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Lisa Reisman |
Sep 20, 2023 5:04 pm
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Michael Jai White: Movie studio is “definitely happening. We just have to regroup a bit.”
Movie poster for White's newly released movie, "Outlaw Johnny Black."
The scene: an out-of-the way mining town ruled by a notorious land baron. The situation: a cowboy-turned-outlaw seeking to avenge the death of his father with a bullet bearing the name of his nemesis. The upshot: posing as preacher, he learns the power of community.
It’s “Outlaw Johnny Black,” the latest release of action star Michael Jai White, otherwise known as the visionary behind Jaigantic Studios, the major movie studio seemingly poised to rise on a desolate stretch of River Street in Fair Haven before vanishing over the last year.
White’s message on “Outlaw Johnny Black,” which is now screening at Criterion Cinemas: tune in. On Jaigantic Studios: stay tuned.
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Karen Ponzio |
Sep 7, 2023 8:28 am
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David and Diego meet over ice cream in the film Strawberry & Chocolate.
Last Friday the New Haven Free Public Library decided to serve dessert first, as Strawberry & Chocolate was screened as the inaugural film in the Ives Branch’s September Free Friday film series. The 1993 Cuban film, directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabio, was also the first of four films that will be screened every Friday in September at 2 p.m. in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 6, 2023 8:30 am
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Julie Smith, Best Video’s executive director, stood before the crowd of about 20 moviegoers who had assembled for the film and cultural center’s Tuesday night screening. “I know this film generally brings up a lot of conversation, so stick around,” she said. The film in question was Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, kicking off Best Video’s series of screenings of movies by the acclaimed director, that proceeds every Tuesday of the month through Sept. 26.
When a friend told me about a conversation sponsored by Community Action Agency of New Haven’s Black Maternal Health Project on Wednesday, I changed my plans for the night, hopped in my pickup truck, and headed to Southern Connecticut State University’s campus. I wanted to see the film Aftershock and hear the panel of Black women health providers talk about it and the stories it tells — true stories of two families that lost their wives, moms, and daughters due to preventable birthing complications.
Fairmount Theater owner Gilberto Gonzalez, Jr.: "I don't know how we're surviving, because we're not making any money."
Could this become New Haven's last remaining movie theater?
Gilberto Gonzalez, Jr. wants to sell the porno movie theater he owns in the Annex — but he can’t find any buyers.
He wants to spruce up the decaying commercial building into an adult cinema to be proud of — but he can’t find any lenders.
He wants to retire and move on from screening sexually explicit films he doesn’t particularly enjoy watching — but he’s still catching up on bills from the theater’s Covid-era closure.
So for now, as he’s done for the past 13 years, Gonzalez shows up to work at the Fairmount Theater on a near daily basis to keep one of New Haven’s last remaining movie houses chugging along. Until whatever happens next.
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Eleanor Polak |
Aug 7, 2023 8:27 am
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The Art School, flooded, as shown in Unfinished Spaces.
The Cuban Revolution ended in the year 1959, leaving Fidel Castro as the country’s prime minister and Cuba itself poised for a time of questioning the old ways, and opening up new avenues of living.
In the spirit of change and innovation, Castro commissioned three architects — Ricardo Porro, Roberto Gottardi, and Vittorio Garatti — to build an art school on the location of an old golf course.
Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray’s 2011 documentary, Unfinished Spaces, tells the story of that art school: its triumphs, its failures, and the ways in which it represents the triumphs and failures of Castro’s regime.
New Haven could lose its last remaining movie theater, as the company that runs the Bow Tie Criterion Cinemas on Temple Street downtown has concluded that “a movie theatre in its current configuration is not a viable business model in the future” at that space.
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Eleanor Polak |
Aug 2, 2023 8:59 am
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Cillian Murphy (center) in the title role of Nolan's Oppenheimer.
Christopher Nolan’s new big-screen biopic Oppenheimer is something of a circle, like the eye, like the bomb, like the world. It’s an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail, where all progress eventually leads to tragedy of seismic proportions.
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Eleanor Polak |
Jul 26, 2023 11:17 am
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Barbie promotional poster.
Greta Gerwig’s movie of the summer, Barbie, hit theaters this week in an explosion of pink, sparkles, and unexpected profundity.
I walked into Bow Tie Cinemas at 86 Temple St. at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, proudly sporting the only pink top I own, and I thought I was ready for anything. Turns out, I wasn’t ready for Barbie.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jul 12, 2023 9:45 am
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Michel doing his best Bogey in a scene from "Breathless"
A swipe of a lip, a cigarette lighting another cigarette, a woman running in a striped dress: these iconic moments and more defined Breathless, the first feature of Best Video Film and Cultural Center’s July film series that spotlights essential French New Wave cinema.
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Brian Slattery |
Jun 20, 2023 8:57 am
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The dancers in the circle were lifting up their own spirits and the spirits of those around them. They were participating in a culture that was now in its third generation of practitioners. And, as was explained, they were helping strengthen and preserve it; if they didn’t, they could lose it.
The occasion was a sneak peek of Friends Center Flint Street — named for the pitted drive that leads up to the familiar flat-top white building where a local childcare nonprofit plans to build a new early education campus.
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Brian Slattery |
May 24, 2023 8:34 am
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Nicky (John Cassavetes) is squirreled away in a seedy hotel. He’s sure that the mob has a contract out on his life. He calls Mikey (Peter Falk) his childhood friend and the only ally he thinks he has left in the world. Mikey arrives to tell Nicky that he’s just being paranoid; everything’s going to be fine. The problem is, Nicky’s right. And Mikey just might be in on it.
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Karen Ponzio |
Apr 11, 2023 8:16 am
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Townwide Tyler and DJ B to the T Jr. strike a pose.
Jazz floated in the air between whispers and animated conversations as people sipped wine and coffee and munched on pita chips and popcorn this past Thursday at Best Video. It was another installment of Lounge Night — a monthly event at the film and cultural center where, over the course of four hours, patrons are treated to movies, music, and conversations about both. On this night, the crowd was treated to three short films from the New Haven 48 Hour Film Project as well as music from DJs Townwide Tyler and B to the T Jr.
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Allan Appel |
Mar 23, 2023 2:08 pm
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Rendering of proposed new childcare campus at ex-Cine 4 site.
Allan Appel photo
David Symond, Jr., Allyx Schiavone, Margo Early, and Karin Patriquin on Wednesday.
The corn will keeping popping at the central ticketing-and-candy counter of the old Cine 4 movie theater — even as that entryway fixture is converted into a reception desk for a planned new early education campus now in the works on Middletown Avenue.
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Thomas Breen |
Mar 23, 2023 10:00 am
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If you attended an HBCU — or want to learn more about the past 150 years of historically Black colleges and universities in this country — come out to the Q House on Friday for a screening of the documentary Tell Them We Are Rising.
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Karen Ponzio |
Mar 22, 2023 8:56 am
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Andrianna Campbell-LaFleur introduces "Through A Glass Darkly"
Best Video went big with its newest film series Tuesday night, bringing the first of three films by legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman to a welcoming crowd. The series opened with Through A Glass Darkly, the 1961 film that is considered the first in a trilogy of Bergman films that explore similar themes of God and spirituality. The next two films, The Silence and Winter Light, will be shown on March 28 and April 4, respectively. According to event coordinator Teo Hernandez, it was something he has wanted to do for a while.
Arnold Gorlick saw one of the best leading-actress performances on the screen — then was outraged not to see it acknowledged Sunday night at the Oscars.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 23, 2023 9:43 am
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Still from What Could Have Been: America's First HBCU.
On Wednesday night at the New Haven Museum, New Haveners had a chance to learn, together, about an uncomfortable truth: that, in 1831, New Haven’s white community leaders overwhelming rejected a serious proposal to found what would have been the first U.S. Black college, on the land where the interchange of I‑95 and I‑91 now exists.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 17, 2023 9:04 am
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It’s America in the 1940s, and World War II is still raging. Carmen Jones has started a fight in the parachute factory she works in, and it falls to Corporal Joe to escort her to jail, miles from the military base where both of them work. Joe is engaged to be married, and just wants to get his duty over with. Jones has other plans. She’s flirting with him — hard — as soon as they’re on the road away from the base. Then Joe makes a poor navigation choice and drives the Jeep into a stream, forcing them to walk from there. Little does he know that he doesn’t stand a chance against Jones’s seductive skills. Little does Jones know that it will prove her own undoing, too.
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Kimberly Wipfler |
Feb 6, 2023 11:37 am
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Clotilda was the name of the last known slave ship to bring African captives to the U.S. just over 160 years ago.
It is also the title of Isaiah Providence’s newest film, which grapples with the “underlying history that goes on in the Black community” — and which was recently screened as part of a short film festival at an Audubon Street arts hub.
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Kimberly Wipfler |
Jan 27, 2023 3:52 pm
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Kolton Harris and film student Joaquín Morales.
At Thursday's BITE kickoff.
“Who would have ever thought I’d be back in here watching a film?” asked Tracey Massey, in a hushed whisper, in the back row of a film screening at the former Stetson Branch library building in the soon-to-be-demolished Dixwell Plaza.
On the projector played “Black Joy,” a musical short film by Kolton Harris, which tells the story of a group of Black students in detention who find pride and celebration in their Blackness through song and dance.
“I came to this library 40 years ago as a child growing up in this neighborhood. It is here where we learned the first stories of Black joy. Here’s where we read books about Martin Luther King Jr., where we heard the first Michael Jackson song, the first Nina Simone song. We learned about Malcolm X. All of those stories generated out of this library.”
“It was joy. It was magic. [Harris] is reminding us of that. It was really just like it is in his film,” said Massey.
