A Century of Life in the City, at the Movies

The lives of working people in the city—above all, New York City—have been at the center of movies from the industry’s start, as seen in “Tenement Stories,” Film Forum’s teeming series of fifty-plus films, running Feb. 6-26. The series spans more than a century of cinema, from the nineteen-tens to last year, with the 2025 documentary “Heat,” directed by Aicha Cherif, about three women whose housing becomes tenuous in the gentrifying Lower East Side. Some of the most harshly realistic visions of poverty are found in the program’s earliest features: Raoul Walsh’s “Regeneration” (1915) and Lois Weber’s “Shoes” (1916), in which youths are driven to gangsterism and sex work, respectively, in households run to ruin by idle fathers.

Mabel Cheung’s “The Illegal Immigrant,” from 1985.Photograph courtesy Celestial Pictures

There are comedies and romances, too, such as Hal Ashby’s “The Landlord” (1970), with a script by Bill Gunn, and tales of artists in the downbeat city, such as Shirley Clarke’s “The Connection” (1961), which features the jazz musicians Jackie McLean and Freddie Redd; “Pull My Daisy” (1959), with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg; and “Frownland” (2007), directed by Ronald Bronstein (who co-wrote “Marty Supreme” and “Uncut Gems”).

But the heart of the series is the immigrant experience—and its frequent burden of social exclusion—as in Allan Dwan’s “East Side, West Side” (1927), in which struggling Jewish and Irish neighbors clash and coöperate; Martin Scorsese’s Little Italy-set crime thriller “Mean Streets” and his documentary “Italianamerican,” a discussion with his parents, who were born in Sicily; and the drama “El Super,” directed by Leon Ichaso and Orlando Jiménez Leal, which shows a Cuban family struggling to fit into American life. And in Mabel Cheung’s drama “The Illegal Immigrant” (1985), set in Manhattan’s Chinatown, a young man from Canton, facing deportation, arranges a paid marriage while contending with pressure from local gangsters.—Richard Brody

The tradition of sculptural assemblage departs from the proposition that things are inasmuch as they are together. The Jamaican-born sculptor Arthur Simms takes this notion to its maximum tension: found objects are bound together by dense skeins of rope that resemble mycelial networks or unusually thick cobwebs. Though the rope suggests tidy metaphors of unity, coherence, and formal integrity, a playful but insistent messiness effloresces in Simms’s entanglements, throwing any seeming wholeness into question. Among the objects pulled together by the ropes are kids’ scooters and bikes, liquor bottles, toys: elements of childish nostalgia and adult revelry alike that charge the sculptural bodies with a rambunctiousness that refuses containment.—Zoë Hopkins (Karma; through Feb. 14.)

Elevator Repair Service, the trickster troupe who created “Gatz,” a delirious reading of “The Great Gatsby,” ups the ante by adapting James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” squeezed to just under three hours and twenty thousand words. That’s like compressing a planet into a bouillon cube, but, even so, the soup is mighty tasty. The show opens as a reading, with the cast jolting whenever they fast-forward, but by Act II, they’re whirling around the stage, performing outlandish octuplet births and potato seductions. Vin Knight is affecting as Leopold Bloom, an anxious outsider in his city, his subconscious, and his leaky body; Scott Shepherd plays multiple roles, but is particularly droll as Blazes Boylan, jitterbugging hornily through Dublin. The show will be catnip for Joyce-heads, but there are pleasures for everyone, or, as Molly might put it: thumbs up.—Emily Nussbaum (Public Theatre; through March 1.)

Hatchie.Photograph by Bianca Edwards

The Australian singer-songwriter Hatchie has steadily built a little dream-pop world suspended between the synth music of Kylie Minogue and the washed-out guitars of the Cocteau Twins. Following stints in a few Brisbane indie bands, in 2017, Harriette Pilbeam uploaded the song “Try” to the website of the radio station Triple J under her family nickname, and then settled into a woozy shoegaze sound, working with her partner, Joe Agius, and the producer Dan Nigro (Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan). Her new album, “Liquorice,” is her most sensational; co-produced by Agius and Melina Duterte (who performs as Jay Som), the LP is feverish and intimate. Alongside Agius and the Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa, Hatchie blows up her dazed songs of dysphoric romance to magnificent proportions.—Sheldon Pearce (Music Hall of Williamsburg; Feb. 7.)

This year’s Dance on Camera Festival showcases thirty-three films from twelve countries. “Rojo Clavel,” one of seven features, is a moving portrait of Manuel Liñan, a dancer who has reshaped the rigid gender tropes ingrained in flamenco in order to express his experience as a gay man. The first of three programs of shorts includes an extraordinary film by Grigory Dobrygin of Natalia Osipova dancing Frederick Ashton’s “Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan” in an empty studio. Shot closeup, with every muscle visible, Osipova is freedom and impulse personified. “Risa,” on a program entitled “Portraits,” offers a stylish and unsentimental glimpse into the inner world of the modern dancer and lifelong teacher Risa Steinberg.—Marina Harss (Symphony Space; Feb. 6-9.)

“Family a.k.a. Family Portrait,” 1970.Art work © Marcia Marcus / ARS / Courtesy Olney Gleason; Photograph by Charlie Rubin

Marcia Marcus’s paintings are strange, in the best way. She rendered people in muted tones and gray scale, so that they appear stuck in the past, and her subjects—often herself—look out with deadpan expressions, giving them an air of confrontation. She compressed space, too, making distances dissolve and physical relationships seem out of proportion. Marcus started painting in the nineteen-fifties. Over the decades, her work—including the twelve pieces in the show “Mirror Image”—fell in and out of fashion, but gained momentum again before she died, last year. Rightfully so. Works such as the exhibition’s titular self-portrait give figurative painting, whose recent dominance has begun to wear thin, a refresh: they treat the medium not as a form of testimonial but as an inventive conceptual project.—Jillian Steinhauer (Olney Gleason; through Feb. 14.)

Many of the best international films of recent years have failed to get U.S. distribution; one of them, P. S. Vinothraj’s “Pebbles,” which premièred at festivals in 2021, is now streaming on MUBI. It’s a drama of the intimate politics of gender in rural Tamil Nadu, where a hard-drinking man drags his young son to a distant village in order to force his estranged wife to return home. As the man brawls with his in-laws, the boy is caught between two worlds, of male rage and female subjection. The pair’s embittered travel in the high heat of a sunbaked plain is punctuated with scenes of women’s struggles to provide the bare necessities; Vinothraj films harsh journeys and hard labor with extraordinary visual variety and emotional nuance.—R.B. (Reviewed in April, 2021.)

Illustration by Patricia Bolaños

The namesake of Haswell Green’s, an Irish-inflected bar and music venue in the theatre district, is Andrew Haswell Green. Who? “The father of New York City,” according to a biography in the establishment’s leather-bound drinks menu, which details Green’s creation of the city’s five-borough structure and his role as a developer of Central Park and the Met museum. Several pages of beverage options include ninety varieties of whiskey, plus wine, beer, cider, and custom cocktails like the mezcal-forward P.Y.T., which, well—imagine a drinkable cigarette. The clientele is likewise wide-ranging. Tourists from California, Brazil, you name it. Regulars from the neighborhood. Wild cards, such as two people in feathered bowler hats who were eating pizza during a weekly show by a pop-rock cover band called the Big Woozy. One of the pizza-eaters, the lead singer announced, was Micki Free, a member, in the eighties, of the Grammy-winning band Shalamar, whom he summoned onstage. Taking a microphone, Free warned the crowd, “It’s gonna get sexy. Is that all right?” Without waiting for an answer, he launched into Prince’s “Kiss,” his falsetto eerily reminiscent of the original. Afterward, things got a little too sexy. A sloshed suited man went from lurching around the dance floor to tilting himself at women by way of introduction. Security intervened, taking him to pay his tab, which he attempted to do with his I.D., and escorting him out of the bar, then escorting him out again after he reëntered. The band played on. Something quintessentially New York hovered about the place, with its mashup of people from all over and its diner-like drinks list, its capacity to surprise and then carry on. Albeit a humbler site than the Park and the Met, it’s no less worthy a bearer of Green’s legacy.

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

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