Films this week 8/16 to 8/18/2024
by Gary Palmucci | 15th August 2024 | Gary's Corner
This Friday night’s special screening of the 2015 film Suffragette, hosted by City Council Member Gale Brewer, is sold out, and there will not be a standby line.
However, a few tickets remain for next Friday night, August 23rd’s special presentation of Rachel, Rachel — followed by a Q&A with Melissa Newman, daughter of the film’s star Joanne Woodward and its director, Paul Newman.
We’re very pleased to welcome to this weekend’s lineup the new 4K restoration of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, direct from its six-week downtown run. New Plaza Cinema viewers who reveled in our sold out March screenings of Rashomon and Ran are in for another feast of epic storytelling, cinematography, editing, action staging and iconic performances from Kurosawa regulars Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune. His thrilling tale of a band of outcast samurai’s desperate defense of a small village runs three and a half hours, including an intermission and entr’acte music — perfect for a late summer weekend afternoon. “No one has come near it,” Pauline Kael wrote decades ago…and it’s still true.
This month’s tribute to Italy’s Michelangelo Antonioni continues on Sunday with his 1975 film The Passenger, starring Jack NIcholson as a disillusioned foreign correspondent who makes an impulsive, fateful choice in his life. Its climax features one of the most subtly spectacular pieces of camera choreography in modern cinema.
Coming up in our monthly “classics” series:
September — More from Ingmar Bergman in the 50s, Summer With Monika and The Magician.
October — Epic American Westerns, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (with special guests).
One new title joins this weekend’s lineup – from Ireland, the Sundance highlight, Kneecap.
NY Times reviewer Beatrick Loayaza wrote:
“Hip-hop draws much of its power from the self-mythologizing impulses of its artists, and “Kneecap” most definitely heeds this call. In this gleefully chaotic quasi-biopic, the members of the hip-hop group of the film’s title are tall-tale heroes, the children of I.R.A. freedom fighters continuing the battle for Irish independence by other means: the reclamation of the Irish language, once actively suppressed, and only recently recognized by the United Kingdom as an official language in Northern Ireland.”
Our holdovers include June Squibb in Thelma, crowd-pleaser Ghostlight in its seventh week, the family-friendly, animated Robot Dreams, and documentary Israel Swings for Gold, whose Q&A guests this weekend will include filmmaker Seth Kramer, Israeli Olympic team pitcher Shlomo Lipetz, and coach Sami Steigmann.