Films this week 3/6/2026 to 3/12/26
by Gary Palmucci | 6th March 2026 | Gary's Corner
Two weeks to go until Oscar night…here at New Plaza Cinema we’re still slipping in a nominee or two we hadn’t previously had a chance to play. This weekend it’s Come See Me in the Good Light (courtesy of our friends at Apple TV) a Best Documentary Feature finalist. The NY Times’ doc specialist Alissa Wilkinson wrote in a recent column: “Few documentaries are quite as emotionally complex as Come See Me in the Good Light , Ryan White’s portrait of the Colorado poet laureate Andrea Gibson and their partner, the poet Megan Falley, in what would turn out to be the final year of Gibson’s life. Nonfiction films often grapple with mortality and the meaning of existence, and usually those center on grief. This one wraps its arms around the full range of feeling that follows a terminal diagnosis: fear, love, desire, anger, wonder, hope, despair, even joy.”
Come See Me…joins another documentary nominee that’s been playing for weeks here to packed houses: Cutting Through Rocks, portrait of a woman bureaucrat in a remote Iranian town (hopefully nowhere near this week’s bomb tonnage), filmed over the past decade.
Next weekend we’ll add a screening of Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’or winning It Was Just An Accident, another Iranian tragicomedy that’s now taken on new dimensions. Somehow I don’t think the director’s stated intention to return to Tehran after his months of Oscar campaigning is going to work out….
Our other weekend holdovers include Sentimental Value (9 Oscar noms including one for its director Joachim Trier, who recently thanked us during a Brooklyn bookstore appearance “for keeping our movie on the big screen;” Jodie Foster and Daniel Auteuil in Private Life; Korean helmer Park Chan-wook’s concussive No Other Choice; the wonderfully moving ‘sleeper’ The President’s Cake, and the expansive Jordanian drama All That’s Left of Us.
On the classic film front, thanks for supporting our recent four-film tribute to costume designer Ruth Morley; this weekend it’s Roman Polanski’s 1974 Chinatown, a great American movie with indelible performances by Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston, and Robert Towne’s devilishly intricate screenplay. That line “Forget it, Jake – it’s Chinatown” has been hammered into cinema history, and more than a few devoted viewers’ personal histories.
A number of our patrons have asked us to ‘encore’ Polanski’s recent ‘Dreyfus Case’ drama An Officer and A Spy, and we’ll be doing so on Saturday, March 21.
I’ll be travelling for the rest of this month in Australia and New Zealand, hopefully visiting a ‘Down Under’ version or two of New Plaza Cinema, and reporting back. My colleagues Abbe Harris, Andrew Lewis, Max Alvarez, Dan Cahill and others will be projecting, wrangling, introducing and Q&A-ing many diverse screenings…all the things that make us special.