Review: Forgotten NYC Movies - "Welcome to New York" "Exiled" and "Parting Glances"

There are so many NYC movies that reviewing the famous ones is pointless because they've been written about ad nauseum (and much better) elsewhere. That's why I like, here at Mr NYC, to review some of the forgotten NYC films, as I've been doing recently. Here are three very, very different NYC movies that are probably forgotten but worth checking out:

Welcome to New York (2014): This movie is a collaboration between legendary NYC director Abel Ferrera and French superstar Gerard Depardieu. A chamberpiece of a film, it is based on the 2011 incident involving former World Bank head Dominique Strauss-Kahn and a black maid in a Manhattan hotel room. Depardieu plays a world famous economist who has just left his big job in DC and, before heading back to France to run for president in an election he seems certain to win, goes to NYC to visit his daughter. While staying at a fancy hotel, he rapes a black maid and is soon arrested and confined to imprisonment in a Greenwich Village townhouse with his wife. While there, he ponders his life, his ambitions, thinks about how no matter how powerful he has become he is actually quite miserable, and how life is meaningless and only lust seems real to him. Eventually the charges against him are dropped -- but his repuation and life are ruined.

Exiled: A Law & Order Movies (1998): This is an old TV movie from back in the day when the major networks still did TV movies. It stars Chris Noth (just before he became Mr Big) reprising his Law & Order character Mike Logan. Logan (and Noth) left the show in 1995 when, in the season finale, he hit a politician in the face on the steps of a courthouse. Logan isn't fired from the force but he exiled from detective work in Manhattan -- the patroling the streets of NYC's Sibera, Staten Island. The movie is about how Logan is trying to break a big case, while romancing a young lady, in the hopes that it will revive his career and bring him back into Manhattan. 

Parting Glances (1986): set over a 24-hour period, mostly at a farewell party, it was one of the first movies to directly address the AIDS crises. It stars Steven Buscemi in his first movie role as a gay man dying of AIDS. This movie was part of the rough and tumble independent NYC movie scene of the 1980s, before such movies became big business in the 1990s. The director, Bill Sherwood, never made another movie because, shortly after this movie was released, he also died of AIDS. But this movie was well ahead of its time and gave us one my generation's greatest actors -- recently profiled here for GQ.