Gary's Corner

We have a ‘packed’ Memorial Day weekend on tap at New Plaza Cinema: three new independent films, two classics, a trio of the best in recent European cinema and by popular demand, a reprise of our most popular film to date. That, of course, would be Bill Nighy in Living which, despite its four-month run here a number of our loyal patrons somehow missed, and have asked us for a return engagement. Voila.

The three new indie releases include:

—MONICA, in which a long- estranged mother (Patricia Clarkson) and her transgender daughter (Trace Lysette) rekindle their relationship in surprising, piercing fashion. In her NY Times ‘Critic’s Pick’ review Teo Bugbee writes, “the director Andrea Pallaoro doesn’t burden this delicate tale of reconciliation with long monologues or extensive back stories, and the performances are compelling in their restraint. Both Lysette and Clarkson are naturally magnetic actors, and they don’t waste the attention they’re given on excess sentimentality.”

Patricia Clarkson will make special guest appearances at this weekend’s screenings of Monica.

—CLOSE TO VERMEER, a new documentary on which we’re pleased to join the NY Premiere, going behind the scenes of the largest Vermeer exhibition ever mounted, now on view at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.  Among the topics covered are the latest techniques for determining what makes a Vermeer truly a Vermeer, to new discoveries while searching the globe for the master’s paintings.

—FILMMAKERS FOR THE PROSECUTION, adapted from a monograph by filmmaker (and longtime NPC booster) Sandra Schulberg, this new doc retraces the hunt by brothers Stuart and Budd (On the Waterfront) Schulberg for film evidence used to convict the Nazis at the first Nuremberg trial.  Seventy five years later, never-before-seen footage and revealing interviews unravel why the resulting film about the trial was suppressed by the U.S. government.

“An alternately thrilling and chastening portrait of accountability in action…The brothers received their orders from none other than John Ford, then head of the OSS field photographic unit…”  – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times
—-

And returning this weekend for encore screenings, Eric Rohmer’s sublime My Night at Maud’s, Bertolucci’s The Conformist (including our special New Plaza-produced interview with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro), and recent Euro-cinema highlights The Eight Mountains, Other People’s Children and Penelope Cruz in L’Immensita.

See you as the lights go down…