PHILIP'S FLICKS

Tag: j. hoberman

New Yorker Films: End of the Road

February 24th, 2009

Anyone who has come to know and love arthouse movies — by the likes of Almodovar, Antonioni, Bertolucci, Fellini, Fassbinder, Godard, Herzog, Jarmusch, Resnais, Rohmer, Sayles, Rossellini, Tarkovsky, Truffaut, Wenders and other major filmmakers from around the globe — has to be saddened by this news:

New Yorker Films, a major distributor of foreign and independent films, is going out of business, according to a report published Monday in the New York Times.

The distributor’s library of 400+ titles will be auctioned off, founder Dan Talbot, who started the company in 1965, told Times reporter Ben Sisario.

“New Yorker Films held rights to distribute movies to theaters and to institutions like colleges, and also to release DVDs,” Sisario wrote.

Here’s the email sent by the company to filmmakers: “I have sad news. The parent company of New Yorker Films has defaulted on a loan. The assets of New Yorker were used as security on the loan. The lender has informed us that it intends to foreclose on these assets. New Yorker stopped doing business yesterday…We are in total shock that after forty three years this has happened.”

Said Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman: ”Without a doubt it was the pre-eminent distributor of foreign art films in the United States from the mid-1960s really into the ’80s. And for much of the time he was the only game in town.”

Click here to read the rest of the Times story.

More coverage:

New Yorker Films, 1965-2009 (IFC.com)

New Yorker Films Shuts Its Doors (New Yorker mag – no relation)

New Yorker Films Dies; Will Rebirth Follow? (Salon)

End of the Road for New Yorker Films (indieWIRE.com)

Reid Rosefelt on New Yorker Films (indieWIRE.com)

John Vanco on New Yorker Films (indieWIRE.com)

Remembering New Yorker Films (Parallax View–Sean Axmaker)

Update on Shuttered New Yorker Films (Hot Splice – Northwest Film Forum)

New Yorker Films (Movie City Indie – Ray Pride)

R.I.P. New Yorker Films (Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow – Chris MaGee)

Thinking Like a New Yorker (Hot Docs – Matt Dentler)

Here’s a 1987 profile on the company, published in the New York Times.

(Thanks to IFC.com’s “The Daily” for many of these links)
Gasparilla International Film Festival: Armand Assante

February 17th, 2009

Armand Assante (American Gangster, The Mambo Kings, The Lords of Flatbush) will make an appearance at this year’s Gasparilla International Film Festival.

UPDATE: Assante will be on hand for the screening of the Romanian-made California Dreamin‘, Sunday, March 1 at 2:50 p.m. at Channelside Cinemas.

The film, directed by the late Cristian Nemescu, stars Assante as a U.S. Marine captain assigned to escort a train carrying NATO equipment bound for Yugoslavia during the war in Kosovo.

Wrote J. Hoberman, in the Village Voice: “An unfinished film set in an unsettled corner of the world, Romanian director Cristian Nemescu’s California Dreamin’ ponders history’s cruelties even as, in a wholly unexpected way, it embodies them. Six weeks into editing this darkly farcical meditation on geopolitical haplessness, the talented 27-year-old filmmaker died in an automobile accident; nine months later, his first feature would win the Prix Un Certain Regard at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.”

Assante will be honored with the festival’s Career Achievement Award for Excellence in Film, to be presented at in his honor at the Dolce Vita Lounge. That reception will be held March 1 at 5 p.m., following the California Dreamin’ screening.

The actor also appears in another GIFF film, The Steam Experiment, starring Val Kilmer.

Screen veteran Terry Moore, to be honored on opening night, at Tampa Theatre, is also among the movie-world notables slated to attend the ihird annual fest, which runs Feb. 26 through March 7 at various Tampa venues.

Tag: j. hoberman

New Yorker Films: End of the Road

Gasparilla International Film Festival: Armand Assante