Films this week 6/9 – 6/11/2023
by Gary Palmucci | 8th June 2023 | Gary's Corner
Long time New Plaza Cinema devotees may recall legendary writer-director Paul Schrader joining us for a pair of riveting Q&As – one of which I moderated – at NYIT screenings of his Oscar-nominated First Reformed back in December 2018. His new film Master Gardener chronicles another of ‘God’s lonely men,’ first assayed by Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver and later by Willem Dafoe, Ethan Hawke and others. This time he’s played by Joel Edgerton – “like a clenched fist,” as Manohla Dargis notes in her NY Times Critic’s PIck review – a horticulturist toiling somewhere in the South whose fateful interactions with his employer (Sigourney Weaver, another New Plaza favorite) and her biracial grandniece propel the narrative forward. Dargis also praises “the movie’s tense dreaminess, its pulpy undertow and severe elegance, as well as the astonishing, awkward sincerity with which Schrader hurtles headlong at questions of love, hate,, race and redemption in an unforgiving world,” populated by “men in search of grace…usually by way of women, but thankfully they are vivid, too.”
Our other new addition is the drama Chile ’76, focusing on a bourgeois woman drawn into a dangerous political dilemma during the years of the Pinochet dictatorship. In yet another NY Times Critic’s Pick, Teo Bugbee praises its young director, Manuela Martelli as joining “the company of Chilean filmmakers like Pablo Larrain and Sebastian Leilo (A Fantastic Woman) who’ve made thought-provoking movies reflecting on the Pinochet regime and its impact on the lives of everyday people.”
In September we’ll be screening the classic 1982 Costa-Gavras film Missing, also set in Chile during this tragic era, with some very special guests.
Holding over this weekend – Close to Vermeer (still packing them in), It Ain’t Over and Other People’s Children.
And coming next week, the Cesar-winning French drama The Night of the 12th,
Jewish film festival favorite Persian Lessons and Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express.
Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema