The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, February 17-23
Directed by Lizzie Borden
A fraught and fervent invocation of direct action in a almost-sci-fi New York, Borden’s vicious debut charts the interpersonal and political turmoil of several groups of radical feminists. Come for a young Katherine Bigelow as a yuppie eager to push respectability politics, stick around as those politics lead to fragmentation along lines of race and class, as pirate media and corporate media become the staging ground for ideological battles. A visionary image of film-as-saturated-media-image, it’s also a pertinent reminder that intersectionality was always theory-as-bomb-those-fuckers-praxis as much as it was a tool for deconstruction. Although, given the film’s climatic and now-unfilmable bombing, perhaps we should just take “deconstruction” in a bit more of a physical sense. Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli (February 19-25 at Anthology Film Archives, in a new 35mm restoration, showtimes daily; a Q&A with Borden, stars Adele Bertei and Jeanne Satterfield, and critic Amy Taubin follows the opening night screening)