Bll Heidbreder, a cinephile who lives in Manhattan, catches 10 art films a week on average, a quota maintained for the last 20 years, ever since his college days in Berkeley, Calif. For someone who doesn't make a living as a film critic, that is a lot of leisure time spent in front of a screen. To gratify his habit, he stints on food: dinner is often just two slabs of wheat bread mortared together with peanut butter.
Some of these details about Mr. Heidbreder are already a matter of public knowledge, at least to that tiny segment of the public acquainted with his role in the film "Cinemania," a study of five compulsive New York cinephiles. The documentary's creators, Angela Christlieb and Stephen Kijak, somehow inveigled this collection of loners to tell their stories directly to the camera. Howard Kaplan reports in the New York Times.
