Gary's Corner

We’re offering something special in our first two screening slots on Friday — a single-admission David Lynch “double feature”: the documentary Lynch/Oz, in which various actors and filmmakers muse on his apparent fascination with a certain 1939 Hollywood classic, and his own 2001 classic Mulholland Drive, voted Best Picture of that year by the NY Film Critics.

Also on Friday night, director Brian Vincent and producer Heather Spore will return for another generous Q&A after their revelatory NYC-downtown-art-world doc, Make Me Famous.

Many of you may recall the 2019 Italian feature Martin Eden, audaciously adapted from Jack London’s novel by a rising young talent, writer-director Pietro Marcello. His new film Scarlet charts an equally idiosyncratic course, following a widowed father and daughter across two post-World War I decades of tragedy and tumultuous change. In her “Critic’s PIck” review, the NY Times’ Manohla Dargis writes:  “Over the passing years, things happen to our characters, gentle and kind things, but also shaming, rejection and violence. They will persevere, fortified by their humanity, by their rooted sense of place and by the enduring strength of their affections.” 

This month our ongoing classics series delves headfirst into 1950’s widescreen Hollywood melodrama, starting with director Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life. James Mason gives a tour-de-force, high wire performance — one of his best — as a suburban school teacher who agrees to experimental doses of the hormone cortisone to combat a painful illness, creating a potentially tragic scenario of its own. This lesser-known Ray classic is in a league with his In a Lonely Place, Rebel Without a Cause, and Johnny Guitar.

Coming July 23: Douglas Sirk’s, The Tarnished Angels, starring Rock Hudson, Jack Carson, and Dorothy Malone.

Our holdovers include the still-selling out Close to Vermeer, an All-Star week encore of It Ain’t Over, as well as the acclaimed Joyland, from Pakistan, and the hurtling rags-to-riches-to-rags saga, BlackBerry.