The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, January 11-18
Only Lovers Left Alive (2014)
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
Andrew Sarris once wrote that “there is no greater spectacle in the cinema than a man and a woman talking away their share of eternity together,” and when Jarmusch made his first out-and-out romance, he proved the lion of film criticism right. The share in this case is eternity itself, as we’re in the company of vampires, too hip and tired to raise their voices above a whisper. The Hunger might reasonably have come to this if Bowie hadn’t succumb to age. Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston are pale demigods who’ve filled their life with possessions and fetish objects to band-aid their eternally hurt souls. For Hiddleston, of late, that hasn’t proven to be enough. The film is a study in shared melancholy, of facing forever, and whether holding hands while it happens makes it any less intolerable. Jarmusch ultimately finds creativity, the product of human imagination, to be reason enough to face any indignation and hardship. And furthermore, that sharing the delight one finds listening to the perfect song, or watching a perfect movie such as this, is the most rapturous pleasure life can offer. Reason to live as many lifetimes as one is handed. Scout Tafoya (January 13, 14, midnight at the Nitehawk)