Train. Shortly after introducing himself to amateur tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger) on a train, mama’s boy Bruno Anthony (an appropriately creepy Robert Walker) concocts a supposedly foolproof plan in which Bruno will kill Guy’s unfaithful wife, Miriam (Laura Elliott), so Guy can marry his socialite girlfriend, Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), one of the daughters of a U.S. senator (Leo G. Carroll). In return, Guy will kill Bruno’s father (Jonathan Hale). Bruno believes he has devised the perfect crisscross murder, with neither man having a clear motive and nothing for the cops to find to link them together. While Bruno is serious, Guy thinks he’s just a loon (Walker had in fact been recently released from a psychiatric clinic after suffering a nervous breakdown and died at the age of thirty-two before the film even opened), but after the psychopathic Bruno actually does kill Miriam — photographed in an unforgettable way by cinematographer Robert Burks, shown in a pair of broken eyeglasses — he starts shadowing Guy, insisting he keep his part of the bargain and kill Mr. Anthony, something Guy never intended on doing. Soon the cops are involved, along with a broken alibi, a key, and a critical cigarette lighter, leading to a spectacular conclusion on a merry-go-round.
Reflections in a pair of glasses continue the theme of doubling in eerie Hitchcock classic
Loosely based on Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel and featuring an early screenplay written by Raymond Chandler (whose name was kept in the credits for marquee value despite Hitchcock’s famous — and literal — trashing of his contribution), Strangers on a Train is a powerful, tense mystery built around the idea of the double; from the opening scene of two pairs of shoes — immediately equating, and differentiating between, the two protagonists, as if they were two parts of the same person — to Hitchcock’s appearance carrying a double bass, to Anne’s younger sister, Babs (Patricia Hitchcock, Alfred’s daughter), wearing the same glasses as Miriam, to Bruno’s declaration, upon ordering two double scotches and relating them to tennis, “The only kind of doubles I play,” the film is filled with mirroring or directly opposing elements. As with Hitchcock’s Rope, which also starred Granger, Strangers on a Train also has a clear homosexual subtext; in real life Walker was straight while Granger was bisexual. Shot in a dark black-and-white that adds to the chilling effects, Strangers on a Train is one of Hitchcock’s best, a fully realized, frightening film that ends in a big way.
Genevieve Yue: “In Hitchcock, the people you meet on trains can spell romance, adventure, or, in the case of Strangers on a Train’s Guy Haines, a colossal headache! Tip: beware anyone wearing spectator shoes.”
Prabha (Kani Kusruti) takes a new look at her life in All We Imagine as Light
ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT (Payal Kapadia, 2024)
Metrograph
Sunday, October 25, 12:15 metrograph.com
Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia won the Golden Eye at Cannes in 2021 for best documentary for A Night of Knowing Nothing, a film that mixes fact and fiction while telling the story of two lovers trying to stay connected via letters amid student protests in India. Kapadia mixes fact and fiction again in her follow-up, the tender and deeply poignant All We Imagine as Light, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes.
The follow-up opens with gritty shots of the streets of Mumbai, as unseen people share their difficulties trying to make a new life for themselves after migrating from the country. “There’s always the feeling I’ll have to leave,” one person says. Another opines, “The city takes time away from you.” A third argues, “Why would anyone want to move back?”
Kapadia, who was born in Mumbai, then shifts to the fictional tale of two nurses and a third hospital employee fighting loneliness as they care for sick people. Prabha (a heart-wrenching Kani Kusruti) and the younger Anu (Divya Prabha) live together in an apartment in the city. Prabha, who is in an arranged marriage, has not seen her husband, who is working in Germany, for more than a year. Anu, whose family is Hindi, is in love with a Muslim man, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), keeping their relationship secret for fear of being discovered and shunned. And Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) is a recent widow who is being evicted from her home of twenty-two years because her name is nowhere on the paperwork left behind by her husband.
When Prabha receives a brand-new German rice cooker in the mail, she assumes it is from her spouse, perhaps a message that he is not coming back and that she should proceed with her life. But she is tentative to start dating, even as she is pursued by the goofy but sweet Dr. Manoj (Azees Nedumangad), who writes poetry for her.
The three women decide to hit the road, taking a trip to Parvaty’s seaside Maharashtrian hometown, where they take stock of their lives, particularly after a man washes up onshore.
All We Imagine as Light is sensitively shot by cinematographer Ranabir Das, with a soft, jazzy score by Topshe as soft rain falls, trains pass by in the background, and Prabha and Parvaty throw stones at a billboard for a pending skyscraper that proclaims, “CLASS is a privilege reserved for the PRIVILEGED.”
All We Imagine as Light is an engaging and touchingly lyrical look at womanhood in contemporary Mumbai, as the city threatens three women with potential isolation and alienation until they bind together. The youngest, Anu, instills new energy into the others to reevaluate their situations and take action. “Do you ever think of the future?” Anu asks.
The film appropriately provides no firm answers in the end, but it is clear that Kapadia’s future is a bright one.
Genevieve Yue: “The humble journeys of the short-range rail rarely get their due. The subway ride, the suburban commute, and the municipal railways that encircle daily life: these are spaces we typically associate with boredom and routine, unlike the adventure of their long-distance cousins. The history of film, however, tells a different story. From the Lumière brothers’ train of early cinema, rolling into the station at La Ciotat—and, by some accounts, headed straight into the audience—to the wind that sweeps through the Mumbai local in Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (2024), the short line has been a place where working people have crowded together and discovered, sometimes, romantic possibility, unnerving encounters, and opportunities for existential self-interrogation. For women especially, like the housewives in David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) and Yasujirō Ozu’s The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice (1952), the train offers a space of reflection and relative freedom, even as its berth is narrow, its passages fleeting.”
Chantal Akerman combines footage of 1970s New York with letters from her mother in News from Home
NEWS FROM HOME (Chantal Akerman, 1977)
Metrograph
Sunday, November 1 metrograph.com
In 1971, twenty-year-old Chantal Akerman moved to New York City from her native Belgium, determined to become a filmmaker. Teaming up with cinematographer Babette Mangolte, she made several experimental films, including Hotel Monterey and La Chambre, before moving back to Belgium in 1973. But in 1976 she returned to New York City to make News from Home, a mesmerizing work about family and dislocation, themes that would be prevalent throughout her career. The film consists of long, mostly static shots, using natural sound and light, depicting a gray, dismal New York City as cars move slowly down narrow, seemingly abandoned streets, people ride the graffiti-laden subway, workers and tourists pack Fifth Ave., and the Staten Island Ferry leaves Lower Manhattan. The only spoken words occur when Akerman, in voice-over, reads letters from her mother, Natalia (Nelly) Akerman, sent during Chantal’s previous time in New York, concerned about her daughter’s welfare and safety. “I’m glad you don’t have that job anymore and that you’re liking New York,” Akerman reads in one letter. “People here are surprised. They say New York is terrible, inhuman. Perhaps they don’t really know it and are too quick to judge.” Her mother’s missives often chastise her for not writing back more often while also filling her in on the details of her family’s life, including her mother, father, and sister, Sylviane, as well as local gossip.
Although it was not meant to be a straightforward documentary, News from Home now stands as a mesmerizing time capsule of downtrodden 1970s New York, sometimes nearly unrecognizable when compared to the city of today. The film also casts another light on the relationship between mother and daughter, which was highlighted in Akerman’s final film, No Home Movie, in which Chantal attempts to get her mother, a Holocaust survivor, to open up about her experiences in Auschwitz. Nelly died shortly after filming, and Akerman committed suicide the following year, only a few months after No Home Movie played at several film festivals (and was booed at Locarno). News from Home takes on new meaning in light of Akerman’s end, a unique love letter to city and family and to how we maintained connections in a pre-internet world. News from Home will be preceded by G. W. “Billy” Bitzer’s 1905 short, Interior NY Subway, 14th Street to 42nd Street.
Genevieve Yue, who will introduce the November 1 screening: “Though Chantal Akerman’s voice can be heard throughout News from Home, her image is only briefly glimpsed, in a reflection on the train. We can’t quite see her, but others undoubtedly can — men, especially, gawk unashamedly, a reminder that the graffiti-covered subway of 1976 New York was often a place of danger and hostility. Not so for the turn-of-the-century train of Interior NY Subway, 14th Street to 42nd Street, whose newly built tunnels are illuminated by lanterns that glow like Christmas lights.”
Asa Butterfield stars as a homeless orphan on a mission in Martin Scorsese’s 3-D adventure
HUGO (Martin Scorsese, 2011)
Metrograph
Dates to come metrograph.com
Martin Scorsese wears his cinematic heart on his sleeve in his first family-friendly film, Hugo. Based on Brian Selznick’s Caldecott-winning 2007 illustrated historical-fiction novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the 3-D movie follows the adventures of the title character, a homeless orphan boy (Asa Butterfield) who survives by his wits in a Paris train station in the early 1900s. He spends his days stealing small bits of food, winding the big clock, avoiding Inspector Gustav (Sacha Baron Cohen), and trying to find parts for an automaton he is rebuilding, hoping it will have a message for him from his father (Jude Law). He soon makes his only friend, a girl named Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) who is being raised by her godparents, the bitter Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley) and his wife, Mama Jeanne (Helen McCrory). When it turns out that Papa Georges is the one and only Georges Méliès, who made the world’s first science-fiction film, A Trip to the Moon, among hundreds of others, then was thought to have died in obscurity, all of his work destroyed, Hugo and Isabelle, along with the help of film historian René Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg), are determined to resurrect Papa Georges and his reputation.
Gorgeously shot by Robert Richardson and featuring marvelous period sets by Dante Ferretti, Hugo is beautiful to look at, the camera roaming through the immense train station and up the tall clock tower like in a Jules Verne story. Such side plots as the budding romances between a café owner (Frances de la Tour) and the newspaper seller (Richard Griffiths) and between Gustav and a shy flower girl (Emily Mortimer) feel forced, and the main narrative meanders its way into treacly territory as all the parts slowly come together. At its heart, Hugo is a movie about the love of movies, paying tribute to the early cinema of Méliès, Harold Lloyd, and others but it gets too stuck on the underlying theme of the preservation of old films, one of Scorsese’s driving forces. Still, Hugo is a visual treat in which Scorsese makes the most of 3-D technology, particularly in the first half, before things get a little too sticky (and slickly) sweet, even for a children’s film.
Genevieve Yue: “Of all the mechanical marvels in Hugo — a mysterious automaton, a wind-up mouse, the camera of early film pioneer Méliès — the steam locomotive is what brings them all together, and Hugo to his newfound family, like a set of converging tracks.”
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Milford Graves enjoys a bite in his garden in documentary about the unique percussionist and philosopher
MILFORD GRAVES FULL MANTIS (Jake Meginsky, 2018)
Maysles Documentary Center
343 Lenox Ave./Malcolm X Blvd. between 127th & 128th Sts.
Sunday, September 27, $7-$15, 2:00, free Q&A 4:30 maysles.org fullmantis.com
Jake Meginsky’s unconventional documentary of unconventional musician Milford Graves begins with the following epigraph from Graves: “Look at the room downstairs / Look at the garden outside / Don’t try to analyze it / Just take it in.” That is not only Graves’s life philosophy but also the best way to experience Milford Graves Full Mantis, which is screening September 27 at 2:00 at the Maysles Documentary Center. Born in 1941 in South Jamaica, Queens, where he resided until his death in February 2021, Graves was an avant-garde free jazz percussionist who played and lived to his own beat. In 2004, Meginsky knocked on Graves’s door, asked to study with him, and soon became the Professor’s assistant and documentarian; the film, codirected by drummer Neil Young, who also edited and photographed it with Meginsky, features compelling live footage along with peaceful moments in Graves’s basement and expansive garden. Early on, Meginsky shows a wild excerpt from a 1973 concert at the Jazz Middelheim Festival in Antwerp in which Graves performs with Joe Rigby and Hugh Glover on reeds and Arthur Williams on trumpet; the fierce, dissonant music might not be to everyone’s taste, but it serves as a terrific counterpoint to Graves’s calmer side, pontificating on, well, sometimes it’s hard to tell what, but it’s always fascinating.
There are also clips of Graves playing solo at the Brandeis Improv Festival in 2015 and in one of Park Ave. Armory’s historic rooms in 2016; in 2011 in his basement, where he’s surrounded by African sculpture, books, and computers that record his heartbeat and nervous system, which he incorporates into his work; and in Japan in 1981 with dancer Min Tanaka at a school for autistic children, where his unique performance inspired the kids to get up and move to the groove. In his backyard dojo he explains Yara, the discipline he invented based on martial arts, African ritual dance, the Lindy Hop, and the praying mantis and which he refers to as “the black way of self protection.” There are no talking-head experts or Graves acolytes singing his praises; the only voice heard in the film is Graves’s own, and for the first half of its ninety minutes Meginsky doesn’t show the film’s subject as he talks. Instead, while Graves speaks about his past and shares his kaleidoscopic philosophies, the camera slowly focuses on his lush garden or shows some of Graves’s animations.
But eventually Graves is seen sitting in his basement, telling a long, remarkable story of a turning point in his life. He’s an engaging character, bursting with enthusiasm and a unique view of the human body, the five senses, tear ducts, and the parasympathetic nervous system. And throughout, he keeps playing those drums, holding the sticks in his trademark way on a nonstandard kit he put together himself.
The screening at MDC will be followed at 4:30 by “An Afternoon with Ashanti Omowali Alston,” a free Q&A with the revolutionary, orator, writer, organizer, motivator, anarchist, and former Black Panther Party member, in conversation with political philosopher, academic, and author Joy James, focusing on the new book Anarchist Panther: The Selected Writings of Ashanti O. Alston (AK Press, August 2026, $21.99).
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Everything Else Is Noise is one of several NYFF64 films that blend fiction and reality
NYFF64
Film at Lincoln Center
Walter Reade Theater, Alice Tully Hall, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
September 25 – October 12 filmlinc.org/nyff
One of my favorite times of every year comes each September, when I play hooky and spend all day at the New York Film Festival, catching four or five press screenings. This year, I shuttled between the Walter Reade Theater and the Francesca Beale Theater to see four extraordinary gems that fit extremely well together, a quartet of exquisite works that move at the pace of life, mixing fiction and nonfiction as they explore the relationship between cinema and reality in beautiful and unique ways.
Nowhere to Lay My Eyes is another gem from Hong Sangsoo
NOWHERE TO LAY MY EYES (눈둘데가 없네) (Hong Sangsoo, 2026)
Saturday, September 26, 12:30
Wednesday, October 7, 8:45 filmlinc.org
Festival favorite Hong Sangsoo once again has two films in the schedule, both fine examples of his personal style — the South Korean auteur writes, directs, edits, produces, and photographs his films. Since 2015, they usually star his partner, Kim Min-hee, who has appeared in thirteen of his movies and doesn’t act for any other director.
In Nowhere to Lay My Eyes, Kim portrays Sanghee, an experimental filmmaker who visits her mother (Choi Myung-gil) and stepfather (Kwon Hae-hyo) for the first time in ten years; Sanghee is joined by her younger brother (Shin Seok-ho), who is caught between his sister’s and mother’s estrangement. Their mother has made a new life on Jeju Island, where she owns a successful restaurant; meanwhile, her husband is a documentary filmmaker who has been working on the same project for two decades, about chobun, or grass graves, in which bodies are not buried but decompose aboveground. They also meet their stepsister (Park Mi-so), who discusses art with Sanghee.
As in so many Hong films, the well-drawn characters eat, drink, and visit the seashore as they talk about movies, aging, responsibility, and relationships. Hong often keeps the camera still and steady; for example, when Sanghee decides to visit a nearby pond, she walks slowly down a gravel road, her back to the stationary camera, her footsteps crunching gently as she says in voiceover, “It was a pleasant day, with clean air.” It’s a simple yet deeply affecting moment, representative of Hong’s work.
However, other scenes include two of his trademark zoom bursts to remind us that we are not watching real life. “Dramas are a scam,” the stepfather says at one point, a comment not only on his documentaries but on Hong’s oeuvre.
All senses are connected in Nicolás Pereda’s Everything Else Is Noise
EVERYTHING ELSE IS NOISE (LO DEMÁS ES RUIDO) (Nicolás Pereda, 2026)
Saturday, September 26, 4:30
Sunday, September 27, 9:30
Sunday, October 4, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 7:30
Monday, October 5, 1:00 filmlinc.org
Mexican filmmaker Nicolás Pereda’s Everything Else Is Noise is a wonderfully wry feminist comedy about music, family, and the art of filmmaking — as well as patience.
It begins with a long shot of crazy traffic, several minutes in which we follow one car at an intersection where vehicles are moving at a snail’s pace, if at all. This one sedan is having the most difficulty, attempting to make a left turn, but no one is letting it in. It’s both hilarious and frustrating, a terrific opening scene for a fabulously inventive film that requires patience on the part of the characters and the audience.
The story takes place in a single apartment, filled to the brim with plants. It is the home of cellist-composer Tere (Teresita Sánchez), who we first encounter when her downstairs neighbor (Andrew Rogers) comes to her door and complains that she is making too much noise. She calmly explains that she is practicing her cello and that she has already reached an agreement with another neighbor that it is fine to do so between nine and five. The man refuses to accept her explanation, repeating his demand again and again, but she insists, over and over in her soft-spoken yet sly manner, that she will continue practicing nonetheless. It’s a marvelously absurd exchange that sets the stage for the hilarious utter nonsense that is to follow.
Tere has let her friend and colleague, cellist and composer Rosa (Rosa Estela Juárez Vargas), borrow her apartment for a television interview about her career. Rosa, who does not want her husband to know about the interview, is nervous and is not the greatest with words, so Tere tries to settle her down by advising her to make up a fake story about her sense of smell. The interviewer, Lázaro (Lázaro G. Rodríguez), finally arrives with Paco (Francisco Barreiro), his cameraman and sound technician; it seems that they were in that car that was stuck in traffic, the first of a series of events that befall them as they try to conduct the interview.
It only gets more complicated when Tere’s daughter, avant-garde cellist Luisa (Luisa Pardo), shows up basically in her pajamas, eventually joined by her father, the famous composer Estevez (José Rodríguez López), who has not publicly acknowledged Luisa as his child, in order to protect his wife and their other, “legitimate” children. Things go wrong in droller and droller ways as Pereda, who wrote the script with Juan Francisco Maldonado and serves as cinematographer, has a blast with clever touches and details that sometimes fly under the radar if you don’t pay attention.
Sánchez, who has appeared in such other Pereda films as Fauna,Minotaur, and Lázaro at Night, is sensational as Tere, imbuing her with a spirited naturalism that brings a realistic quality to the narrative, melding fiction and nonfiction. (Pereda has won awards for both his documentaries and fiction features.) Pardo and Barreiro, also Pereda regulars, ramp up the absurdities to priceless levels.
Everything Else Is Noise is a small gem, making its points about gender inequality, class differences, the media, and the creative process in both subtle and overt ways that will have you shaking with laughter. As Luisa says, “In my opinion, the issue with experiencing this music live, where you can see the performer, is that the visual aspect takes over, and you stop really listening. So, for this to make sense, I’m going to ask you all to close your eyes while I play.” Paco then adjust the camera viewfinder and puts his head in his hands.
And as Tere notes, “The senses are all connected.”
Brava!
Song Sunmi stars as an actress making a comeback in The Day She Returns
THE DAY SHE RETURNS (그녀가 돌아온 날) (Hong Sangsoo, 2026)
Tuesday, October 6, 9:00
Thursday, October 8, 6:15 filmlinc.org
A kind of companion piece to his 2012 drama The Day He Arrives, Hong Sangsoo’s The Day She Returns is a meditative examination of life and art, of the choices we make amid our inherent biases and societal mores.
Song Sunmi stars as Bae Jeongsu, a famous actress returning to work after twelve years off raising her daughter. She has chosen a small indie film for her comeback, and she is promoting it through a series of one-on-one interviews with three woman journalists (Kim Seon-jin, Oh Yeon-su, and Kang So-yi) at a local German restaurant.
Instead of merely hyping the film or herself, she first asks what each of the women thought of the film, and they indeed share their thoughts while also delving into their own personal situations and agendas. Bae shows what appears to be genuine interest in them, even as their stories grow more absurd and self-centered, but she hesitates when they ask her about her recent divorce. She also wants them to have a beer with her.
Attempting to be accommodating yet not overly effusive, Bae shares such ideas as “All interpretations ultimately lead to anxiety. If you can see things as they are, then you can actually experience real peace,” “I refuse fake love in my life,” and “How can we maintain an innocent face when our souls are in tatters?” As happens at press junkets, Bae sometimes repeats herself, giving the same answer to similar questions, although the third interview is the most legitimate.
In between interviews, each of which lasts between fifteen and twenty minutes, shot with a still camera (but watch out for those strange trademark zooms), Bae goes outside with her personal assistant (Ha Seong-guk) for a smoke and wonders whether she is being too honest. Sitting on grass, seen in between two parked cars, Bae is a curious figure, provoking questions about whether she is acting for the interviewers, telling the truth, or having trouble discerning reality from fiction. That line is further blurred when she goes to her acting class and her teacher (Cho Yun-hee) gives her a challenging assignment with a fellow student (Park Mi-so).
Hong shoots The Day She Returns in a stark black-and-white that lends the film a ghostly, surreal quality, accompanied by a hypnotic score. (Hong serves as writer, director, cinematographer, editor, producer, and composer.) Sunmi, who played a film professor in The Day He Arrives, is brilliant as Bae, a former star trying to resuscitate her career in her forties but doing things her own way. She may be a well-known actress, but she could be any woman facing a transition, taking stock of where she’s been and trying to decide what comes next, but in her case displaying a vulnerability that may or may not be real, given her profession.
One of the questions asked is “What is a good film?” The answer, of course, is just about anything by Hong Sangsoo.
(The Day She Returns is screening with Kleber Mendonça Filho’s South of Tehran, in which the Brazilian director meets with Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi.)
Beatrice Gibson makes a stunning feature debut in the poetic At Night
CURRENTS: AT NIGHT (Beatrice Gibson, 2026)
Saturday, October 3, 9:00
Sunday, October 4, 5:30 filmlinc.org
“At Night is a film in the shape of a question,” experimental filmmaker and installation artist Beatrice Gibson explains in the director’s note for her feature debut, the poetic, elegiac At Night. That question mixes fiction and reality as six women examine their lives over the course of one evening in Paris, focusing on risk, love, sex, art, and motherhood.
Gibson, who has been celebrated for her short works, stars as B, a filmmaker reaching a creative crisis. Her husband (Nick Gordon) is not happy that she might miss another family event involving their son, Obie (Obie Gordon). She reaches out to an old friend and child minder, Didi (educator, mother, and activist Diocouda Diaoune), who we later see drinking tea by herself in a Chinese restaurant, by a large cerulean aquarium, watching Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s The Cloud in Her Room as she speaks on the phone with her mother (Aissata Ba). Waiting for a train, Didi meets a Metro nightworker (Habib Dembele) who, like Didi, knows Bambara, the national language of Mali.
In an extraordinary scene, B and Didi are joined for drinks by Kátia (psychoanalytic psychotherapist Kátia Belo Cardoso), Sophie (English poet and teacher Sophie Robinson), Amy (British filmmaker, photographer, and electrician Amy Gwatkin), Laida (Spanish artist and filmmaker Laida Lertxundi), Denna (producer Denna Cartamkhoob), and Pauline (visual and performance artist Pauline Curnier Jardin), who discuss their lives and careers, particularly how they try to balance sexual desire and children with their work. Other issues that are brought up in the film are race, class, and gender.
A mime (American-born English model and actress Lily McMenamy) performs a grotesque routine about women’s bodies. At a bus stop, Didi encounters a performer (London-based multimedia artist Adam Christensen) who shares a deeply personal story with her. Kátia shares the tale of Yemaya, the Yoruba ocean mother goddess.
The sounds of the night range from Elvin Brandhi’s haunting score to recited poetry, including excerpts from American poet and essayist June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights” and Alice Notley’s “The Descent of Alette” (recorded by the American poet shortly before her death; Gibson was hoping Notley would be able to appear in the film) and a poem by Robinson she reads at a record store. (The film was inspired by the writings of Jordan, Notley, and American novelist and poet Kathy Acker.)
A compelling, deeply affecting feminist fantasia, At Night is gorgeously photographed by Ben Rivers, who captures the dark mystery of a Paris night, from bars and cafés to bland hotel rooms and empty streets. Many scenes are set at bus and train stops and in and on the Metro, as characters spend time in transition that only takes them so far. The film hovers over the melding of fiction and reality, as most of the participants — who are not professional actors — crafted their stories and dialogue with Gibson (Deux soeurs qui ne sont pas soeurs,I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead), based on their actual lives. Editor Liyo Gong masterfully stitches it all together, resulting in a spellbinding cinematic experience.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Frannie (Teri Garr) and Hank (Frederic Forrest) try to hold on to their love in One from the Heart
ONE FROM THE HEART (Francis Ford Coppola, 1982)
Paris Theater
4 West Fifty-Eighth St. at Fifth Ave.
Monday, September 14, 7:00 www.paristheaternyc.com
New York, New York meets La La Land in Francis Ford Coppola’s romantic musical fantasia, One from the Heart. The film, which famously bankrupted the director and his Zoetrope Studios when it was released in 1982, is screening September 14 in the Paris Theater series “Big & Loud,” for the first time ever in 70mm in New York City. Teri Garr, one of the best actresses of the 1970s and 1980s, stars as Frannie, a woman who works at the Paradise Travel agency with her best friend, Maggie (Lainie Kazan). Frannie lives with Hank (Frederic Forrest), a would-be musician who owns a surreal junkyard, called Reality Wrecking, with his best friend, Moe (Harry Dean Stanton). With their dreams drifting further and further out of reach — note how Frannie works at Paradise and Hank at Reality — Frannie and Hank spend the Fourth of July separately; Frannie is intrigued by local piano player Ray (Raúl Juliá), while Hank has the hots for circus girl Leila (Nastassja Kinski). Fireworks are on the way, just not necessarily what was expected. Written by Coppola and Armyan Bernstein, the film is lushly photographed by Vittorio Storaro, who previously worked extensively with Bernardo Bertolucci and won an Oscar for his cinematography on Apocalypse Now. Storaro drenches the screen in oversaturated blues, reds, greens, and pinks, creating a dreamlike neon atmosphere in which scenes sometimes converge in unusual ways.
Frannie (Teri Garr) gets carried away by Ray (Raúl Juliá) in famous Francis Ford Coppola financial disaster
Tom Waits’s lounge-music score features duets with Crystal Gayle that both enhance the mood and propel the plot, which could use a little help. Coppola re-created the Vegas strip at Zoetrope, with no location shooting; production designer Dean Tavoularis and art director Angelo P. Graham transformed Sin City into a dazzlingly fake place, as if existing only in the main characters’ minds. The film cost $26 million to make and took in less than $1 million at the box office, a disaster that puts it firmly in the pantheon with Cleopatra and Heaven’s Gate. But seen four decades later, One from the Heart is not quite the failure it is usually believed to be. The sets are spectacularly over the top, Storaro’s use of color — on Forrest’s face alone — is otherworldly, and Waits’s songs can serve as a good distraction at just the right times. There are still a whole lot of cringeworthy moments that make no sense — let’s not get started on the airport mess — but, as with Heaven’s Gate, it’s not nearly as bad as legend would have it. And some of it is downright delightful. Garr, who died in 2024 at the age of seventy-nine after a long illness that kept her out of public view and led to her retirement from acting in 2011, owns her role from start to finish, whether putting up a window display or being carried naked through the streets. Keep a look-out for cameos by Waits and Rebecca de Mornay, along with Coppola’s parents in an elevator.
“Big & Loud” continues through September 29 with such other films as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music, William Friedkin’s underrated Sorcerer, and Louis Malle’s crime gem Elevator to the Gallows.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s remake of his own Serpent’s Path is another suspense gem
SERPENT’S PATH (『蛇の道』) (HEBI NO MICHI) (LA VOIE DU SERPENT) (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
September 11-17 www.ifccenter.com
When Kiyoshi Kurosawa was asked by a studio in France to remake one of his earlier films, he opted to revisit his 1998 straight-to-video thriller Serpent’s Path, which was written by Hiroshi Takahashi (Ringu,Sodom the Killer) and starred Show Aikawa and Teruyuki Kagawa. He cowrote the new script with French journalist Aurélien Ferenczi, who passed away in October 2024 at the age of sixty-one. The result is a brutal, gripping white-knuckle shocker that you won’t be able to turn away from, no matter how much you might want to.
Albert Bacheret (Damien Bonnard) is a disheveled, distraught man who is determined to find whoever murdered and dismembered his eight-year-old daughter, Marie (Hélène Caputo). He is helped by Sayoko Mijima (Ko Shibasaki), a calm, composed hospital psychiatrist who is treating Yoshimura (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a Japanese man having trouble adjusting to life in France. Sayoko has also moved from Japan to Paris, leaving behind her partner, Soichiro (Munetaka Aoki).
Albert and Sayoko are not criminal masterminds, but they expertly kidnap Laval (Mathieu Amalric) and chain him to a wall in an abandoned warehouse. Albert accuses Laval of having killed Marie, but Laval adamantly denies he had anything to do with it, claiming he is just an accountant at the Minard Foundation, an institution that we slowly learn more about, none of it good. Deprived of food, drink, and a bathroom, Laval eventually gives up his boss, Pierre Guérin (Grégoire Colin), who Albert and Sayoko decide to capture as well. Like Laval, Pierre is not forthcoming at first, but torture has a way of making people talk, whether it be truth or lies, and the plot thickens, offering more and more surprises along with more and more violence.
Albert Bacheret (Damien Bonnard) and Sayoko Mijima (Ko Shibasaki) hunt for a killer in Serpent’s Path
Throughout the film, Albert, who became estranged from his wife, Lola (Vimala Pons), after the tragic incident, shows a short video of Marie playing the piano and roller skating as he reads a newspaper report that details exactly what happened to her, making Laval, Pierre, and, later, Christian Samy (Slimane Dazi) watch it — but the audience as well, as if inuring us to the atrocity while also feeling Albert’s torment. Kurosawa (Wife of a Spy,Tokyo Sonata) and cinematographer Alex Kavyrchine have created a fascinating dichotomy between the kind of violence we see onscreen, whether a movie in a theater or a video on a smartphone or laptop, and the kind we are not shown but only have to imagine, especially when it involves children. We cringe every time Albert narrates the video but not at what Albert and Sayoko do; in fact, we are rooting for them. As the body count rises, so do humorous shots of the victims, eliciting uncomfortable yet necessary laughter. The original film clocked in at eighty-five minutes; the French remake adds more than twenty minutes, ratcheting up the tension.
Bonnard (Staying Vertical,Les Misérables) is terrific as Albert, ably portraying a laser-focused but perhaps misguided man who has disconnected from society, impulsive and restless, turning to screens to redefine his purpose. His unease is so palpable you just want to give him a giant hug — but maybe not when he’s armed. Actress and singer Shibasaki (One Missed Call,xxxHolic) adds just the right amount of mystery to Sayoko, who might be more than she seems. Meanwhile, the mighty Amalric (Kings and Queen,The Grand Budapest Hotel) once again proves why he’s one of the best actors on the planet.
At one point, when Yoshimura talks to Sayoko about facing the end, she replies, “The end? The end of what? Are you afraid of the end? Isn’t the hardest part when there is no end?”
Or, in other words, be careful what you wish for.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
