Films this week 10/20 to 10/22/2023
by Gary Palmucci | 19th October 2023 | Gary's Corner
Over the past two years New Plaza Cinema has collaborated with Netflix to bring some of their outstanding theatrical features to our screen, including Power of the Dog, The Lost Daughter, and All Quiet on the Western Front. There’ll be more here from Netflix this fall, starting this weekend with the sizzling high-finance-workplace drama Fair Play. Another highlight of this year’s Sundance Film Festival (we’ve already played Past Lives, Miracle Club, and Scrapper), Fair Play spotlights Alden Ehrenreich and Phoebe Dynevor in what Amy Nicholson, in her NY Times Critic’s Pick review called “a superbly malevolent erotic thriller about two ambitious financial analysts who drink too much, sleep too little and cannot afford to bring their feelings to work.” This competitive couple is also secretly engaged, and as Nicholson notes, “…Chloe Domont the writer-director (and Billions alum) of this impeccable debut feature, suspects (they) might not survive her cutting observations on money, gender and power.” Ehrenreich, who started his career with elite directors like Coppola, Woody Allen, and the Coen brothers, and had a small but important role in Oppenheimer as a Senate aide, is finally coming into his own as a leading man, and newcomer Dynevor provides his raw, fearless match. One of our most astute film critics, Time magazine’s Stephanie Zacharek noted in her review, “This workplace psycho-romance traces the resentments that can asphyxiate a couple when one partner’s career escalates as the other’s falters, and it does so in the service of a bigger picture.” We’ll be adding extra screenings of Fair Play this weekend. Coming next weekend from Netflix: Nyad, a portrait of the daring long-distance ocean swimmer Diana Nyad, starring Annette Bening and Jodie Foster, from the filmmakers of New Plaza favorite, Free Solo. Also holding over: Past Lives, Radical Wolfe (with director Richard Dewey and possible special guest(s) back for a Q&A on Sunday), Luchino Visconti’s 1960, pre-Leopard classic Rocco and His Brothers, and a final screening of Pedro Almodovar’s “mini-double,” Strange Way of Life and The Human Voice. And, please join us if you can for Friday’s 4 pm screening of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity — in the audience will be a group of visiting Parisian high school students and their teacher, a cineaste eager to expose them to an American film noir classic on a big screen. They are, he promises, under strict instructions “to speak English only!” on their NYC sojourn…
Gary Palmucci, Film CuratorNew Plaza Cinema