Films this week 04/25/2025 to 05/01/2025
by Gary Palmucci | 25th April 2025 | Gary's Corner, Uncategorized
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 nature. In his NY Times Critic’s PIck review, A.O. Scott wrote:
“Now is the time to state that “Enough Said” is very funny indeed. Line for line, scene for scene, it is one of the best-written American film comedies in recent memory and an implicit rebuke to the raunchy, sloppy spectacles of immaturity that have dominated the genre in recent years.Ideally, writer-director Nicole Holofcener would be able to work at a Woody Allen pace, issuing annual bulletins from the lives of people who, after 15 or 20 minutes, already seem like your friends.”
Please join us for this one.
Longtime NPC supporter, a true friend, Melissa Newman will return on Saturday afternoon to host a screening of Paris Blues, starring her beloved parents, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward along with Sidney Poitier and Diahann Carroll. Melissa will have some poignant personal anecdotes to relate about this shot-on-location drama, directed by Martin Ritt, on the loves and tribulations of a quartet of restless
Americans in Paris in the early 1960s.
After three sold out weekends, director Michael Jacobsohn will reprise his documentary portrait, The Cornelia Street Cafe in Exile, and do an after-show Q&A. This will be the film’s last showing here for at least a few weeks, so catch it while you can.
Our Sunday screening of Louise Lasser co-starring (and appearing here in person) in Woody Allen’s Bananas and a penetrating short film, Did You Know My Husband?, is sold out, but there’ll be an encore show on May 18. Tickets will be on sale this weekend.
Our monthly first-Friday social justice film series continues on May 2 with Crime + Punishment , a coruscating chronicle of NYPD misconduct in the past decade, following a dedicated group of officers who’ve put themselves on the line to bring it to light. We’ll have our usual cadre of passionate speakers, and guests from the film itself.
Plus, holdovers galore: the Oscar-winning No Other Land, Steve Coogan and Jonathan Pryce in The Penguin Lessons, a follow-up Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration with filmmaker Julia Mintz presenting her indelible Four Winters, the Italian ‘sleeper’ WW2 drama Vermiglio, French ‘new talent’ revelation Holy Cow, and the fascinating, slyly hilarious doc Secret Mall Apartment.
Looking ahead a bit…with 35th anniversary Twin Peaks celebrations – and homages to its incomparable creator David Lynch – in progress around the country, we’re offering on May 3 a special screening of the new documentary I Know Catherine, the Log Lady, with its director Richard Green in attendance.
And still further along, the 1970s NYC saga Drop Dead City; and the US Theatrical Premiere – starting May 22 – of the one of a kind ‘road doc’ Rebel With a Clause, with its irrepressible creative duo, Ellen Jovin and Brandt Johnson, present at many shows to parse our punctuation and grammar.
Whew….I’m out of breath. For more information on all of these, consult our ever-active social media platforms.