THE WARRIORS

Directed by Walter Hill

(1979) “Warriors, come out to play.” As color-coded gangs gather by the thousands in the Bronx, charismatic leader Cyrus is assassinated and the finger points, mistakenly, at the Warriors – now it’s one long trek back to Coney. Ultra-stylized, violence-packed update of Xenophon’s Anabasis. 35mm. Approx. 90 min.
12:30, 4:20, 8:10

“Looks as if Fritz Lang had directed The Wiz, with occasional contributions from Sergei Eisenstein and Bruce Lee. What is most frightening about the movie is the essential truth of its basic premise: that the streets already belong to the violently and criminally inclined. The city is dying, block by block, from fear, loathing, fire, and desertion. And suddenly a dark and dangerous knighthood emerges on the screen from the ruins.”
– Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice

“ENORMOUSLY ENTERTAINING!”
– Gothamist

“There’s a night-blooming, psychedelic shine to the whole baroque movie… It has – in visual terms – the kind of impact that ‘Rock Around the Clock’ had when it was played behind the titles of Blackboard Jungle. It’s like visual rock, and it’s bursting with energy.”
– Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK

Directed by John Carpenter

(1981) 1997, and President Donald Pleasence has escape-podded from an Air Force One terrorist takeover into Manhattan, now a river-girdled maximum security prison. Convicted bank robber Kurt Russell’s piece-of-cake assignment: ride a glider onto the World Trade Center and get him out, within the 22 hours before his own injected explosives go off. DCP. Approx. 99 min.
2:20, 6:10, 10:00

“ONE OF THE BEST ESCAPE (AND ESCAPIST) MOVIES. A brutal, very fine-looking suspense melodrama… by far Mr. Carpenter’s most ambitious, most riveting film to date. Works so effectively as a warped vision of ordinary urban blight that it seems to be some kind of hallucinatory editorial.”
– Vincent Canby, The New York Times

“To many fans who love the filmmaker’s tinkling synth scores, his impeccable widescreen compositions and libertarian wink, this Kurt Russell action flick occupies the sweet spot. For good reason too: The pleasures are right in your face, beginning with the million-dollar idea of turning NYC into a walled-off prison where criminals run free. Even born-and-raised New Yorkers (of which Carpenter was decidedly not) could smile at that histrionic setup; it’s an outsider’s joke made funny by our willingness to be entertained… It feels perfectly positioned between Hollywood’s ’70s-era political cynicism and the dawning age of the blockbuster. The movie proudly wears its affection for crusty Sergio Leone archetypes and countdown-clock suspense sequences; Carpenter was Tarantino long before Tarantino was.”
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

“John Carpenter is offering this summer’s moviegoers a rare opportunity: to escape from the air-conditioned torpor of ordinary entertainment into the hothouse humidity of their own paranoia. It’s a trip worth taking.”
– Richard Corliss, TIME