Films this week 8/8/2025 to 8/14/2025
by Gary Palmucci | 8th August 2025 | Gary's Corner
It’s another packed weekend at New Plaza Cinema: nine movies on the program, from our ever-durable holdovers to new work from various corners of the filmmaking world that we think deserves your scrutiny.
As many of you know, we like to occasionally present animated feature films from around the world, including the Oscar-winning Flow, celebrated –as website Indiewire noted this week – “for its use of the free-to-download software Blender, which enabled the film’s animation team to craft a lush, human-free world of staggering beauty and rising water. “
Indiewire goes on to report that “Practically at the other end of the spectrum of what’s possible, director Julian Glander has created a distanced, painfully, poignantly pastel vision of Florida in Boys Go to Jupiter (on this weekend’s schedule). The film was also made in Blender….the story follows intrepid – and intensely sleep-deprived – deliverista Billy 5000 as he tries to hustle for the $5K he hopes will give him the independence he craves, even as absurd and miraculous things keep happening around him…” The director will join us for a Q&A after Sunday’s 315 pm show.
From a completely different, deeply anguished corner of the world comes a new documentary, Sudan, Remember Us; the essential UK publication The Guardian reports:
“Franco-Tunisian-Moroccan filmmaker Hind Meddeb is based in Paris, but it was her on-the-spot experience in Khartoum in 2019 of the Sudanese uprising against the reactionary 30-year rule of president Omar al-Bashir which has led to this intensely engaged and sympathetic documentary study. The film immerses itself in the world of the protesters – particularly the young and female protesters – a whole generation energised and brought together by the insurgent movement,” and also one which has been shadowed by tragedy.
The director will join us for Q&A after Sunday’s 520 pm show; keep an eye out for the NY Times’ Alissa Wilkinson’s review of the film, this weekend.
Several of our patrons have raved to me about another new release which we’re picking up from its just-completed run at Lincoln Center. NY Times critic Natalia Winkelman, praised Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight as “a family drama elegantly realized (and) relayed entirely through the perspective of a white child who witnesses her mother spinning out against a backdrop of the bloody, early-1980s transition from Rhodesia to an independent Zimbabwe. “
Coincidentally, a holding-over, third film on our program forms a sort of trilogy of over a half-century of African history. My colleague Abbe Harris, who tracked the movie down, noted: “We’ve been so gratified by audience reaction to our US premiere of The Blond Boy from the Casbah: its universal story of a closely-knit Jewish family living in a tumultuous Algiers in the late fifties; an autobiographical love letter brimming with humor and sentimentality, with a plotline paralleling that of Cinema Paradiso.”
Also holding, of course, Bad Shabbos with co-screenwriter Zack Weiner Q&A-ing on Saturday and Sunday nights; Celine Song’s Materialists, Kathleen Chalfant in Familiar Touch; as well as an ‘encore’ show of Rebel With a Clause hosted by director Brandt Johnson and his irrepressible ‘grammar muse,’ Ellen Jovin.
Finally, my good friend and film historian Max Alvarez will on Sunday afternoon present one of his favorites, the unique 1964, Cannes-winning
Jacques Demy musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, starring Catherine Deneuve.
And coming soon:
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Monk in PIeces – a new documentary exploring the life’s work, struggles and enduring legacy of composer and performer Meredith Monk, with its director present for a Q&A.
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Reds – two screenings, on August 16 and 23, of Warren Beatty’s consummate 1981 political epic (frequently requested by New Plaza regulars), co-starring Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton and Maureen Stapleton. Show times will be posted later this week.
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The General and Me – this exceptional new documentary will be presented on August 24 by its director Tiana Silliphant and executive producer (and multi-Oscar and Tony-winner) Christopher Hampton. Watch our website for ticketing details.
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More Sunday afternoon classics: Paul Newman, George C. Scott and Piper Laurie in The Hustler (August 31), Jeanne Moreau in Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, scored by Miles Davis (September 14), and Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (September 28).