this week in film and television

THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL 4K RESTORATION

Mark Bittner feeds several cherry-headed conures in The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL (Judy Irving, 2003)
New Plaza Cinema @Macaulay Honors College
35 West Sixty-Seventh St. between Central Park West & Columbus Ave.
Opens Friday, November 17
newplazacinema.org
pelicanmedia.org

Judy Irving begins her 2003 documentary, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, with a shot of a skeptical passerby who has stopped to watch Mark Bittner as he cares for a flock of forty-five cherry-headed conures, also known as red-masked parakeets, living in the trees outside his apartment.

“They’re not really wild if you have names for them, if you don’t mind my saying,” the man claims. “You feed them out of your hands, you have names for them, and they come up to you like they’re your pets. . . . Well, whatever.” He then shrugs and walks away.

The exchange doesn’t bother Bittner at all; he gleefully answers the suspicious man’s doubts and just continues doing what he’s doing, a big smile on his face.

It’s an extremely clever way to start the film, which opens November 17 in a brand-new 4K twentieth anniversary digital restoration at New Plaza Cinema. With the question of Bittner’s relationship with the birds resolved right up front, Irving, who served as director, producer, editor, and cinematographer, is free to now follow Bittner’s odd life choice.

Born in Vancouver, Washington, in 1951, Bittner moved from Seattle to Berkeley when he was twenty and then to San Francisco with the goal of making it as a rock-and-roll musician, in search of a “real transformation.” In 1993, he became infatuated with the conures, some of whom had previously been pets and others that had been born in the wild. Over the course of several years, he devoted his life to them, giving them names, caring for them when they were ill, watching out for predatory hawks, and keeping a somewhat scientific journal of their comings and goings and their individual personalities.

As if he’s sharing the plot of a soap opera, he talks about Scrapper and Scraperella’s breakup; discusses the pairing of Picasso and Sophie; introduces us to Fanny, Gibson, Flap, Pushkin, and Olive; sings to Mingus to get him dancing; vacuums up the mess the birds make in his apartment; nurses Tupelo; and bonds deeply with Connor, the only blue-crowned conure in the flock, an older bird who cannot find a mate or best friend. Connor is not unlike Bittner, a single man with thick glasses, a bushy beard and mustache, and a long ponytail who apparently has no close friends either.

“I don’t think of myself as an eccentric,” he says in his calm, relaxing voice.

Inspired by such Beat writers as Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac, Bittner is a kind of throwback, an easygoing Bohemian going with the flow, living for free without a paying job. “It wasn’t a plan; it just happened,” he says about his caring for the birds. “It was what I was doing while I was trying to figure out what that thing would be, my idea of where I was going to go in my life. But it became the thing that I’m doing. It’s magic that way.”

But that magic threatens to disappear when he is forced to leave his apartment and has to figure out what will happen to the birds.

Irving, who appears in the film, originally intended the project to be a short but ended up compiling thirty hours of 16mm footage over a few years on a shoestring budget. “When I first met him, I thought Mark was an inarticulate hippy recluse and he thought I was an ecofeminist lesbian,” she writes in a new article for Talkhouse. That changed as filming continued.

A companion piece to Bittner’s 2004 memoir of the same name (the book has the added subtitle A Love Story . . . with Wings), The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is a tender and touching — and colorful — look at not just one man’s dedication to conures but the connection between humanity and nature, as well as the need for people to be a part of something, like a bird in a flock. We are not built for solitude. And that comes to fruition in a sweet shocker of a finale involving Irving (Pelican Dreams, Dark Circle), who will be at New Plaza Cinema for Q&As following the 6:10 screening on November 17 and the 2:40 shows on November 18 and 19.

Meanwhile, Bittner is working on his next book, Street Song, which will be accompanied by an album featuring such originals as “Poppa John,” “The Arrow You Want,” and “You’re So Peaceful” and covers of tunes by Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

REVERSE SHOT AT 20: SELECTIONS FROM A CENTURY: MANAKAMANA

A mother and daughter eat ice cream in experimental documentary Manakamana

MANAKAMANA (Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez, 2013)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, November 18, 12:30, & Sunday, November 19, 3:30
Festival continues through November 26
www.manakamanafilm.com
movingimage.us

If you’re an adventurous filmgoer who likes to be challenged and surprised, the less you know about Pacho Velez and Stephanie Spray’s Manakamana, the better. But if you want to know more, here goes: Evoking such experimental films as Michael Snow’s Wavelength, Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma, and Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests as well as the more narrative works of such unique auteurs as Jim Jarmusch and Abbas Kiarostami, Manakamana is a beautiful, meditative journey that is sure to try your patience at first. The two-hour film, which requires a substantial investment on the part of the audience, takes place in a five-foot-by-five-foot cable car in Nepal that shuttles men, women, and children to and from the historic Manakamana temple, on a pilgrimage to worship a wish-fulfilling Hindu goddess. With Velez operating the stationary Aaton 7 LTR camera — the same one used by Robert Gardner for his 1986 documentary Forest of Bliss — and Spray recording the sound, the film follows a series of individuals and small groups as they either go to or return from the temple, traveling high over the lush green landscape that used to have to be traversed on foot before the cable car was built. A man and his son barely acknowledge each other; a woman carries a basket of flowers on her lap; an elderly mother and her middle-age daughter try to eat melting ice-cream bars; a pair of musicians play their instruments to pass the time.

A heavy metal band takes a picture of themselves in meditative documentary

Each trip has its own narrative, which must be partly filled in by the viewer as he or she studies the people in the cable car and the surroundings, getting continually jolted as the car glides over the joins. The film is a fascinating look into human nature and technological advances in this era of surveillance as the subjects attempt to act as normal as possible even though a camera and a microphone are practically in their faces. Produced at the Sensory Ethnography Laboratory at Harvard, Manakamana consists of eleven uncut shots of ten-to-eleven minutes filmed in 16mm, using rolls whose length roughly equals that of each one-way trip, creating a kind of organic symbiosis between the making and projecting of the work while adding a time-sensitive expectation on the part of the viewer.

A film well worth sticking around for till the very end — and one that grows less and less claustrophobic with each scene — Manakamana is screening November 18 and 19 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series “Reverse Shot at 20: Selections from a Century,” honoring the twentieth anniversary of the film publication Reverse Shot, which has been its in-house journal since 2014; the two-month retrospective highlights twenty-first-century works touted by what was originally a stapled zine. Velez will be present at the November 19 show to discuss the film; both screenings will be preceded by the 2014 video Reverse Shot Talkie: Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez. “Spray and Velez’s film calls attention to attention, the ways our thoughts and perceptions slowly drift and return during long durations spent looking at certain subjects or familiar scenarios,” Leo Goldsmith wrote in Reverse Shot.

DOWN IN DALLAS TOWN: FROM JFK TO K2

Alan Govenar returns to Dealey Plaza in Down in Dallas Town: From JFK to K2

Who: Film director Alan Govenar
What: New York City theatrical premiere of Down in Dallas Town From JFK to K2, with 7:00 screenings opening weekend followed by director Q&As
Where: Cinema Village, 22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
When: November 17-23
Why: In conjunction with the sixtieth anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy at the age of forty-six on November 22, 1963, poet, writer, folklorist, photographer, and filmmaker Alan Govenar travels back to Dealey Plaza to take another look at that fateful day and how it has impacted contemporary society in the documentary Down in Dallas Town: From JFK to K2, opening November 17 at Cinema Village. Govenar mixes archival audio and television footage with new interviews of eyewitnesses, Kennedy experts, tourists, musicians, and more, including the first-ever interview of Mary Ann Moorman, who talks about her iconic Polaroid snapshot of the event. The film also explores many of the songs written about JFK and the murder, by such groups as the Dixie Nightingales, Los Conquistadores, the Southern Bell Singers, Freddy King, and the Sensational Six. Along the way, Govenar wonders whether JFK’s policies could have prevented the rampant homelessness, designer drug epidemic, and gun violence so prevalent in America today.

In previous films, Govenar examined tattoo legends (Tattoo Uprising), the NEA’s National Heritage Fellowships (Extraordinary Ordinary People), multidisciplinary artist Sidiki Conde, who has lost the use of his lower body (You Don’t Need Feet to Dance), and a nameless hotel that became a gathering place for Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, and others (The Beat Hotel). Here he turns his attention to a moment in American history that caused a paradigm shift that is still felt today. “Kennedy was the best president we had. I wish we still had him,” Robert from Maine tells Govenar. Down in Dallas Town is more than just another movie about JFK, and Govenar will be at Cinema Village for Q&As following the 7:00 screenings opening weekend to take it even further.

DOC NYC 2023 CENTERPIECE: UNCROPPED

Photojournalist James Hamilton is the subject of fascinating documentary (photo by Jody Caravaglia)

UNCROPPED (D. W. Young, 2023)
Available online through November 26
Festival runs November 8-26 at IFC Center, SVA Theatre, Village East by Angelika, and Bar Veloce, $13-$30
www.docnyc.net
www.uncroppedfilm.com

Once upon a time, documentaries were primarily the purview of public television and a handful of small, independent theaters in big cities. But with the explosion of streaming services and technological improvements in camera phones, we now have the ability to see more nonfiction films than ever, taking us places we’ve never been before while introducing us to a wide range of sociopolitical issues and extraordinary, and nefarious, individuals. The fourteenth annual DOC NYC festival got underway November 8, kicking off nearly three weeks of more than two hundred films and special events, including thirty world premieres and twenty-six US debuts. It’s been exciting watching the growth of the festival itself, from its relatively humble beginnings in 2010.

The opening-night selection was Clair Titley’s The Contestant, about aspiring Japanese comedian Tomoaki Hamatsu, who, unbeknownst to him, becomes a reality-show star; Sam Pollard and Llewellyn Smith’s South to Black Power is the closing-night film, a look at controversial New York Times columnist Charles Blow, with Pollard, Smith, and Blow participating in a Q&A.

The centerpiece is the world premiere of D. W. Young’s warm and lovely Uncropped, which is as gentle and unassuming as its subject, photographer James Hamilton, who should be a household name. But fame and fortune are clearly not the point for Hamilton, who grew up in Westport, Connecticut, and didn’t own his own camera until he was twenty. He’s lived in the same cramped Greenwich Village apartment since 1966 and has little online presence, especially when compared to several other photographers named James Hamilton.

“James’s work is refreshingly devoid of ego,” Sonic Youth cofounder Thurston Moore says in the film, letting out a laugh. “Let’s put it that way.”

The soft-spoken, easygoing Hamilton notes, “My whole career was all about having fun.”

And what fun it’s been.

Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine are among the many famous and not-so-famous people photographed by James Hamilton (photo by James Hamilton)

Hamilton got his start by forging a press pass to gain entry to the Texas International Pop Festival in 1969 and used the shots to get a staff job at Crawdaddy magazine. He later took pictures for the Herald, Harper’s Bazaar, the Village Voice, New York magazine, the London Times, and the New York Observer. He photographed rock stars and fashion icons; joined with print journalists to cover local, national, and international news events, including wars; shot unique behind-the-scene footage on such film sets as Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, Bill Paxton’s Frailty, and George A. Romero’s Knightriders; and captured life on the streets of New York City and elsewhere.

Among the people Young talks to are journalists Joe Conason, Alexandra Jacobs, Michael Daly, Thulani Davis, Richard Goldstein, Mark Jacobson, and Kathy Dobie, editors Eva Prinz and Susan Vermazen, and photographers David Lee and Sylvia Plachy. Young, who also edited the film and produced it with Judith Mizrachy, cuts in hundreds of Hamilton’s photos, which run the gamut from celebrities, politicians, and musicians to business leaders, kids playing, and brutal war scenes, accompanied by a jazzy score by David Ullmann, performed by Ullmann, Vincent Sperrazza, and others.

Hamilton, who has never been a fan of being interviewed, sits down and chats with Plachy, who shares fabulous stories of their time at the Voice; journalist and close friend Jacobson, who Hamilton took pictures for on numerous adventures; Conason, who discusses their transition from the Voice to the Observer; Dobie, who gets personal; and Prinz and Moore together. “We never crop James Hamilton’s photographs,” Prinz points out, raving about his remarkable eye for composition.

Uncropped, which will be available online through November 26, also serves as an insightful document of more than fifty years of New York City journalism, tracing the beginnings of underground coverage to today’s online culture where professional, highly qualified, experienced writers and photographers are having trouble getting published and paid. But through it all, Hamilton has persevered.

in his previous film, The Booksellers, Young focused on bibliophiles who treasure physical books as works of art even as the internet changes people’s relationships with books and how they read and purchase them. One of the experts Young meets with is Nancy Bass Wyden, owner of the Strand, an independent bookstore founded in 1927 and still hanging on against Amazon, B&N, and other chains and conglomerates.

Near the end of Uncropped, Young shows Hamilton and Dobie perusing the outdoor stacks of cheap books at the Strand, dinosaurs still relishing the perhaps-soon-to-be-gone days of print but always in search of more fun.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

TARIQ “BLACK THOUGHT” TROTTER IN CONVERSATION WITH JON STEWART

Tariq Trotter (photo by Joshua Kissi) will discuss his new new memoir at BAM with Jon Stewart this week

Who: Tariq Trotter (Black Thought), Jon Stewart
What: Book launch and conversation
Where: Brooklyn Academy of Music, Harvey Theater at the BAM Strong, 651 Fulton St., 30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
When: Tuesday, November 14, $44-$68, 8:00
Why: “The story of my life starts with the fire. A lot of people know I burned down my family’s home when I was six years old, but are not aware of the magnitude of that moment — and all that began to unravel after it. That, I have never spoken of publicly, and rarely even to those closest to me,” Tariq Trotter, aka Black Thought, writes at the beginning of his new memoir, The Upcycled Self: A Memoir on the Art of Becoming Who We Are (One World, November 2023, $26.99). “You sometimes hear stories about people who have ‘lost it all’ and rebuilt their lives, but what I learned at a young age is that sometimes shit is just lost forever, or the cracks are so bad the building blocks never quite Lego-fit the way they once did. We lost everything we had in that fire. Yes, material goods are just ‘things,’ but the things we collect and value — especially when we’re young, or broke, or struggling — are extensions of who we are. Our visible, tangible losses, then, represent something deeper. In the fire, we lost ourselves.”

Written with Jasmine Martin, the book features such chapters as “A Creative Reckoning,” “Family,” “An Epidemic,” “New City, New Self,” and “The (Square) Roots” as Trotter traces the arc of his life and career. Born in Philadelphia in 1973, Trotter was a graffiti artist and drug dealer before hooking up with Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson in high school and Malik B. in college and finding success as a rapper and MC in the Roots while also establishing a solo career as a musician, actor, film producer, and stage composer and lyricist. He also leads the Roots as the house band on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

On November 14 at 8:00, Trotter will be at BAM’s Harvey Theater, discussing the book with talk show legend and activist Jon Stewart, the former host of The Daily Show and The Problem with Jon Stewart, which is ending after just two seasons over creative differences with Apple about coverage of China and AI. The $68 tickets come with a copy of Trotter’s book, in which he also writes, “Our lives are a response to the call of our childhoods. Somewhere in the echoes of the past, we find our truest selves. Who am I? Who are you?”

If you can’t make it to BAM, Trotter will be at Columbia’s Miller Theatre on November 28, speaking with journalism dean Jelani Cobb.

REVERSE SHOT AT 20 — SELECTIONS FROM A CENTURY: THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is part of twentieth anniversary tribute to Reverse Shot at MoMI

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON (David Fincher, 2008)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Friday, November 3, 6:30, and Sunday, November 5, 1:00
Series continues through November 26
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
reverseshot.org

Museum of the Moving Image is honoring the twentieth anniversary of the film publication Reverse Shot, which has been its in-house journal since 2014, with a two-month retrospective of twenty-first-century works touted by what was originally a stapled zine.

Among the films that have already been screened in “Reverse Shot at 20: Selections from a Century” are Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar’s A Lion in the House, Joel Anderson’s Lake Mungo, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse, and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. On November 3 and 5, MoMI will present David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which fits in well with the name of the journal, Reverse Shot, considering what happens to the title character.

Based on the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is an unusual love story for the ages. As Benjamin (Brad Pitt) grows younger, everyone around him gets older, creating fascinating intersections among various characters, but primarily with Daisy Fuller (Cate Blanchett). It’s August 2005 in New Orleans, as Hurricane Katrina approaches. In her hospital room, an elderly, dying woman (an unrecognizable Blanchett) gives her daughter, Caroline (Julia Ormond), a diary that she begins reading out loud. It was written by a man named Benjamin Button, who was born an old man in 1918 and tells his life story as the years pass by and he ages backward, sort of a reverse Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman) in the great Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970), with a bit of the overrated Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) thrown in as well.

The film lags a bit as Benjamin and Daisy approach similar ages — actually, the closer they get to their actor selves — but the beginning is marvelous, with Fincher working magic as Pitt plays a tiny, withered old man, and the ending is heart-wrenching. Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac) and screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close) wisely choose not to turn Benjamin into a human oddity that confounds the medical profession; instead, he just goes about his life, trying to do the best he can with a positive outlook and a lust for living. Alexandre Desplat’s score is among the best of the year, supported by a soundtrack filled with New Orleans jazz. The cast also includes Tilda Swinton as a diplomat’s wife who takes a romantic interest in Benjamin, Jared Harris as the randy captain of a tugboat who teaches Benjamin about the sea (and booze and sex), Taraji P. Henson as Queenie, the woman who raises the baby Benjamin after he is abandoned by his father (Jason Flemyng), and Mahershala Ali as Queenie’s husband, Tizzy.

In Reverse Shot, Andrew Chan wrote, “The unexpected harmony of extravagant price tag and minor-key mood is just the most obvious reason this film stands as an anomaly in the landscape of contemporary Hollywood cinema. . . . This is a masterpiece through and through, and not only the best thing I’ve seen come out of Hollywood in years, but also a film that deserves to stand proudly beside the work of contemporary masters Terence Davies and Wong Kar-wai in its evocation of what it feels like to be caught in the middle of time as it endlessly, imperceptibly slips away.”

“Reverse Shot at 20: Selections from a Century” continues through November 26 with such other gems as Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum, and Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset / Before Midnight / Before Sunrise trilogy.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH MARRIAGE

Three winged Mythology Sirens (Trio Limonāde) teach Zelma (Dagmara Dominczyk) old-fashioned ideas in My Love Affair with Marriage

MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH MARRIAGE (Signe Baumane, 2022)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
October 6-12
212-255-224
quadcinema.com
www.myloveaffairwithmarriagemovie.com

“I am a girl and I am weak,” seven-year-old Zelma (voiced by Dagmara Dominczyk) is taught in Signe Baumane’s wonderful animated feature, My Love Affair with Marriage.

In her 2014 debut, Rocks in My Pockets: A Crazy Quest for Sanity, the Latvian-born, Brooklyn-based filmmaker explored her family history of mental illness. In My Love Affair with Marriage, she follows the life of Zelma, from conception through childhood and the adult quest to find an identity.

Writer, director, animator, and designer Baumane combines hand-drawn animation, papier-mâché constructions, photographed backgrounds, and stop-motion animation to create a beguiling world that mixes reality with fantasy as Zelma goes through “Inception,” “Formation,” “Implementation,” and “Reconsideration.” Poignant scenes from her life — defending herself at school, moving to new countries, losing a friend, falling in love — are supplemented by songs performed by a Greek chorus of three winged Mythology Sirens (Trio Limonāde, consisting of Iluta Alsberga, Ieva Katkovska, and Kristine Pastare) who serenade her with old-fashioned notions about soul mates, virginity, sex appeal, shaming, weakness, and other concepts of life and romance. The heavenly music and songs are by Kristian Sensini, with lyrics by Baumane.

“It’s not a war / Not a tear / Not a wound / It’s the start of your monthly cycle,” the chorus tells Zelma. “You are on your way to becoming a woman / The worst is ahead of you / The world is full of traps set just for us women / Beware of everything / especially men / There are three simple rules for a woman to succeed in life / One: Be a virgin until you marry / Two: Choose and marry well / Three: Hold the marriage together whatever it takes.” Zelma responds, “But how about love?”

Zelma (Dagmara Dominczyk) is ogled by an older man on a train (Keith Randolph Smith) in My Love Affair with Marriage

As Zelma encounters new situations that she doesn’t understand, Baumane cuts to wildly inventive biology lessons animated by Yajun Shi in which an adorable smiling neuron (Michele Pawk) discusses fallopian tubes, the limbic system, major histocompatibility complex, the effects of oxytocin and dopamine, hormones, various parts of the brain, human microbiomes, and a bevy of scientific facts that impact how and why Zelma reacts to specific stimuli.

She is told early on that “ignorance is a girl’s bliss,” but she spends the film battling her biology and gender expectations to search out happiness and fulfillment, discovering that traditional ideas of subservience and marriage are not making her feel complete. Her relationships with such men as Bo (Matthew Modine), Sergei (Cameron Monaghan), and Jonas (Stephen Lang) bring her ever closer to who she is, but it is not going to be easy, especially as she still fights off the repression that was forced into her by growing up in the Soviet Union.

My Love Affair with Marriage is an engaging film that effectively turns stereotypical tropes inside out and upside down while avoiding becoming academic, moralistic, or didactic. Baumane uses different forms of animation for the personal, biological, political, and imaginary aspects of Zelma’s life, which helps maintain the fast pace of the 108-minute film. The entrancing visuals include works by Lasse Persson, Douglas Fitch, and Sandra Osip and art historical references, from Munch to Escher.

Dominczyk (Succession, The Lost Daughter) brings a childlike wonder to Zelma, while Tony winner Pawk (Crazy for You, Cabaret) is mesmerizing as Biology; if they ever make any kind of Biology collectible, count me in. Also in the voice cast are Erica Schroeder as Elita, Emma Kenney as Sarma, Clyde Baldo as Eduards the bully, Florencia Lozano as Zelma’s mother, Ruby Modine as Nina, Carolyn Baeumler as Darya, Christina Pumariega as Darya’s mother, Tracy Thorne and Laila Robins as emcees, Dale Soules as a Soviet official, and Michael Laurence as the Big Man.

But the focus is what’s happening in Zelma’s mind and body — which represents what’s going on in the viewer’s mind and body as well, regardless of gender. It might be an all-too-familiar story, but Baumane infuses it with a bold and intriguing freshness. Her depictions of kisses, coffins, clouds, and interior spaces are captivating, showing that life as a woman is no automatic fairy tale.

“To be a woman is dangerous and can be deadly,” Zelma, who turns into an animal when threatened, says. “I was so afraid to be a woman.” But that was once upon a time.

My Love Affair with Marriage opens October 6 at the Quad, with Baumane on hand for Q&As at the 2;30, 5:00, and 7:30 screenings every day through October 11.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]