Gary's Corner

“I live with this movie every day of my life.”  

That’s no less an authority than Martin Scorsese speaking of Luchino Visconti’s 1963 Italian epic The Leopard, which he routinely includes in lists of his five or ten all-time favorites.   New Plaza Cinema will be showcasing it this weekend in our monthly classics series.  Film historian, Max Alvarez will lead a Q&A after the Sunday screening.

Burt Lancaster stars as an aging aristocrat who is powerless to prevent the decline of his family’s fortunes in the face of Garibaldi’s invading armies, who’ve just landed in 1860’s Sicily.   While Lancaster’s familiar voice is dubbed in Italian in this original, uncut version,  his body language and gravitas never fail to convince us that he is indeed a prince, and  a witness to tidal socio-politiical  forces with immense melancholy and grace.  

Alain Delon,  Claudia Cardinale and Nino Rota’s operatic score provide indelible
support.  When this version of The Leopard plays in NYC it frequently sells out the house, so we’re adding a second screening this weekend.  

Another addition to our program is a recent Chinese film, Return to Dust.  Writing in rogerebert.com, regular NY Times critic (and New Plaza guest) Glenn Kenny writes that its director Li Ruijin “is a young filmmaker -he’s about 40 – who seems to have a very old soul….Every frame of this movie is exquisitely considered without seeming fussy or stagy.”  

Set in the rural Chinese province of Gansu, the film follows a middle-aged couple who move with stoicism from one difficult life situation to another, a story arc which apparently got the film in some trouble with Chinese authorities, who mandated some ‘more optimistic’ edits in the domestic release version. 

We’ll be screening the director’s cut here, which Kenny writes “departs from Western practice entirely by not making any overt move to tear at the viewer’s heartstrings.”  It was featured in 2022’s Berlin and Edinburgh Film Festivals.  

Reprise screenings this weekend include the very popular The Miracle Club;
Umberto Eco – A Library of the World; the in-depth Negro Leagues documentary by Sam Pollard, The League; and Ed Asner’s powerful swan song Tiger Within, with a director Q&A.  

Coming next weekend: screenings of the highly acclaimed drama Past Lives;   another epic-length classic, Jean Eustache’s 1973 The Mother and the Whore;  
the raucous downtown art world doc Make Me Famous, with its producer-director team returning for a Q&A;  and a new animated feature – and 2023 Oscar submission – from Armenia,   Aurora’s Sunrise.