Gary's Corner
Films this week 05/30/2025 to 06/05/2025
Gary’s Corner
by Gary Palmucci | 30th May 2025 | Gary's Corner
We’ve just finished a remarkable week at New Plaza Cinema, hosting the US theatrical premiere of Rebel With a Clause, the enlightening – and frequently hilarious – chronicle of filmmaker Brandt Johnson and his wife Ellen Jovin’s six-year journey across all 50 states, in search of grammatical and punctuational veritas.
Over a thousand patrons attended nearly two dozen screenings – many of which were sold out, and almost all hosted by Brandt and Ellen, with Q&As that were often uproarious and always filled with great audience energy and enthusiasm.
We’re grateful, as ever, for your support, and hope to have Brandt and Ellen back here next month for more personal appearances with their film. Keep an eye on our online schedule for updates on that; Rebel With a Clause will continue regular showings this weekend, and into June.
Another sleeper-hit-in-the-making arrives at New Plaza Cinema on Friday, fresh from its boffo downtown premiere. Bad Shabbos is the tale of an upper west side, Friday-night Shabbat dinner that goes darkly, hilariously wrong for a young man introducing his (gentile) fiancee to a smotheringly attentive family.
Misunderstanding and mayhem quickly ensue, some of it even fatal, all of it knowingly and convulsively funny. The eclectic cast includes Kyra Sedgwick, David Paymer, Josh Mostel, Jon Bass, Method Man and John Bedford Lloyd, and director Daniel Robbins will join us for Q&As following Friday’s 4 & 6 pm shows, and Saturday’s 7:45. A couple of these are already near capacity, so please plan your online ticket purchases accordingly.
Another show likely to sell out, as it usually does, is Friday night’s latest installment of New York Short Filmmakers Showcase. Curator Michael Jacobsohn, having moved us with his own recent non-fiction portrait The Cornelia Street Cafe in Exile, has assembled another provocative program.
For Drop Dead City, one of our several strong ‘holdover’ titles this month, we’ll be visited on Sunday evening by its co-director Michael Rohatyn, whose father, investment banker Felix Rohatyn, was a key player in helping NYC stave off municipal bankruptcy in the fall of 1975. The documentary covers that saga in hair-raising detail.
Other ‘holds’ this weekend will include Francois Ozon’s spellbinding When Fall is Coming, and the Italian ‘winter’s tale’ Vermiglio.
Coming next weekend:
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Moving the Mountain– on the 36th anniversary of the events in China’s Tiananmen Square, we’ll revisit Michael Apted’s documentary investigation of how the Beijing student protests descended into tragedy; producer Trudie Styler, film editor Susanne Rostock and other guests will join us for a discussion
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East of Eden– James Dean’s incandescent 1955 debut film will continue our year-long examination of his brief, burning-bright career, hosted by Make Me Famous filmmakers Brian Vincent and Heather Spore, and 1950s film scholar Foster Hirsch
And later in June:
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June 14- a second encore of Woody Allen’s Bananas hosted by its co-star Louise Lasser, along with the 2018 short film Did You Know My Husband ?, written by Susan Charlotte and directed by Antony Marsellis
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June 22- Make Me Famous – the downtown ’80s art scene doc celebrates ‘Year Two’ of its New Plaza Cinema residency, with some special guests.
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June 27- A Photographic Memory- An intimate, genre bending portrait of the late journalist/photographer Sheila Turner Seed, constructed by her daughter Rachel, and hailed by the NY Times’ Alissa Wilkinson as “Reaching far beyond personal narrative, blooming into a moving meditation on memory, interpretation and the nature of photography itself. ” Filmmaker will be present.
Films this week 05/30/2025 to 06/05/2025
We've just finished a remarkable week at New Plaza Cinema, hosting the US theatrical premiere of Rebel With a Clause, the enlightening - and frequently hilarious - chronicle of filmmaker Brandt Johnson and his wife Ellen Jovin's six-year journey across all 50 states, in search of grammatical and punctuational veritas. Over a thousand patrons attended nearly two dozen screenings - many of which were sold out, and almost all hosted by Brandt and Ellen, with Q&As that were often uproarious and always filled with great audience energy and enthusiasm. We're grateful, as ever, for your support, and hope to have Brandt and Ellen back here next month for more personal appearances with their film. Keep an eye on our online...
Films this week 05/23/2025 to 05/29/2025
About a year ago Brandt Johnson and Ellen Jovin, a husband and wife filmmaking team, walked into New Plaza Cinema to describe a project they'd been working on for several years that was nearing completion. It was called Rebel With a Clause, chronicling their journey around the U.S. - eventually covering all 50 states - speaking from a roadside 'grammar table' to a very diverse group of Americans about their feelings on proper punctuation, spelling, adjectives, adverbs, Oxford commas, subjective clauses...and that's just a small sampling. The responses ranged from rhapsodic to rueful, frustrated to grateful, and always revelatory about everyday citizens' fascination with this subject. Eventually Brandt and Ellen brought the...
Films this week 04/16/2025 to 05/22/2025
We are back on a full New Plaza Cinema schedule - and then some - this weekend. Holdovers include the incisive French dramas When Fall Is Coming and Holy Cow, Steve Coogan and Jonathan Pryce in The Penguin Lessons and, following its sell-out last Sunday, two more shows of the NYC fiscal saga Drop Dead City. Louise Lasser will return for an encore presentation of Woody Allen's Bananas and a 2018 short film in which she co-stars, Did You Know My Husband?, with a Q&A conducted by the latter's screenwriter Susan Charlotte. This show is sold out, but we've just added a third screening, on Saturday June 14 at 5 pm. Tickets should be on sale late next week. Also joining us on Sunday, following a noon screening of Alfred...
Films this week 05/09/2025 to 05/15/2025
New Plaza Cinema will be on 'partial hiatus' this weekend, as CUNY graduation celebrations continue, with screenings only on Sunday, May 11. We'll be back on our regular schedule next weekend. Holding over will be Francois Ozon's When Fall Is Coming, the crowd-pleaser Penguin Lessons with Steve Coogan and Jonathan Pryce, and a final screening of Oscar-winner No Other Land. Our new addition, direct from its sellout downtown premiere, is the documentary Drop Dead City, chronicling a saga many of us remember - New York City's brush with bankruptcy and myriad other municipal disasters in the mid-1970s. In The New Yorker last month, Richard Brody wrote: "At a time when the very function of government is being destroyed from within,...
Films this week 05/02/2025 to 05/08/2025
New Plaza Cinema will be on an abbreviated schedule over the next two weekends, as Macaulay Honors College hosts commencement celebrations for CUNY's senior class. We'll have two shows per day this weekend, and four screenings on Sunday, May 11. We will be back on a full weekend schedule starting May 16, with some extra weekdays of operation around the Memorial Day holiday to augment the US Premiere of Rebel With A Clause, whose new trailer is now running with most of our shows. Three of this weekend's screenings definitely fall into the 'unique' category. NY Times film scribe Jason Bailey in 2022 hosted what is still one of our best classic film talk-backs, with Al Pacino's debut in The Panic in the Needle Park. He recently...
Films this week 04/25/2025 to 05/01/2025
So many special New Plaza Cinema shows in the works in the coming weeks - personal appearances, premieres, Q&As - in no particular order, let's get rolling... NY Times film scribe Jason Bailey in 2022 hosted what is still one of our best classic film talk-backs, with Al Pacino's debut in The Panic in the Needle Park. He recently completed a new bio, "Gandolfini - Jim, Tony and the Life of a Legend," and will join us on May 4 for a rare screening - via a refurbished DCP courtesy of Disney/Searchlight - of Nicole Holofcener's Enough Said, an acerbic 2013 rom-com co-starring Julia-Louis Dreyfus. In his research, Jason was told by many who knew him that this role, a laconic divorced dad, was the closest to Gandolfini's true...
Films this week 04/18/2025 to 04/24/2025
This weekend's New Plaza Cinema program is topped by three 'sleeper' hits that have been playing here to near-capacity audiences: The Penguin Lessons, starring Steve Coogan and Jonathan Pryce; the droll documentary Secret Mall Apartment (check our website this weekend for possible Q&As); and the wistful tribute The Cornelia Street Cafe in Exile. The latter screening's Q&A will feature filmmaker Michael Jacobsohn and veteran broadcast journalist Budd Mishkin, currently of 1010 WINS Radio. Mishkin has also graced the stage of the legendary Cornelia Street Cafe as a performer, captivating audiences with his renditions of songs by Russian tunesmith Bulat Okudzhava. Get your tickets online asap for this one. To honor the...
Films this week 04/11/2025 to 04/17/2025
Another 2025 Academy Award recipient joins No Other Land (now in its third month) on this weekend's New Plaza Cinema canvas. I'm Still Here, Brazilian director Walter Salles' chronicle of a family's heartbreak and resilience during the tumultuous early '70s, brought home the country's first-ever Oscar win, for Best International Feature. The film's tragedy is tenaciously embodied by its star Fernanda Torres (an Oscar nominee) and a surprise appearance from Fernanda Montenegro, star of the director's 1998 Central Station; both its lead actress and that film, you may recall, were nominees that year. After two sold out screenings last weekend, it was only fitting that The Cornelia Street Cafe in Exile return for an encore. Its...
Films this week 04/04/2025 to 04/10/2025
There have been many New Plaza Cinema weekends when documentaries 'rule the roost,' but this one seems particularly exceptional. We'll be offering four shows of the Oscar-winning No Other Land, now in its seventh selling-out week; as always we recommend advance online ticket purchase, and please check your confirmations carefully. Our monthly first-Friday screenings of films on social justice issues will feature ace documentarian (The League, Sammy Davis Jr: I've Gotta Be Me) Sam Pollard's MLK/FBI, dissecting FBI monarch J. Edgar Hoover's obsessive mid-60s efforts to denigrate Martin Luther King, via wiretaps and other ruthless forms of surveillance. In his prescient, 2021 Critic's Pick review, the NY Times' A. O. Scott wrote:...
Have a question or comment for Gary?
You can reach him at films@newplazacinema.org