IFC Center Celebrates Twenty Years

Speaking with July about the lasting impact of her latest novel, All Fours, the Guardian’s Zoe Williams notes that Me and You “has the most endearing, infuriating sequence: someone buys a goldfish and ­accidentally drives off, having left it on top of his car. July, starring in the film because, realistically, she was the only person who could have, decides from inside her own car that the fish will certainly perish, and delivers an ode: ‘I didn’t know you, but I want you to know that you were loved.’ Her voice was incredibly distinctive—she nailed all those universal feelings such as awkwardness, futility, delight, yet was as far as you could imagine from being an everywoman.”

As a nod to its midnight-movie tradition, IFC Center will revive William Lustig’s notorious Maniac (1980). “An exploitative, grungy riff on Psycho, the film gleefully embraced its laughably bad production, rolling with countless incongruities, deplorable sound design, and performances that were, at best, stiff and awkward,” wrote Chris Cabin at Slant in 2010. “Maniac was nevertheless a haunting film as a whole; you could never quite shed the grime that it immersed you in.”

As “a tribute to both the theater’s Greenwich Village neighborhood and its commitment to documentary,” programmers Harris Dew and Caitlin Crowley have selected Dont Look Back (1967), D. A. Pennebaker’s immortal chronicle of Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England shot on gorgeously grainy black-and-white 16 mm. “Dont Look Back circulates the illicit, the forbidden, and the secret through every shadowy, glorious off-kilter frame,” wrote Robert Polito in 2015. “No matter what the shifting cast, setting, or situation, we feel over and over that we were not meant to see or hear any of this.”

Yasujiro Ozu’s I Was Born, But . . . (1932), a bright comedy that takes a turn as two brothers learn their first sad lessons about the reality of adulthood, launched the theater’s classic programming in 2005. Five years later, when IFC Center gave it its first theatrical run, a review of the film appeared for the first time in the New York Times. “There are a handful of silent, black-and-white old movies that have the power to make all the subsequent advances in the medium look redundant,” wrote A. O. Scott. I Was Born, But . . . “is such a movie.”