The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, April 19-25
Alice in the Cities (1974)
Directed by Wim Wenders
Wenders has said that Alice in the Cities is his purest work—it’s the movie that ignited his love for the road, leading him to his later pictures, some of which are featured in the mini retro at BAM this week (Alice screens with 1975’s Wrong Move and 1976’s Kings of the Road—which, together, make up his Road Trilogy). In Alice, a journalist, played by Wenders regular Rüdiger Volger, finds himself with an unlikely traveling companion in nine-year-old Alice, who gets separated from her mother. The odd pairing of a young girl and a strange grown man doesn’t so much incite lewd questions here as it provides the points of view that drive Alice: an appreciation for history and maturity for existential lingerings, as well as the excitable, childlike outlook of Alice as they traipse through New York and Germany. The two also briefly find themselves at a concert for the late Chuck Berry. Kristen Yoonsoo Kim (April 21, 2pm, 7pm; April 22, 9:30pm; April 23, 8pm at BAM’s spotlight on Wenders’s Road Trilogy)