Films this week 9/6 to 9/8/2024
by Gary Palmucci | 4th September 2024 | Gary's Corner
Three new titles are joining this weekend’s New Plaza Cinema lineup.
The NY Times’ Manohla Dargis in her Critic’s Pick review describes War Game, a highlight of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, as “a nail biter of a documentary that asks a question a lot of us don’t want to even consider: What if there’s another Jan. 6, only bigger, better organized and more ideologically cohesive? …Two filmmakers turned their cameras on a nonpartisan group of politicians and intelligence and military advisers who were role-playing in a fake crisis like the assault on the Capitol. Like actors in a grim sequel ,they were taking part in an unnervingly familiar scenario, racing to prevent a coup and maybe civil war….This particular game (created by Vet Voice Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group for veterans) had one overarching rule: the president and his team have six hours to quell the revolt and ensure the ‘peaceful transfer of power,’ parameters that, as the clock runs out, give it mounting urgency.”
Some real-life political and military figures provide verisimilitude – former Montana governor Steve Bullock (as the US President) and North Dakota senator Heidi Heitkamp; Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, conservative pundit Bill Kristol. Check out the all-too convincing trailer online.
Another festival standout – at Sundance, Moma’s New Directors and Cannes – joining our lineup is Good One, introducing a perceptive director, India Donaldson and a luminous new actress, Lily Collias, as a mature-for-her-years teenager whose weekend camping trip with her father and an old friend turns into a fateful passage of self-realization. The NYT’s co-chief-film-critic Alissa Wilkinson fell hard for this “astounding debut, full of the kind of emotional detail that can only come from personal experience….Collias is truly extraordinary. We’ll be seeing more of her in the future. I thought of Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone and Thomasin McKenzie in Leave No Trace, both star-making turns in small, character-driven indies…” Its trailer is also well-worth sampling.
We’ll be paying tribute to an iconic French actor who recently left us – Alain Delon, with two showings of Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterful Le Samourai. It just so happens that over the years at New Plaza Cinema we’ve screened many of Delon’s best roles: Monsieur Klein, La Piscine, Le Cercle Rouge, The Leopard, Rocco and His Brothers…but not this one, in which he plays a consummately cool hired killer who’s double-crossed (or perhaps even more than that?) on an assignment. Melville’s best pictures just seem to get better with age – we hope to present another one, The Army of Shadows, in the coming weeks, along with more Delon.
We’ve had many requests for additional shows of Hudson Valley filmmaker Ralph Arlyck’s sublime personal memoir / documentary I Like It Here, following its debut last holiday weekend. Not to worry, it will be back for a pair of screenings on Saturday and Sunday afternoon, and we hope many more to come.
Also encoring : Annie Baker’s Janet Planet (in an open captioned screening), a final showing of Kurosawa’s epic Seven Samurai and for those who got turned away from last Sunday’s sold-out show, the exuberant jazz doc The Girls in the Band.
Coming later this month:
- Saturday Sept 14 – the return of Hundreds of Beavers, complete with at least a couple of cast members!
- Sunday Sept 15 – Ingmar Bergman’s 1958 The Magician with Max von Sydow
- Sunday Sept 22 – Filmmaker Ric Burns will present his 2019 documentary Oliver Sacks: His Own Life
- Friday Sept 27 – another installment of our ever-popular NYC Filmmakers’ Short Film Showcase (get those tickets promptly)