Films this week 2/13/2026 to 2/19/26
by Gary Palmucci | 13th February 2026 | Gary's Corner
New Plaza Cinema will present a two-weekend, centennial tribute to Oscar-winning, New York-centric costume designer Ruth Morley, whose work spanned five decades and an eclectic range of movies including The Miracle Worker, Taxi Driver, The Front, Kramer vs Kramer, Tootsie and dozens of others.
Our first weekend will kick off – on Valentine’s Day, appropriately – with One From the Heart, including a newly recorded introduction by director Francis Coppola. And on Monday, President’s Day (part of our full schedule then) we’ll present a film that I think deserves to be better known – 1970’s Diary of a Mad Housewife, from the writer-director team Frank and Eleanor Perry, featuring Carrie Snodgress, Richard Benjamin and Frank Langella.
Joining us after each screening will be Ruth Morley’s daughter, Melissa Hacker, an independent filmmaker and world-citizen whose documentary (and part-family history) My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports will be included in ‘part two’ of our salute, on February 28-March 1, along with two other titles to be announced. This promises to be an exceptional series of programs.
A Private Life, Jodie Foster’s first French-speaking starring role (she’s been fluent from her teens) is new to this weekend’s NPC lineup. She plays an American psychiatrist in Paris whose emotionally cloistered life is upset by the unexpected death of one of her patients. The director – and a key supporting actress – will be familiar to many in our audience , per NY Times reviewer Manohla Dargis:
“French filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski has a gift for creating intriguingly complex female characters, women whose lives are at once specific to them and recognizably commonplace. In her tender 2022 drama about women, love and mothering, Other People’s Children, the life of a teacher, played by Virginie Efira, grows increasingly complicated after she falls for a man and develops an equally fierce bond with his young daughter. Efira has a small, pivotal role in A Private Life as … an elusive yet seductive presence who appears in slyly teasing, fragmented flashbacks. Her death might be shrouded in mystery, but there was nothing enigmatic about her effect when she was alive.”
This fabulous cast is further augmented by those quicksilver actors Daniel Autueil and Mathieu Amalric.
Another, very different filmmaker whose last picture, Decision to Leave, was a New Plaza Cinema hit returns here with his latest; Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice is an often pitch-black, serpentine saga of one family man’s struggle both to get a new job after losing his old one, and hang on to his dignity…and sanity.
Our holdovers include five Oscar nominees: Sentimental Value, Blue Moon, Cutting Through Rocks, The Voice of Hind Rajab and Mr. Nobody Against Putin.
Plus: All That’s Left of You, Holding Liat, and SHTTL, whose inexhaustible lead actor Moshe Lobel will Q&A with his own ‘special guest’ on Saturday afternoon.
Next weekend, Rebel With a Clause is back for another encore (only a very few tickets remaining!), along with The Cornelia Street Cafe in Exile, and a final screening of Ralph Fiennes in The Choral…