KING OF NEW YORK screening at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

Abel Ferrara | 1990 | USA | 1h43m | Presented in the original English audio with English subtitles

KING OF NEW YORK IS one of the great dirty city films of its era, a gangster picture that feels half crime saga and half fever dream. Christopher Walken plays Frank White, a drug lord fresh out of prison who moves back into New York and decides to beome a modern-day Robin Hood type figure. Frank is monstrous, charismatic, ridiculous and magnetic all at once, and the film understands that the danger of power is often tied to glamour.

The supporting cast is stacked, with Laurence Fishburne, Wesley Snipes, David Caruso, Giancarlo Esposito and Steve Buscemi all moving through Ferrara’s New York, but it’s Walken who gives the film its strange centre of gravity. The BFI called it a 1990 gangster classic and singled out Walken’s turn as a career-best performance, and I think that gets close to why the film has lasted. It didn’t land cleanly with everyone when it first came out, but its standing has grown over time, and it’s now widely treated as one of Ferrara’s defining films.

WHY I’VE INCLUDED IT IN THIS WEEK’S PROGRAM: I wanted at least one film in this lineup that feels drunk on power. KING OF NEW YORK belongs here for the same reason FOMO exists in the first place: I don’t just want polished classics, I want films with danger in them. Ferrara gives you corruption, ego, violence, vanity and urban decay, but he does it with such force that the film becomes oddly majestic. Ferrara's mix of grime, style and madness is exactly my kind of cinema.

LOCATION: FOMO Secret Cinema, Bazari Orbeliani, Tbilisi. A five minute walk from Liberty Square metro.

HOW TO FIND FOMO: Enter Bazari Orbeliani via Atoneli St above Carrefour and take the stairs on your left to the first floor. You can also check our Instagram story highlights for a video showing exactly how to find us:
https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17933106294029235/