Bruce Goldstein

Bruce Goldstein is the founder of classic film distributor Rialto Pictures and Founding Repertory Artistic Director of New York’s Film Forum, the nation’s flagship cinema for classic film restorations. He’s been called “the dean of repertory film programmers.”

Goldstein’s programming at Film Forum has been called “the Best of New York” by New York Magazine. In 1997, Time Out New York named him one of the 101 essential people or places of New York “for keeping showmanship alive,” and, in 2005, “New York’s Finest Film Programmer.” In its 2012 “Best of New York” issue, the Village Voice called him “the Michael Jordan of Film Programmers.” Kent Jones’s profile of Goldstein in Film Comment was titled “The King of New York.” He’s been profiled in The New York Times and The New Yorker, among many other publications.

Goldstein founded Rialto in 1998.  Among the nearly 100 international classics re-released by the company are Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955), Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937), Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), the original Japanese Godzilla (1954), and Mel Brooks’s The Producers (1968), which kicked off the 2018 TCM Classic Film Festival. Since 2012, Rialto has been the main U.S. theatrical and non-theatrical representative of the StudioCanal library of over 8,000 international titles. In 2023, the Museum of Modern Art in New York honored Rialto with a 25th anniversary retrospective. 

Goldstein has produced events for all of TCM’s festivals and cruises, including popular presentations on pre-Code movies, character actors, vaudeville, subtitling, Godzilla, The Nicholas Brothers, Capra’s The Donovan Affair (for which he re-created the missing soundtrack with live actors), The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), and many other events. Each year, Club TCM is packed to the rafters for his quiz show “So You Think You Know Movies,” which helps kick off the annual TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood. 

Goldstein’s acclaimed “New York Trilogy” of short films (Uncovering the Naked City, In the Footsteps of Speedy, and TCM’s Pelham One Two Three: NYC Underground) were all shown on HBOMax as part of the 2021 virtual TCM Classic Film Festival. In 2023, he served as a consultant on the Museum of the City of New York’s 16-screen installation “You Are Here,” on view through 2025. 

In 1990, the New York Film Critics Circle presented Goldstein with a special award “for consistent and imaginative quality programming of repertory films.” In 2002, he was decorated with the French Order of “Chevalier” of Arts & Letters. In 2012, he received the first Lifetime Achievement Award in Film ever given by George Eastman House.

You can also see Goldstein on TCM in the Original, Two For One: The Tradition of the Double Feature, along with Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese.