Eight and a half months ago I missed a 5.17 Cannes Film Festival screening of Abel Ferrara‘s Welcome To New York due to being traumatized by the cracking of my iPhone inside the Salle Debussy. There have been no screenings since. (Or none that I’ve heard about or been invited to.) If I’d known Welcome to New York would be unviewable for the remainder of 2014 and two months into ’15 I would have shaken off my distress and attended the damn 5.17 Cannes showing. Ferrara’s film has screened at festivals and been streamed online around the world since (it aired on Japanese TV in mid January) and now, finally, the U.S. market is finally getting a theatrical and VOD looksee on 3.27. I’m sorry but even with my lifelong interest in all things Ferrara, my blood is no longer up. A film has to open at a moment of heightened cultural interest. Welcome to New York was smoking hot when Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s attorney threatened to “bring action for defamation.” An opening last September would have worked pretty well. But at this stage it feels like cold dumplings in the fridge.