This weekend's worthwhile cinematic diversions in New York--midnight movie style:

--Abel Ferrara's King of New York features Christopher Walken (right) in his "role of no return" as bizarre mobster Frank White, who--after being released from prison--decides to kill all of his competition, outfox the cops and share his wealth with the less fortunate. To say it is a violent Robin Hood is to criminally understate its appeal; it is gloriously, excessively violent, the perfect synthesis of Ferrara's socipathic edge and Walken's grave unpredictability. Not to mention Laurence Fishburne's scene-stealing turn as Jimmy Jump and a classic gag including a drug deal, some pistols and a suitcase full of tampons. Ah, yes, only in New York--at IFC Center, to be precise.

--There is not much to say about Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (Saturday at the Paris Theater) that you have not read somewhere else or thought about already, so why not just leave at this: In one year back in the 1970s, Robert De Niro played "Johnny Boy" Civello, Vito Corleone and Bang the Drum Slowly's terminally ill catcher Bruce Pearson. Is that the best single year of any actor's careeer in the history of cinema or what? OK, fine--Vince Vaughn's Dodgeball / Be Cool / Wedding Crashers / Thumbsucker year has been pretty spellbinding, too.

--Walter Hill's The Warriors (at the Sunshine) is one of the more underrated New York films of the '70s, kind of lost in the deep sidewalk shadow between Scorsese and Saturday Night Fever. Nevertheless, the story of a street gang that must battle their way from the Bronx back to Coney Island after being mistakenly fingered for an assassination holds up surprisingly well 26 years after its release. If nothing else, the gang's gleeful stomp through the beaten city functions like a time capsule available nowhere else, and the Sunshine is air conditioned. At least there is that.