Tony Randall plays a used car salesman in 1957 Martin Ritt black-and-white CinemaScope tale
Who: Directors Billy Wilder, Woody Allen, Martin Ritt, Otto Preminger, Fred Zinnemann, Robert Wise, Samuel Fuller, and others
What: “Black & White ’Scope: American Cinema”
Where: BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St., 718-636-4100
When: February 27 – March 19
Why: BAMcinématek is presenting twenty-one CinemaScope films shot in glorious black-and-white by such master cinematographers as Gordon Willis, James Wong Howe, Eugen Schüfftan, and Conrad Hall, from such classics as The Apartment, Manhattan, The Hustler, In Cold Blood, The Elephant Man, The Longest Day, and The Three Faces of Eve to such lesser-known fare as The Victors, Forty Guns, China Gate, No Down Payment — featuring Tony Randall as a used car salesman — and the unforgettable (for all the wrong reasons) Rashomom remake The Outrage, starring Paul Newman, Laurence Harvey, Claire Bloom, Edward G. Robinson, and William Shatner.
An unsettling feeling of creepiness hovers over Farewell to Hollywood, the controversial documentary codirected by filmmaker Henry Corra and teenager Regina Diane “Reggie” Nicholson, who wanted to complete one full-length work before she died of cancer. Corra, whose mentor was David Maysles — when he was twenty-two, Corra saw Grey Gardens, then went to New York and asked the Maysles brothers for a job and was hired on the spot — met Nicholson at a film festival in 2010 and was so taken by her story, he decided to collaborate with her on her dream project. Corra and Nicholson spent most of the next twenty-one months together, compiling more than four hundred hours of footage as Reggie had tests done, got into a nasty battle with her parents, and watched films that inspired her, including Apocalypse Now, The Graduate, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and, most importantly, Pulp Fiction; Reggie was particularly obsessed with Uma Thurman’s character in Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 Oscar-nominated flick. But as is his style in such previous films as George, Jack and The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan, Corra inserts himself into the story, in this case becoming Reggie’s primary caretaker as the cancer begins to ravage her body and she insists on keeping the camera running. It’s all part of what Corra calls “living cinema,” becoming involved in the lives of his subjects, not merely being an objective viewer, and it’s clear that at least some of Reggie’s often ugly battle with her parents is a result of her relationship with Corra. Although it is not sexual in any way, Corra does admit to loving Reggie, and vice versa, something that Reggie’s father finds inappropriate and leads to Corra’s banishment from the Nicholson home twice, which means he’s unable to film Reggie for extended periods of time. Much has been argued about whether Corra overstepped the ethical bounds of documentary filmmaking — he staunchly defends his approach, claiming he’s making art, not mere entertainment, and he doesn’t even like the word “documentary” — but there’s something chilling in this comment he made to Indiewire in an 
Award-winning film festival favorite Drunktown’s Finest is a refreshingly original look inside life on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico. “They say this land isn’t a place to live; it’s a place to leave. Then why do people stay?” asks Nizhoni Smiles (MorningStar Angeline) at the beginning of writer-director Sydney Freeland’s debut feature, which opens with a shot of a town that could be any town. The story follows three teenagers trying to improve their lot by getting off the reservation. Sick Boy (Jeremiah Bitsui), who is about to have a child with Angela Maryboy (Elizabeth Frances), is trying to stay out of trouble the weekend before joining the army. Felixia (Carmen Moore) is a transsexual model attempting to jump-start her career by appearing in a Women of the Navajo calendar. And Nizhoni decides to track down her birth family before leaving to go to college in Michigan. The lives of the three protagonists intersect in unexpected ways as outside forces — and questionable decisions — complicate their chosen paths. 
This year’s heated Oscar race features a pair of fact-based British films about two of the most intelligent and important men of the last hundred years, but their life stories couldn’t be more different. The Theory of Everything follows Oxford-born theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) as he falls in love with linguist Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones) and is stricken with motor neuron disease while at Cambridge; at the age of twenty-one he is given two years to live, but more than fifty years later he is still alive and vibrant at seventy-three, celebrated far and wide as the smartest human being on the planet. On the other hand, The Imitation Game is about London-born mathematician Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), who died in shame and obscurity in 1954 at the age of forty-one; it would be more than fifty years before his remarkable work for the British government during WWII would be revealed to the public. In both films, the protagonist is on a scientific quest; in The Imitation Game, Turing is trying to break the seemingly unbreakable code of the Nazis’ Enigma machine, while Hawking is after nothing less than a single mathematical equation that can explain the vast universe. Both films were based on recent books, The Imitation Game on Andrew Hodges’s Alan Turing: The Enigma, and The Theory of Everything on Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen by Jane Hawking. Both films feature extensive scenes filmed on location where some of the action originally took place, The Imitation Game in Bletchley Park and The Theory of Everything at Cambridge.
