The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, October 5-11
Beetlejuice (1988)
Directed by Tim Burton
Decades before Winona Ryder burst back onto the scene to charm, frighten and disturb us as a justifiably spastic mother in Stranger Things, she played similar games with our emotive and mental states as Lydia Deetz, the anything-but-spastic, impressively impassive adolescent daughter of post-mortem sorts and dispositions in Beetlejuice, one of Burton’s greatest masterpieces that must be seen at least once, and that simply cannot be seen too many times. Winona’s essentially career-launching performance is but one of the acting-related hallmarks of this genre-twisting, darkly comedic piece of mild terror. Another is that of Michael Keaton in the role of Beetlejuice himself, a most bizarrely clad and apoplectically tempered, tyrant-like ghoul of the afterlife, a mode of greater or lesser existence which at turns seems not entirely unpalatable—thanks not least to one of the most unforgettable scenes in all of Burton’s œuvre, that in which a levitating Lydia grooves to the tune a certain song by Harry Belafonte to make you want to get up and shake along with their direly felicitous party. Also, the “honk-honk” sound effect after Beetlejuice kicks over a wonky little tree: hella ballsy. Also, Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, and music by Danny Elfman. You just can’t go wrong with this winner of a movie. Unless, you know, you take the covered bridge, but still. Paul D’Agostino (October 8, 9, 11:30am at the Nitehawk)