Films this week 5/22/2026 to 5/28/2026
by Gary Palmucci | 22nd May 2026 | Gary's Corner
This holiday weekend’s schedule at New Plaza Cinema is chock full of hold-overs, reprises, last-chance screenings….and a special quartet of films on Memorial Day Monday.
Thinking about the ‘state of the nation’ as this special holiday approached, these four films, which we ‘ve screened either just recently or over the past year, seemed to me to shine anew as chronicles of war-torn young heroes and heroines, the lingering ache of decades-long tragedy, and military men under crushing pressure.
They include:
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The President’s Cake, a young girl’s journey through the chaos of early-nineties Iraq
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Amrum, from Turkish-German director Fatih Akin, following a young boy’s painful maturation on a desolate North Sea island, in the waning weeks of World War II
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Dear Vietnam, a ‘diary-film’ account , over a half-century, of a young woman’s coming-of-age starting in Saigon at the height of the US involvement, and her complex relations with her refugee-family, and her homeland with its ambiguous heroes and villains, in succeeding decades.
Documentary filmmaker and project advisor Susanne Rostock will introduce Monday’s screening, on behalf of filmmaker Tiana Alexandra-Silliphant.
An Officer and a Spy, one of our most requested ‘reprise’ titles, Roman Polanski’s piercing procedural on the Dreyfus Case.
New this weekend is the French drama Two PIanos, from director Arnaud Desplechin, who in the past three decades has given us such convulsive Gallic classics as Comment je me suis dispute…, Kings and Queen and A Christmas Tale . Here he tracks the reunion in Lyon of a talented pianist and his mentor (Charlotte Rampling), which touches off a cycle of depth-charged encounters in the young man’s life.
In his NY Times review, critic Ben Kenigsberg notes that the drama,
“…less sprawling than much of his work, feels like an effort to reconnect with the madness of his early films. That’s a compliment. “
Appearing for Q&As this weekend will be – in its final screening – Moshe Lobel, lead actor in Shttl; director Brandt Johnson and his leading lady, goddess of gerunds Ellen Jovin in Rebel with a Clause; and Matthew Shear, writer-director-leading man of Fantasy Life, who has relished engaging with upper west side audiences this month.
From the UK, the 1949 Alec Guinness classic Kind Hearts and Coronets, hosted by film historian Dan Cahill and myself, and BAFTA best actor winner I Swear; the Tangiers valentine Calle Malaga; and melancholic Vancouver Island-set Blue Heron.
American indies are repped this weekend by Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers (still selling out); Billy Preston- That’s the Way God Planned It; and Sundance alum Omaha, with NPC favorite John Magaro from Past Lives and Koln 75.
More encores next weekend:
— Rebel Without a Cause, where we’ll be joined by Becca Ray, daughter of its director Nicholas Ray, and other special guests.
— three other docs that racked up full houses earlier this spring: The Unfixing, Rabbi on the Block, and Still a Revolutionary: Albert Einstein.