Films this week 04/16/2025 to 05/22/2025
by Gary Palmucci | 16th May 2025 | Gary's Corner
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 Hitchcock’s 1957, nearly docudrama-style The Wrong Man, will be Christopher McKittrick, author of a new biography of Vera Miles, who co-starred in the film with Henry Fonda. We’re looking forward to his insights on this underrated actress, in one of Hitch’s most unusual films, atypically filled with lots of location work in Queens and midtown.
Director Charles Burnett’s 1978 American indie classic Killer of Sheep is another film that deserves to be better known and more deeply appreciated. Its portrait of a struggling family in LA’s Watts neighborhood was at the forefront of two decades of important work by that city’s African-American filmmakers, but for many years the film’s exposure was limited by music rights and other contractual issues. After a long, diligent effort, independent distributor Milestone Films in 2007 finally gave the picture a proper national release, and the edition we’re screening on Saturday also reflects a recent picture and sound upgrade. This is simply an American classic, a must-see.
We’ll be screening on Friday The Encampments, another documentary examining the reactions of students at Columbia University and elsewhere to these past nineteen months of agony in the Middle East. At press time we were still awaiting confirmation of a speaker with that evening’s show– please check our website and social media for updates.
Jacob Elordi offered a memorable portrait of Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s recent film Priscilla, along with his strong role in Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada.
He also stars in the new drama On Swift Horses (screening Sunday), described thusly by the NY Times’ Alissa Wilkinson:
“Often the movies treat love and desire as if they’re easy to define: romantic, platonic, familial, sexual. Either you want him or you don’t; either you love her or you don’t. But the messy places in between those poles are where real life lies, and that’s where “On Swift Horses” dwells. Based on Shannon Pufahl’s 2019 novel, the story is set in the 1950s, in a world in which characters might act on desire but do not really speak of it directly. The air around them is thus charged with something that crackles and explodes, and the movie, when it works, is electric.”
Elordi has undoubtedly been inspired by James Dean, whose 1955 debut film East of Eden we’ll be screening on Sunday, June 8.
Here’s a round up of some other New Plaza coming attractions :
- May 22-28 Rebel With A Clause – a special one-week engagement (note the Thursday opening date) of the delightful new documentary that follows a husband and wife’s 50-state ‘road trip’ in search of punctuational and verbal veritas. The filmmakers will appear at most shows. Check out this recent NY Times article for further details:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/06/nyregion/ellen-jovin-new-york-grammar-table-film.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CRebel%20With%20a%20Clause%E2%80%9D%20celebrates,imparts%20grammar%20rules%20to%20strangers.&text=While%20reporting%20this%20story%2C%20Katherine,difference%20between%20affect%20and%20effect. - May 23 – Big Night – screening of the 1996 culinary classic starring Stanley Tucci, Isabella Rossellini and Tony Shalhoub, with a special guest speaker, ‘food-on-film’ author Deborah Geis.
- May 30 – Bad Shabbos -our premiere weekend of a raucous NYC Jewish family comedy featuring Kyra Sedgwick, David Paymer and Method Man.
- June 22- Make Me Famous – the downtown ’80s art scene doc celebrates the second year of its New Plaza Cinema residency, with some special guests.
- 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 NYT’s 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.