Films this week 05/02/2025 to 05/08/2025
by Gary Palmucci | 2nd May 2025 | Gary's Corner
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 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 ‘Jim’ 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 – tickets are moving quickly.
Our monthly first-Friday social justice film series continues this week 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 from advocacy group Revolutionary Reels, and guests from the film itself, including former NYPD Lt. Edwin Raymond, author of the recent “An Inconvenient Cop: My Fight To Change Policing In America.”
And, 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. Twin Peaks devotees certainly know and love the late actress Catherine Coulson, who enthralled us with both her log and ethereal presence. But her life had a much richer backstory than many of us were aware of; director Richard Green will join us on Saturday night to talk about it.
French auteur Francois Ozon has beguiled us in recent years with his dark comedies The Crime Is Mine and Everything Went Fine. His latest, When Fall is Coming, is set, per the NY Times’ Manohla Dargis,
“…in the heart of France, in a picturesque village in a large, pretty house, that Michelle (Hélène Vincent) makes her home. With her kind eyes, guileless smile and upswept hair, she looks the very picture of a sweet old lady. Looks can be deceiving, though, as we’re reminded, and as Ozon’s movie goes along, that picture grows amusingly slyer… in a story about ladies who are old but not necessarily sweet.”
Finally, holding over (again) this weekend will be the ‘new French film talent’ sleeper Holy Cow, and Steve Coogan and Jonathan Pryce in the droll, rueful Penguin Lessons.