On weekends in college, I would go to the local movie rental store to take out a few stacks of popular recent movies, making my way through some of the modern American classics. It wasn’t until I saw The Lives of Others at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in the winter of 2007 that I became what you could call a certified cinephile. The Lives of Others is a transcendent German film about love, writing, and espionage set in East Berlin. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film at the 2007 Academy Awards, and it is one of those haunting movies that stays with you forever. It is also the kind of movie that is rarely screened these days in mainstream cinemas.
In this posthumous work, Talbot (1926–2017) brings back to glittering life the “golden age” of New York City’s art house cinemas with an enchanting look at his life working in film. From opening the U