The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, February 10-16
Let the Right One In (2008)
Directed by Tomas Alfredson
Alfredson’s chilly, surgical mise en scène perfectly fits his take on an age-old story. His vampire romance is all about withholding, slightly twisting its conventions, reserving its inevitabilities, searching for the cause of a genre’s fallen stature among moviegoers like a tumor. He plays the long game, keeping us so invested in a story of a boy’s first crush (Kåre Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson are stupendous as the young lovers) that we lose track of the vengeful amateur detective drunkenly stumbling towards a truth of which he can’t sense. The audience drifts through cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema’s compositions as if on an ice floe into a foggy morning. When Alfredson decides to break the stillness with the most heart-breaking POV shot in modern cinema, the film’s cold core melts like a blood-soaked Bresson and a sort of transcendence takes place. Scout Tafoya (February 15, 5pm, 9:45pm at Syndicated)
