Jacqueline Bisset

“Day for Night,” a much loved, widely awarded, and truly joyous work about the trials and triumphs of making a film and the extraordinary power of motion pictures as objects of affection and obsession.

There are times during Abel Ferrara’s Welcome to New York when you can feel a defiant filmmaker pushing back against the moralizing status quo. When he gives voice to trampled idealism and unapologetic carnality. Those fleeting moments of clarity make the rest of this disjointed, unfocused mess all the more painful. Cinema owes a debt of gratitude to auteurs like Ferrara and Gérard Depardieu, but there’s simply no dramatic necessity for this film to exist.