Gary's Corner

Due to both CUNY events and the NYC Marathon, we’ll only be screening this weekend on Saturday. We’ll be back to a full schedule next weekend. But we’ve packed the day with a quintet of outstanding films.  

The Persian Version joins a group of diverse highlights, including Past Lives, Theatre Camp, Scrapper,  Shortcomings and The Eternal Memory — which we’ve featured from this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The Persian Version was awarded both the US Dramatic Competition Audience Award and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting prize. 

On RogerEbert.com, a forum for many of the nation’s up-and-coming young critics, Nick Allen wrote, “Writer-director Maryam Kesharvarz’s film is an ebullient rule-breaker, and it does so in the name of the many women it wants to celebrate…At first, it’s about rebellious New Yorker Leila, who clues us into her life of being a first-generation Iranian-American but also the ‘fuckup’ of her big family. Then, in fourth-wall-breaking sequences straight from ‘Fleabag,’  Leila tells us about her past of mixing American culture with her trips to Iran and how she wants to be the Iranian-American Scorsese…”   

Add to this already-teeming narrative the heroine’s fractured relationships and her poignant parental connections and you have “a storytelling style few directors would dare…a dazzling thing to witness.”  

And direct from its ongoing, smashingly successful downtown re-release, we’re also adding the 1993 Hong Kong classic Farewell My Concubine, co-winner (with Jane Campion’s The Piano) of that year’s Cannes Festival Palme d’or and Best Foreign Film from the NY Film Critics. Director Chen Kaige’s epic, initially shorn in the US by Miramax’s “Harvey Scissorhands'” of some 20 minutes, is being screened here theatrically at full length for the first time.   

It encapsulates, at seemingly breakneck speed, nearly seven decades of Chinese history in a saga of two “stage brothers” in the Beijing Opera, and the woman who mesmerizes them (Gong Li, NY Film Critics’ Best Supporting Actress). Another New Plaza Cinema “epic for a cloudy weekend afternoon.”

We’ll also be shoehorning in ‘last chance’ screenings of The Royal Hotel with Jennifer Garner, Pedro Almodovar’s mini-double Strange Way of Life/ The Human Voice and the incandescent Past Lives.  

Our Noirvember dark classics, on Sunday November 12th and 19th, will be Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy and Jules Dassin’s Night and the City.  

The always-a-sellout “Short Films by NYC Filmmakers” will return on November 12. Also coming soon: the documentaries Joan Baez – I Am a Noise, and early aughts classic The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill with director Judy Irving in person.