The cinema is a place for communal reflection. Here, in this odd temple, complete strangers commune to supplant their own experiences, if only momentarily, in favor of the chimerical images on the silver screen. Alexandre Rockwell’s The Projectionist is both an homage to the art form and a rumination on its impact on the collective memory of those that experience it. If a movie’s images are constructed as dreams, Rockwell wonders, might it also be that we sometimes live like we’re in a walking reverie, always grasping for what is real?

Yet, The Projectionist is not nearly as esoteric as all that implies. Its image-based philosophy is couched inside a simple tale of a formerly incarcerated man’s confrontation with a violent past. It is a rare filmic pleasure. Like Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, Rockwell’s film feels like being thrust into a nightmarish puzzle which demands to be solved. Spearheaded by veteran character actor Vondie Curtis-Hall in one of his finest performances to date and shot in warm chiaroscuro by Sam Motamedi, The Projectionist is strange, haunting, elegiac and thoroughly transportive.

Of course, for Sully (Curtis-Hall), a wrongfully convicted recluse, the opportunity to be whisked away from somewhere other than his depressed existence is a gift. A film projectionist at the real-life Film Noir Cinema in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Sully spends most of his days showing classic films to a largely empty audience. As the likes of Fellini, Truffaut and Preminger flash across the screen, Sully gets lost, projecting his own harrowing journey onto the faces and lives of others. It is a place not unlike producer Quentin Tarantino’s own New Beverly, in Los Angeles.

In patchwork flashbacks, Rockwell reveals Sully’s previous life in illogical, chronologically confused ways, such that it takes a while before we can, if ever, discern between the projectionist’s reality, his memory and utter fiction. For a while, it is even difficult to tell whether Sully is alive or dreaming, and if anything, Rockwell could’ve spent more time teasing out the answers.

Sully lives a humdrum life with very little human interaction, and there’s an implication that his memory may be fading. For one thing, he has labeled his carton of milk and his daily soup in his otherwise empty fridge. His home is sparse, and the sounds of domestic violence seep through the cracked drywall. His daily life is only interrupted by infrequent visits to a home for the aged, where he visits his brother, Aaron (David Proval), who is wracked with dementia.

But, one morning, his former partner, Donald, arrives (Kevin Corrigan) with an ominous message that his ex-boss, Rosa (Kasi Lemmons) needs him for an urgent job. Details are murky at best, but the gist is that Sully had once shot and killed the nephew of a criminal boss named Darko (Rockwell), who is now out of prison and out for blood. Rosa wants Sully to kill him before he can kill anyone else.

But Sully has tried very hard to put that life behind him, since it is the same life that is responsible for his estrangement from his daughter, Lala (Selah Rust). Old habits do die hard, and it seems as if Sully will probably lose this battle against his past in more ways than one; what is there to salvage when most everything has already been taken away?

Despite its outward sullenness, The Projectionist is so well observed in its smaller moments that it contains within it an unusual kind of hope. Perhaps it’s that everyone can find their place, even in a world that has been shattered, and even when it seems like our lives are monochromatic. Sully’s story is not unique within the context of film history — certainly not when it comes to the film noir fare he projects at the theater — but Rockwell’s gentle ruminations on the fallacy of nature and the vapidity of violence are profound in their cogency.

The Projectionist screened at the 2026 Slamdance Film Festival.

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