Photo: Starless Dreams
Iran’s foremost documentary filmmaker, Mehrdad Oskouei has spent the past couple of decades exploring the restlessness, despair, and resilience he sees around him. Much of this work can now be seen in Anthology Film Archives’ excellent “Documentary, Iranian Style: The Films of Mehrdad Oskouei,” the most extensive retrospective to date of the director’s pictures in North America. It’s about as essential a film series as I can imagine.
—Bilge Ebiri
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1949 film, starring Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotten, was his second in color. It was also one of the last he would make without significant overtures toward pulpy suspense or the macabre. This odd hybrid of DeMille’s Unconquered and Hitchcock’s own Rebecca is miscast in almost every key role, and spends too much of the opening with the forgettable third lead (Michael Wilding). It’s also a masterpiece — recognized instantly as such by French critics who were undoubtedly more lenient on such matters as misplaced accents. The contemporary eye ought to be similarly obliging; in spite of the peaks Hitchcock would scale in the subsequent decade or so, one could easily wonder if concealing his fearlessly empowered experimentation behind the facade of a genteel theatrical property wasn’t one of his more astonishing displays of razzle-dazzle.
—Jaime N. Christley
Brooklyn’s pronoun play classic pure indie pop that would sound right at home on a playlist next to tracks by the Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Stars. The band is a project of Alyse Vellturo, whose whispered vocals float above melancholy guitar riffs and delicate synth lines. Her 2016 debut EP, There’s no one new around you, was inspired by heartbreak, and named after a dispiriting notification on Tinder. This intimate show at Pianos will be a perfect way to experience her work.
—Sophie Weiner
Algorithm meets rhythm in Autobiography, the latest smash hit from Brit Wayne McGregor, resident choreographer at London’s Royal Ballet. He’s treating his body as an archive, developing choreographic portraits based on the sequencing of his own genome; every performance is different, but they all feature ten dancers, sets and projections by Ben Cullen Williams, and an original electronic score by Jlin. Lucy Carder designs the lights, Aitor Throup the costumes, and Uzma Hameed puzzles out the dramaturgy; the piece is “an abstract meditation on aspects of self, life, and writing.” The Saturday matinee performance is “Pay What You Decide”: Make a reservation for a dollar, and then figure out what it’s worth to you after you see it.
—Elizabeth Zimmer
This night at H0L0 hosts a slew of live electronic producers churning out raw, unpredictable music. The most exciting act on the roster is FBI Warning, a duo composed of Beto Cravioto and Rogelio Ramos, both highly respected New York house and disco DJs. Together, they stray from the warmth of house and veer into spooky live techno. Another performer to look out for is the New York–based Korean DJ Greem Jellyfish, who weaves psychedelic, intricate house tracks.
—Sophie Weiner
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The international dance world’s philosopher-clown, Jerome Bel questions every assumption the field makes, and fills stages with folks often denied a platform. In Gala, first performed in 2015, twenty New Yorkers — amateurs and professional dancers ranging in age from eight to eighty — come together to create a spontaneous community. What matters is the care and attention they, and we the spectators, lavish on the event, opening our eyes to the way ordinary folk choose to move (to a spectrum of recordings) and how they take turns leading the crowd. The Saturday show’s family-friendly, with activities for kids seven and up beginning at two.
—Elizabeth Zimmer
Terry Riley sits alongside artists like John Cage and Philip Glass as one of the most influential experimental composers of the twentieth century. His 1964 composition, In C, is known as one of the earliest works of minimalist music. The piece is made up of repeating parts and can be played by any number of musicians, so how it sounds depends greatly on its interpretation by whomever is playing it. Brooklyn’s avant-garde Darmstadt Ensemble mount a version every year to celebrate the anniversary of the piece’s creation. This year, to enhance the music’s rhythmic elements, they’ll be joined by drummer Andrya Ambro, a former Talk Normal member currently of Gold Dime. If you’re curious about minimalist music, this is a great place to start.
—Sophie Weiner
Since beginning their collection a decade ago, the VHS-obsessed, Los Angeles–based Everything Is Terrible! team has amassed more than 15,000 copies of Cameron Crowe’s hideous 1996 rom-com Jerry Maguire, with the goal of someday housing the artifacts in a desert pyramid. Until then, Everything Is Terrible! troublemakers Commodore Gilgamesh and Ghoul Skool (a/k/a Dimitri Simakis and Nic Maier) continue to mount dadaist performances and concoct lysergic collage films such as DoggieWoggiez! PoochieWoochiez!, a remake of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 cult classic The Holy Mountain that consists entirely of dog-related footage. Here, they’ll screen their latest found-footage feature, The Great Satan, a 75-minute supercut — think Bruce Conner meets Negativland — of cable-religion hokum, puke-worthy puppetry, and cheesy horror flicks. The Terribles will also appear in person, elaborately costumed amid puppets and their devoted audience’s VHS offerings.
—Richard Gehr
Brooklyn pop punk group Diet Cig are the main draw on this lineup, but their jangly guitars, LiveJournal-style lyrics, and giant hooks are far from all concertgoers will get. Seattle’s Great Grandpa are another young band on the rise, making bubblegum punk in the vein of peers like Tacocat. Another standout: the Spook School, a queer Scottish indie pop group who will appeal to fans of Los Campesinos! and American groups like Making Friendz.
—Sophie Weiner
Algorithm meets rhythm in Autobiography, the latest smash hit from Brit Wayne McGregor, resident choreographer at London’s Royal Ballet. He’s treating his body as an archive, developing choreographic portraits based on the sequencing of his own genome; every performance is different, but they all feature ten dancers, sets and projections by Ben Cullen Williams, and an original electronic score by Jlin. Lucy Carder designs the lights, Aitor Throup the costumes, and Uzma Hameed puzzles out the dramaturgy; the piece is “an abstract meditation on aspects of self, life, and writing.” The Saturday matinee performance is “Pay What You Decide”: Make a reservation for a dollar, and then figure out what it’s worth to you after you see it.
—Elizabeth Zimmer
Photo: Andrej Uspenski
Algorithm meets rhythm in Autobiography, the latest smash hit from Brit Wayne McGregor, resident choreographer at London’s Royal Ballet. He’s treating his body as an archive, developing choreographic portraits based on the sequencing of his own genome; every performance is different, but they all feature ten dancers, sets and projections by Ben Cullen Williams, and an original electronic score by Jlin. Lucy Carder designs the lights, Aitor Throup the costumes, and Uzma Hameed puzzles out the dramaturgy; the piece is “an abstract meditation on aspects of self, life, and writing.” The Saturday matinee performance is “Pay What You Decide”: Make a reservation for a dollar, and then figure out what it’s worth to you after you see it.
—Elizabeth Zimmer
Three distinguished Spanish troupes come together to celebrate the authentic yet contemporary flamenco form, beginning with the Ballet Nacional de España performing their new full-length Suite Sevilla, choreographed by the company’s director, Antonio Najarro, through Monday. The festival continues with Compañia Eva Yerbabuena in the new Carne Y Hueso. On the final day, the eleven members of Ballet Flamenco Jesús Carmona perform Ímpetus, to the music of Albéniz, Riqueni, and Escudero. Starting on March 4, Carmona joins New York City Ballet principal dancer Joaquín De Luz and the multitalented David Neumann for a five-day residency, culminating in a studio event, Exploring Stillness, March 9 at six. The festival effloresces around the city; check full details at flamencofestival.org.
—Elizabeth Zimmer
A sampling savant, a circular-breathing specialist, and a bird-voiced mystic collaborate for the first time when Carl Stone, Ned Rothenberg, and Ami Yamasaki perform alone and together here. A self-described “sampling psychotic,” Tokyo-based Stone is a preeminent force in live computer music who has been microsampling and macro-massaging found sounds for nearly four decades. Rothenberg, a pioneering veteran of New York’s improvising community, embraces both minimalism and expressionism on saxophones, clarinets, and the shakuhachi, an end-blown Japanese flute he manipulates with dramatic subtlety. The high-pitched songs and signals of birds, bats, and bugs fly out of Yamasaki’s mouth. Her stakes are high, as demonstrated by the 2015 installation till a quiet room sings, in which she encouraged listeners to “please stay long enough to start to figure out how the world is composed and with what the self is made.”
—Richard Gehr
If you like melodic indie rock with catchy pop hooks and dissonant guitars, you’ll like Drawing Boards, a Brooklyn band made up of past members of many other much-loved local groups (TEEN, Darlings, Sisters). Fans of classic acts like Built to Spill should also enjoy these tunes. They’ll play a record-release show for their self-titled debut album at Alphaville. Backing them up are Wild Pink, another jam-friendly Brooklyn indie rock group whose moody songs build to epic climaxes.
—Sophie Weiner
The local band High Waisted play buoyant surf pop that will remind you of groups like Tennis, whose wistful tunes sail atop glistening guitar riffs, and Shannon and the Clams, who turn Sixties girl-group aesthetics into high camp. They’ll be backed up by the excellent pop group Kitten, a Los Angeles synthpop band who are angling for a place beside newly minted superstars like Charli XCX.
—Sophie Weiner
Alaska-born John Heginbotham, a Juilliard grad, now calls Brooklyn home. His last major triumph was an expansive collaboration with artist Maira Kalman last fall at BAM; here he celebrates his troupe’s sixth anniversary with an hour-long program of solos and duets, two of them new to New York, as part of the Harkness Dance Festival. Musical accompaniments, live and recorded, range from Aphex Twin and Raymond Scott to Dana Suesse and Heitor Villa-Lobos. Heginbotham demonstrates a tropism toward humor, but moments of great feeling also typify his work.
—Elizabeth Zimmer
Sporting the shaggiest blond shag in all of shagdom, David Bowie is the appealing reason to catch Labyrinth, the misnamed 1986 cult film directed by Jim Henson. As Jareth, the Goblin King, Bowie seductively lures fourteen-year-old Jennifer Connelly through an underground maze populated with a mess of surreal puppets and jerky animatronics. Bowie described his character in this funky fusion of The Wizard of Oz and The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer as “at best, a romantic, but, at worst . ..a spoilt child, vain and temperamental: kind of like a rock ’n’ roll star!” He seems to be having a swell time, in any case. Saxophonist Donny McCaslin, whose group brilliantly backed Bowie on his final album, Blackstar, opens with a hard-grooving set in memory of the thin white goblin.
—Richard Gehr
Photo: Songhoy Blues at Africa Now 2017 / Shahar Azran / Courtesy of the Apollo Theater
South African DJ and house producer Black Coffee, the most popular noise in African electronic music, headlines the Apollo’s sixth annual “Africa Now!” festival, coproduced with the World Music Institute. Born Nkosinathi Maphumulo, Coffee wraps suave Afropolitan rhythms and smooth keyboards around sensuous vocals. His music sounds nostalgic compared to that of the Congolese-Canadian Pierre Kwenders, who threw down an Afrofuturist gauntlet last year with his dazzlingly inventive MAKANDA at the End of Space, the Beginning of Time, an intoxicating clafoutis of angelic voices, time-warp percussion, and sinuously sly Congolese guitar. It will be man against machine when Nigerian drum legend and Afrobeat co-creator Tony Allen sets his flowing Afrobeat polyrhythms against Detroit producer Jeff Mills’s Roland TR-909 drum machine for their first American face-off. The Nigerian-Romani singer Ayo brings her eclectic acoustic articulations as well.
—Richard Gehr
Sporting the shaggiest blond shag in all of shagdom, David Bowie is the appealing reason to catch Labyrinth, the misnamed 1986 cult film directed by Jim Henson. As Jareth, the Goblin King, Bowie seductively lures fourteen-year-old Jennifer Connelly through an underground maze populated with a mess of surreal puppets and jerky animatronics. Bowie described his character in this funky fusion of The Wizard of Oz and The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer as “at best, a romantic, but, at worst . ..a spoilt child, vain and temperamental: kind of like a rock ’n’ roll star!” He seems to be having a swell time, in any case. Saxophonist Donny McCaslin, whose group brilliantly backed Bowie on his final album, Blackstar, opens with a hard-grooving set in memory of the thin white goblin.
—Richard Gehr
Algorithm meets rhythm in Autobiography, the latest smash hit from Brit Wayne McGregor, resident choreographer at London’s Royal Ballet. He’s treating his body as an archive, developing choreographic portraits based on the sequencing of his own genome; every performance is different, but they all feature ten dancers, sets and projections by Ben Cullen Williams, and an original electronic score by Jlin. Lucy Carder designs the lights, Aitor Throup the costumes, and Uzma Hameed puzzles out the dramaturgy; the piece is “an abstract meditation on aspects of self, life, and writing.” The Saturday matinee performance is “Pay What You Decide”: Make a reservation for a dollar, and then figure out what it’s worth to you after you see it.
—Elizabeth Zimmer
Alaska-born John Heginbotham, a Juilliard grad, now calls Brooklyn home. His last major triumph was an expansive collaboration with artist Maira Kalman last fall at BAM; here he celebrates his troupe’s sixth anniversary with an hour-long program of solos and duets, two of them new to New York, as part of the Harkness Dance Festival. Musical accompaniments, live and recorded, range from Aphex Twin and Raymond Scott to Dana Suesse and Heitor Villa-Lobos. Heginbotham demonstrates a tropism toward humor, but moments of great feeling also typify his work.
—Elizabeth Zimmer
Call Kal Marks sludge rock, post-hardcore, or, simply, “Boston’s loudest band” — whatever the label, the group makes an impression. With its latest album, Universal Care, the three-piece expands its palette of emotions from the anger and longing that dominated its past work, and its music benefits from it. Here, Kal Marks headline a show of local stalwarts, including gloomy grunge rockers A Deer a Horse and reverb-soaked garage rock group Baked.
—Sophie Weiner
Last year, U.K. trio Shopping released their dazzling third album, The Official Body, on which the band manages to evoke post-punk pioneers while remaining innovative and experimental. These songs seriously groove, combining minimalist instrumentation with impressive writing and performance. Despite its protests to the contrary, the group is subtly political, addressing media bias, racism, and sexism without ever getting pedantic. But even without their lyrical content, these songs are mesmerizing jams that will get you moving.
—Sophie Weiner
Photo: Universal Pictures/Photofest
Nun Deborah Kerr leads her convent of conspicuously young and gorgeous sisters to a remote Himalayan mountain town. They encounter, of all things, the attentions of a man — and we’re not talking the big guy upstairs. Black Narcissus (1947) explores female sexuality, holy ambition, and the hellacious effects of red lipstick in one of the more unlikely settings for a lusty rendezvous. This was Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s intitial foray into “composed film,” with its meticuolously timed score and studio-built sets. Like in The Red Shoes, which would follow in 1948, the hyper-vibrant Technicolor is the real marvel here. Everything looks just a little too crisp — from landscapes to David Farrar’s rakish gaze. Kerr is all restraint, in contrast to the emotional Kathleen Byron or the winsome native played by Jean Simmons. Ultimately, tensions erupt the only way they can — in a life or death struggle on a 9,000-foot-high precipice.
—Heather Baysa
Sporting the shaggiest blond shag in all of shagdom, David Bowie is the appealing reason to catch Labyrinth, the misnamed 1986 cult film directed by Jim Henson. As Jareth, the Goblin King, Bowie seductively lures fourteen-year-old Jennifer Connelly through an underground maze populated with a mess of surreal puppets and jerky animatronics. Bowie described his character in this funky fusion of The Wizard of Oz and The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer as “at best, a romantic, but, at worst . ..a spoilt child, vain and temperamental: kind of like a rock ’n’ roll star!” He seems to be having a swell time, in any case. Saxophonist Donny McCaslin, whose group brilliantly backed Bowie on his final album, Blackstar, opens with a hard-grooving set in memory of the thin white goblin.
—Richard Gehr
It’s tempting to find Great Expectations lacking in plot but having a most definite course, punctuated by bizarre obstacles, opening in a graveyard and culminating in an act of defiance against the prison of heartbreak and mourning. Young Pip spends much of Great Expectations being bullied, bruised, insulted, condescended to, and misled, but if asked to name the story’s villain, most will struggle to remember a name. Though they may often be unfriendly, the most vivid figures who orbit Pip’s youth and young adulthood — such as Miss Havisham, Estella, and the convict Magwitch — tend to serve as vivid totems of the strange world, beset by malice and rank poverty, but infused with curiosity and wonderment. David Lean’s celebrated 1946 adaptation is well drawn and propelled with a vigorous confidence; it’s a heroic act of illustration, towering over a dozen subsequent adaptations.
—Jaime N. Christley
Photo: Warner Bros/Photofest
A movie resolutely of its moment that still surges with third-rail electricity, Alan J. Pakula’s 1971 neo-noir Klute, about a New York City prostitute being stalked by a sociopath, is heralded as the first installment of the director’s “paranoia trilogy,” followed by The Parallax View (1974) and All the President’s Men (1976). The true author of Klute, though, is its star: Jane Fonda, here as doxy Bree Daniels, a boho-chic, Hell’s Kitchen–dwelling aspiring actress who reads Sun Signs before going to bed and sorts through her irreconcilable instincts during weekly appointments with her matronly shrink. (The therapy scenes, with Fonda performing opposite Vivian Nathan, a founding member of the Actors Studio, were largely improvised and are emblematic of Klute’s quicksilver sensibility.)
—Melissa Anderson