City News (film)

Did You Know?

• The film's style owes a debt to the cartooning of R. Crumb and Harvey Pekar.
• Several sequences are modeled on early-1980s MTV music videos.
• An automobile wreck intercuts live footage with comic strip imagery.

Plot

The film follows Tom Domino, a self-styled noir-like protagonist who runs an East Village alternative newspaper by day but struggles at night to create a cartoon strip. A verbal sparring match with a woman named Daphne in a Manhattan bar breaks his writer's block, and he dashes home to cartoon the encounter. The resulting strip, called City News, becomes a local hit, boosting newspaper sales. Domino then questions whether he loves Daphne genuinely or only as his muse.

Theatrical and festival release, critical reception

In December 1982, Variety critic Lawrence Cohn reviewed City News at a private screening. The film later earned awards including Best Dramatic Film in Atlanta and Best Low-Budget Feature in Houston. Cinecom Pictures handled its U.S. and Canadian theatrical release, drawing praise from Judith Crist and USA Today, while The New York Times offered a mixed take. By 1989, City News had entered the Museum of Television & Radio’s permanent collection and was listed in the American Film Institute's Catalog of Feature Films.

PBS broadcast, TV critics' reception

City News was nationally broadcast on the third season of PBS's Peabody Award-winning series American Playhouse in April 1984. It received mostly favorable reviews from newspaper critics across the U.S., including the Los Angeles Times, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Milwaukee Journal, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, though The New York Times gave a mixed review. The film never had a commercial video release but was published to YouTube in 2013.