Films this week 01/31/2025 to 02/06/2025
by Gary Palmucci | 31st January 2025 | Gary's Corner
Our current focus at New Plaza Cinema remains on this year’s Oscar nominees – a fascinatingly eclectic, impossible-to-predict-with-certainty lineup. Joining four others this weekend is A Real Pain, described with her usual acuity by the NY Times’ Manohla Dargis:
“Jesse Eisenberg races straight into life’s stubborn untidiness in A Real Pain, a finely tuned, melancholic and at times startlingly funny exploration of loss and belonging that he wrote and directed. He plays David, a fidgety, outwardly ordinary guy who, with his very complicated cousin, Benji (Kieran Culkin), sets off on a so-called heritage tour of Poland. Their grandmother survived the Holocaust because of “a thousand miracles,” as David puts it, and they’ve decided to visit the house where she grew up. Theirs is an unexpectedly emotionally fraught journey, and a piercing, tragicomic lament from the Jewish diaspora.”
Our four other, holdover nominees include Conclave (eight nominations including Best Picture, Actor and Supporting Actress), Flow (International AND Animated Feature), The Seed of the Sacred Fig (International) and Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (Documentary). We’re working on assembling an ‘all nominees’ weekend leading up to the March 2 ceremony…
But that is far from all of this weekend’s slate. Venerable distributor Zeitgeist Films, whose documentaries on Norman Mailer and Oliver Sacks graced our 2024 programs, offers up a new one, fresh from its boffo downtown premiere – Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story. The New Yorker’s Hilton Als wrote this week that it
“….shows how hard Liza Minnelli has worked, and in a number of genres – stage, screen, television – as one of the last of the great actor-singer-dancers. The film considers how Minnelli, the child of the performer Judy Garland and the director Vincente Minnelli, set out to make herself as an artist through perseverance, and how her charisma could touch many different people all at once. The seventy-eight-year-old Minnelli conveys, still, an inner pathos and wit, and her will to survive and express herself.”
On Friday night we’ll be ‘sneak previewing’ a recent American indie, Three Birthdays, set in the early 70s height of the sexual revolution with its tumultuous effects on American married couples and their children. Its star Josh Radnor (How I Met Your Mother, Fleishman is in Trouble) and director Jane Weinstock will join us for some after-screening discussion. At press time just a very few tickets were still available.
After last weekend’s full house we’ll be reprising Bob Dylan in the 1967 cinema-verite classic Dont Look Back, as well as – nearing the second year of its New Plaza Cinema ‘residency’ – the downtown-’80s-art-scene immersion Make Me Famous, featuring a Q&A with filmmakers Brian Vincent and Heather Spore and a special guest or two. The Count of Monte Cristo is on hiatus this weekend, but will be back later in February.
Coming next weekend
Origin – Ava DuVernay’s acclaimed adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, starring Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Jon Bernthal, continuing our new, Friday night series Gathering For Justice.
The Lady Eve – Preston Sturges’ 1941 screwball romance with Henry Fonda, Barbara Stanwyck and William Demarest will screen on Sunday afternoon, hosted by film critic Stuart Klawans, whose recent book Crooked, But Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges, casts a fresh eye on the writer-director’s enduring classics.
“I tell ya, it’s the same dame!”