Films this week 04/04/2025 to 04/10/2025
by Gary Palmucci | 4th April 2025 | Gary's Corner
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:
“…. it’s an exemplary historical documentary — unafraid of moral judgment but also attentive to the fine grain of ambiguity that clings to the facts. It doesn’t force the preoccupations of the present onto the past, but rather invites you to think about how what happened then might help explain where we are now. The story took place a long time ago, but it isn’t finished.”
This Friday, April 4 is the anniversary of Dr. King’s 1968 assassination. We’re very pleased to have as our guests following the screening, radio host Mark Thompson and NYC Councilmember (NY 27) Dr. Nantasha Williams.
Many of you know Michael Jacobsohn, whose astute short film curation has been packing our house every other month for over two years. This weekend we’ll get a chance to see Michael’s own filmmaking ‘chops’ on screen with the US theatrical premiere of his new feature documentary, The Cornelia Street Cafe in Exile, chronicling the rich history of a beloved Greenwich Village landmark that operated from 1977-2019. Its former owner Robin Hirsch and other special guests will be joining us at both screenings.
Janis Ian: Breaking Silence will have an encore show, as will our Italian comedy-drama crowd pleaser There’s Still Tomorrow. It will be joined on our program by another recent Italian cinematic gem — and the country’s 2024 Oscar submission for best international feature – Vermiglio.
The winter appearance of a Sicilian deserter in a small Alpine village near the end of World War II provokes subtle but resonant changes in a teeming, close-knit family; in his Critic’s Pick review the NY Times’ Chicago-based Ben Kenigsberg, one of its best up-and-coming reviewers, praised Vermiglio as “…so devoted to evoking a time and place ….It is a rich, enveloping film that asks viewers to approach it as if tiptoeing through the snow.” Oscar winner Jane Campion raved about its young director Maura Delpero: “(The film) has put a spell over me….the world Vermiglio explores delights me a lot.”
Next week, the recent American indies Eephus and Secret Mall Apartment will join our schedule, along with the Brazilian Oscar-winner I’m Still Here.
And, approaching the second year of its New Plaza ‘residency,’ downtown-art-scene doc Make Me Famous will return, along with filmmakers Brian Vincent and Heather Spore, no doubt with a guest or two, and another report on their work-in-progress portrait of James Dean.
Dean himself will convulse our wide screen on June 8 in Elia Kazan’s classic East of Eden….