Photo credit: 26 Aries.
Chinatown – “one of the lone neighborhoods in Manhattan to preserve its heritage and verve,” we noted earlier this year – takes center stage in two new documentaries.
Los Sures
Friday December 9, 7 pm to 10 pm at Dobbin Street: $8 to $10
Dobbin St. is a new “luxury event space” that occasionally throws non-luxury events. For Halloween, they hosted a screening of Suspiria and went all out, washing the space in Dario Argento’s signature evil-pink light and amassing a band to do the live score. They even threw in some popcorn, a bar, and prep school-style beds for good measure.
Spa Night
Thursday September 8, 7:45 pm at Metrograph: $15
This one’s been held over at the Metrograph again and it looks like this is finally, actually, literally the last time you can catch Spa Night within the stylish confines of the Lower East Side’s newest art house theater and perhaps the only ciné in the whole wide city with a concession stand that looks like it was designed by a serial killer. You’ll find that Spa Night is replete with that very same understated but stylish weirdness. It’s a quiet, crawling film fraught by teeth-gritting tension so overwhelming you get the feeling everything’s about to come crashing down if you breathe too loudly.
From left: Stephen Lewis, Cian Westmoreland, Michael Hass, and Brandon Bryant. (Photo: Daniel Maurer)
With the U.S. “reasonably certain” that a drone strike killed the much reviled Jihadi John and a wave of recent attacks boosting our worst fears about ISIS, the timing isn’t exactly great for a documentary that questions the wisdom of targeted killings. But two former drone operators who appear in Tonje Hessen Schei’s Drone are sticking to their guns.