Todd Berliner, who will introduce the 6pm screening on June 30, is Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is the author of Hollywood Renegade: Elaine May, Mikey and Nicky, and the Making of a Masterpiece, soon to be released by University of Texas Press.

Elaine May’s third feature stands apart from the rest of her oeuvre in a number of ways, not least of which is the fact that it finds her working with another paradigm-shifting actor/director in John Cassavetes. Here Cassavetes plays opposite his frequent collaborator Peter Falk, the former playing a Philly gangster who has run afoul of his boss and gone underground due to a fresh contract on his life; the latter playing his childhood friend who—unbeknownst to him—is helping with the assassination plot. Set entirely across one anxious night, Mikey and Nicky remains an eminently potent, emotionally tremulous portrait of male friendship (and male betrayal) that crackles with the raw energy of three of the era’s most indelible and uncompromising American film artists working together. A Muscle Distribution/Hollywood Entertainment release.