Matcollis This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Contentar Best movie of this year hands down!

Kailansorac Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

JasparLamarCrabb Paul Mazursky's wonderful ode to struggling actors in 1953 New York. It's not exactly a comedy and not exactly a drama, but a mix of both. Lenny Baker is Larry Lipinsky, a Brooklyn transplant living the bohemian life Greenwich Village. Shelley Winters (in an utterly outrageous performance) is his suffocating mother. The movie is populated with one eccentric character after another from Christopher Walken's pretentious poet to Antonio Fargas's flamboyant dandy to Lois Smith's tragic depressant. The movie is very flavorful and extremely well acted. Baker, who died less than ten years later, gives what should have been a career making performance. Jeff Goldblum pops up as an extremely ridiculous actor. Somehow this film is largely forgotten --- it's a real buried treasure.

Lechuguilla Writer/Director Paul Mazursky clearly aims to showcase that special place and time in his own life, in this semi-autobiographical story of a young, would-be actor who leaves his Brooklyn home and moves to Greenwich Village, to live among poets, writers, and other young actors. It's the early 1950s, and Mazursky's alter ego goes by the name of Larry (Lenny Baker), early twenties, earnest, fun loving, romantic, and plagued by an overbearing, intrusive mother named Faye (Shelley Winters).Larry's friends include several rather eccentric people. But they're all his age, and all have the usual growing-up problems. Talk turns to romance, sex, finding a job, future plans, and so on. The script is rather talky. But in a place like Greenwich Village, where life revolves around people, philosophy, and the arts, what else is there to do but talk?Though humor permeates the film, it's mostly dark comedy, which masks the underlying emotional pain of the various characters, as they all seem rather lost and forlorn amid such gloomy and dreary physical surroundings. But maybe the drabness of it all provides that sense of nostalgia for Mazursky, that sense of having moved beyond, to a broader, brighter, more expansive vision of life.The film's cinematography is conventional. Dark interiors match the film's dark, poignant themes. Background music features mostly light jazz, with a little opera thrown in. Casting and acting are fine. But Shelley Winters steals the show with her terrific performance.Nostalgic in tone and sentiment, "Next Stop, Greenwich Village" offers memories of another time, another place. It's a period-piece setting, a coming-of-age story. It's a film that will appeal to viewers who lived through the 1950s, or who can identify with the bohemian lifestyle that so defines that special place called Greenwich Village.

edwagreen The very essence of this wonderful 1976 film depicting life in the 1950s Village is fully realized by a wonderful cast.Lenny Baker, who died way too early, was simply wonderful as our Brooklyn College graduate, who leaves home to venture forth to Greenwich Village. It's the place of cafés, of wander and lust, the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg protest era, and all things associated with society at this time.Shelley Winters was fabulous as Baker's quintessential Jewish mother.The troupe that Larry (Baker) falls in with reminded me of a group by Hemingway in "The Sun Also Rises," as they leave for Mexico.There was also some wonderful support here by up and coming actors Chris Walken and Jeff Goldblum as well as Ellen Greene.This often comic film does have its moments when one of the group commits suicide. There is a truly magnificent supporting performance by Antonio Fargas, as the black Bernstein Chandler. He made up the story of his mother working as a maid for a Jewish family. Gay to the hilt, Fargas etched a believable, memorable character.The film turns quite poignant at the end when Larry wins a part in a Hollywood film and as he leaves, mama Winters reminds him never to forget who you are.A film to treasure for the ages.

treagan-2 When I think of this film, I think of my older brother's generation, graduating from high school about 1956, and from college about 1960. Mazursky catches the look of a certain kind of young people of that era, their fashions, their expressions, their masks and identities. There's a sense of confusion and discovery, or rejection of the restrictions of middle class culture and their embracing of a murkily-defined bohemian alternative, and the disruption that brings to their lives, culturally, socially, sexually.The film also reminds me of my years spent living near and wandering around Greenwich Village, 1966-70. Some of the kinds of people Mazursky shows were still there, ten years older, either mystified or amused or annoyed by the hippie hoards invading them. Honky-tonk, high rents, and mass culture bohemianism had arrived.Mazursky gets this right. I don't know how this picture would play to those not interested or affected by the sociology time capsule, but I think it still would play.And hats off to Shelly Winters, once again playing an impossible mother.