Round-Up: Where Is the Art House?
One avid moviegoer attends the marquee showings of every major New York indie theater
Guest columnist Chris Molnar visits six of New York’s storied indie theaters, from Film Forum to IFC Center, reflecting on their legacies and on the films now lighting up their marquees. The complete series is now available to read on our website. For access to new issues and our entire online archive, get a digital subscription, now 20% off with promo code “Molnar.” Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad.
Part I: Collective Monologue at Anthology Film Archives
In Collective Monologue, we observe even the grim history of the zoo without judgment. It is shown to us instead through small, careful records; drawings of forgotten handlers and their charges from a zoo-related magazine. The caretakers fought for a better institution; the animals, both charismatic and damaged, have seen greater hardships. A similar journey is visible at Anthology, in the archives, even in the aging HVAC.
Part II: Diciannove at Angelika
What was my nineteenth year like, anyway? Didn’t it also mostly consist of trudging along behind other people, an overgrown juvenile desperate to be independent but without any real idea of what that might look like? Tortorici’s art lies in how he builds these adolescent feelings—of confusion and helplessness—accurately, subtly, using the paces of life instead of plot.
Part III: Cloud at IFC Center
Unlike Kurosawa’s similar, if dingier, thriller Serpent’s Path (from 1998, remade in 2024), where a miasma of snuff film-making yakuza kidnap and kill each other out of revenge, everyone in Cloud is only medium-bad. Unhinged and violent? Sure. But they’re not career criminals, they’ve just been sent over the edge, and so I find it consistently funny and unnervingly relevant.
Part IV: Suspended Time at Metrograph
The pandemic setting can feel a little on-the-nose, but the film is redeemed by the fact that Assayas really does love his characters—even if in part it’s because they are him and his family… Suspended Time is far from a masterpiece, but it feels true and close to his heart, and the fourth-wall breaking musings about David Hockney’s pandemic paintings or Assayas’s childhood are amusingly straightforward in the no-bullshit mode in which his most successful later movies operate.
Part V: Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass at Film Forum
Sanatorium… is a full-bore odyssey into an unknown universe. Though it shares the logline of a premise with Schulz’s book, the film’s richly visualized, narratively-sparse mixture of stop-motion with some live-action is really its own beast, acting as a technological step forward and thematic culmination to [the Quay Brothers’] career.
Part VI: One Battle After Another at Village East
Leonardo DiCaprio asked Anderson for his definition of an art house director; the filmmaker replied that another name for it might be “box-office challenged.” But while Battle still has a ways to go before it becomes profitable, that’s not exactly right, I don’t think. To me, Anderson’s films fall in the art house category because their messaging is fundamentally ambivalent, and their primary focus is on emotion and imagery.
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Related articles:
An Interview with Olivier Assayas, conducted by José Teodoro
A Review of Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika, by Jeremy Philip Galen
An Interview with Julie Delpy, conducted by Natasha Boas
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