Downtown Movies Return After Dark Year

For the first time in a year and a half, I sat in a dark, air-conditioned theater with my friend Dan Heaton and a trough-sized serving of popcorn and — just as I’ve done hundreds of times in pre-pandemic times — watched a movie at the Bow Tie Criterion Cinemas.

The cause for such cinephilic celebration was the nine-screen downtown movie theater​‘s improbable and, for the movie-obsessed like myself, miraculous emergence from its Covid-19-induced shutdown.

The local first-run and arthouse theater at 86 Temple St. has been closed for all intents and purposes since Covid-19 first made landfall in Connecticut in March 2020.

The theater briefly reopened in June 2020. But facing the daunting prospect of few new Hollywood releases and even fewer paying customers in those early months of the pandemic, it promptly re-closed on July 1 of that year.

That means that Friday’s reopening of the doors, flicking on of the digital projectors, and re-popping of the (fresh enough) popcorn marked the first time in well over a year that movie-hungry members of the New Haven public could return to the downtown cinema and catch a flick on the big screen.

That’s not to say that local moviegoers have been left bereft of all cinematic options during the pandemic. Quite the contrary.

The New Haven Documentary Film Festival has offered hundreds of screenings — online and in person — of new nonfiction films each of the past two years, including during the festival that wrapped up Sunday. The city’s only other remaining first-run movie theater, Cine 4 on Middletown Avenue, reopened months ago, in April. And in an act of cinematic desperation earlier this summer, I biked up to North Haven’s Cinemark to catch a screening of Black Widow before a public-radio roundtable review.

But there’s something different about being able to walk (or in my case, bike) a few blocks to a hometown theater, as Dan and I did on Friday.

Walking across the red bow-tie-patterned carpet with his arms stretched wide, Dan — a former Yale University Press colleague of mine and the only person I know in New Haven who attended the Bow Tie Cinemas more frequently than I did before the pandemic hit — declared with jubilation and relief, ​“I’m home!”

I couldn’t disagree.

During our first trip back to the movies together on Friday, Dan and I saw Free Guy. The bubblegum-flavored action-comedy stars Ryan Reynolds as an exuberantly optimistic bank teller whose life is upended when he realizes that the violent, chaotic and repetitive world he exists in is in fact that of a role-playing video game. He’s less of a human playing the game, more of a background character designed to be played.

It’s a Truman Show riff for a superhero-inundated cinematic generation. Thanks largely to Reynolds’ impish charm and the more versatile acting chops of co-lead Jodie Comer, the movie hits the mark for self-aware fun — even if its attempts to raise questions about the nature of free will and the consequences of artificial intelligence barely skim the surface.

To be honest, I would have been content with just about any cinematic fare on my journey back.

As Dan ably put it, the reopening of the Bow Tie Criterion Cinemas felt like a homecoming.

Ever since I moved to New Haven a decade ago, I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of my life bouncing between the 200-seat theaters and 40-seat screening rooms at 86 Temple St.

It’s where my partner Lucy and I went on our second ever date (a midnight screening of Friday the 13th; poor Kevin Bacon, he never stood a chance). It’s where I’d catch up with just about every new release I could while diving deep into the film criticism podcast Filmspotting, and then writing movie reviews for the Independent, and then hosting the weekly radio show ​“Deep Focus” on WNHH with fellow Independent writer and film buff Allan Appel.

It’s where I’d often run into and geek out to movies with Dan, who for years kept his own blog (the late, great Cheeseblabbery) with witty and insightful write-ups about the hundreds of films he’d watch every year, mostly at the downtown Criterion.

Dan and I and a handful of uniformed staffers were the only people present at the newly reopened downtown theater when we arrived a few minutes before Friday’s 1:30 p.m. screening.

Due to an unfortunate disregard for the local press, the manager of the theater told the Independent that Bow Tie’s company policy prohibits employees from talking to reporters.

Multiple calls and emails and other attempts to get in touch with Bow Tie’s corporate office received no response.

The theater at 86 Temple St., which first opened in New Haven in 2004, is part of a national chain owned by a family that’s been in the movie exhibition business for over a century.

The Temple Street building’s maintenance man, Bob Russo, however, did tell the Independent that he’s been keeping up the empty theater even during the shutdown. (He also looks after the 44 luxury apartments that sit atop the theater in the rehabbed 1930s-era building that used to be home to United Illuminating.)

In the runup to Friday’s reopening, Russo said, he’d been replacing light bulbs, making sure the bathrooms were in working order, and checking in on the air conditioning and ventilation systems.

The only other fellow moviegoer who arrived before Dan and I walked down the carpet to Theater 5 was Sam Lim (pictured at right), a Korean language teacher at Yale.

He showed up to the movie theater’s reopening day to catch a screening of Respect, the new Jennifer Hudson-starring biopic about Aretha Franklin.

Before the lights dimmed and the onslaught of previews began, Dan and I leaned back in our upholstered chairs in a middle row in the otherwise empty theater.

We talked about the Mets doubleheader he’d been to earlier in the week.

About how he’d serendipitously thumbed across a Sparks album in a cut-out bin in early 1980s West Virginia, decades before Edgar Wright’s new documentary came out.

About whether or not the new aggressively idiosyncratic Leos Carax musical Annette would make its way to New Haven, or whether we’d have to go to New York to catch a screening.

And about the joy and relief of being able to catch new movies at a hometown theater as opposed to having to make the trek by bus out to the Milford mall — or, as Dan more succinctly described that cinematic alternative, ​“hell.”

When the theater lights turned down and the silver screen lit up, we were far from ​“hell” indeed.

It was good to be back.