Valentine’s Day is for lovers, and also for haters. If you’re looking to celebrate on February 14th—or to abscond entirely, laughing or screaming—our local art house theaters are here to provide.
Nitehawk Williamsburg has a wide swath at their “Love is Love” series, which will run between February 8th and the 24th. The selection ranges from the actually romantic (Before Sunrise on the 12th!) to the not-so-swoon-worthy (a midnight screening of Cronenberg’s widely panned JG Ballard adaptation, Crash? Fun fact: there are no less than 61 occurrences of the word “semen” in Ballard’s novel, about a group of Londoners who get off on car wrecks. Talk about auto erotica.)
Between the 8th and the 14th, Metrograph has a movie for every mood: there’s Casablanca if you’re feeling starry-eyed; Moonlight for a good, poetic weep; and with Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day, there’s also cannibalism on the menu.
Anthology will again host a “Valentine’s Day Massacre” between the 14th and the 21st—their “cherished tradition of celeb(/denig)rating Valentine’s Day” with a lineup of “radically anti-romantic” movies. They’re showing Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession, “a batshit crazy depiction of an imploding marriage,” alongside Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, a movie so stylish it really makes you wonder if dysfunction is the new black. And while there are lots of sentimental movies to be thankful for and to revisit this month, you might also opt for Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid—Anthology calls it both “hilariously funny and bitterly corrosive,” kind of like Valentine’s Day.