Five-Finger Deaths & Discounts

Street-level grit, snap zooms, a score that struts like Shaft, and a dignified antihero facing obsolescence... Noah Segan's soulful and entertaining The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is a valentine to both The Greatest Shitty in the World and '70s New Hollywood cinema. It's The Friends of Eddie Coyle for the Venmo era: John Turturro, unsung face of the city, shines as an analog thief in an increasingly cashless world, who still drops emptied wallets in a mailbox so his marks can keep their IDs. After lifting the wrong bag from a mob-connected crypto bro, the ensuing high-stakes countdown doubles as a Turturro-led tour of every borough.

JP Harris left home at 14 and spent years living off-grid in rural Vermont, learning logging and carpentry to get by. He also picked up the clawhammer banjo, and his career has proved that the oldest things in American music aren't dormant, merely unplugged. The outlaw-punk's new album "Shaving a Dead Man" radically strips back to traditional songs as early as the 18th century, performed only by Harris (banjo, lead vocals) and Old Crow Medicine Show's Chance McCoy (fiddle, harmony) in a West Virginia studio the two built from a workman's shack. World-weary, unsentimental and glosslessly hands-on, the record refuses to treat these heirlooms as if they're trapped under museum glass.

Presented by the essential film-culture site Screen Slate and programmed by founder Jon Dieringer, "Psycho-Fiction: The Surreal Nightmares of Screaming Mad George" (October 23 - November 4) pays gooey tribute to legendary Osaka-born F/X weirdo Joji Tani (1956 - 2026), whose nom-de-squib was inspired by his love for Screamin' Jay Hawkins and MAD Magazine. Featuring a few 35mm prints, including Society (1989, prepare yourself for the mind- and body-melting "Shunting" orgy) and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988, the first VHS tape I ever owned!), this handmade-horror memorial party includes curated shorts, rarities, even live music.

The Market Is Usually Wrong About What's Obsolete. This week's picks may be a release-date coincidence, and I'm not talking about the predatory nostalgia that powers franchises and reboots. "Dead" is an industry prediction, not an observation. When an industry says a craft is finished, it usually means the economics stopped working for the people selling it... not that audiences stopped wanting it. Somebody still wants to watch a man lift a wallet with his hands, or see latex do something a CGI render can't, or hear a newly recorded ballad older than the recording industry itself. So here's the tip, whether you're making films or covering them: don't ask what the market wants next. Ask what it just declared no longer viable. The appetite regularly outlives the business model, and the person who shows up to creatively fill that gap looks like a genius.