Gary's Corner

On this slightly abbreviated weekend (we’ll be closed Friday night for a CUNY event) we’re adding one new film to the New Plaza Cinema lineup, from an up and coming Australian director, Kitty Green, whose previous, harrowing The Assistant made some waves in 2020.  

In her NY Times “Critic’s Pick” review, Jeanette Catsoulis lauds The Royal Hotel as a “keenly calibrated thriller…Place two young, attractive American female backpackers (Ozark’s Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick) in a forlorn mining town somewhere in the Australian Outback; surround them with sex-starved, boorish miners; allow them no access to cell service or reliable transport.Their ensuing trials are a cyst that Green and her co-writer, Oscar Redding, take their sweet time to lance.” 

The physical and often emotional desolation of the Australian landscape has been the site of several of that nation’s cinema classics — Wake in Fright,  Sunday Too Far Away,  Mad Dog Morgan, and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. In a concurrent interview in last week’s NY Times — well worth reading in full — Kitty Green explains, “I guess I like to make films about things I’m afraid of…And I think as a woman in this world, it naturally becomes about gender dynamics and these kinds of spaces, because that’s where my fear is realized.”   

Her family background also played a considerable role — in degrees both amusing and hair-raising: “My paternal grandfather,” she notes, “owned a pub like the Hugo Weaving character in the movie,” and her mother, a photographer and noted professor, supplied some strong creative influence: “She’d often leave the films she watched outside my room — they’d be in the Blockbuster case, so I’d never know what I was getting. I’d just slot it in and it’d be like Haneke’s Piano Teacher or something. It was that kind of film education.”  

In addition to screenings of The Royal Hotel, two of our hardest-working documentary filmmakers will be back this weekend for further Q&As — Richard Dewey (and possible other guests — check our website) with Radical Wolfe; and director Brian Vincent and producer Heather Spore with Make Me Famous, no doubt having stories to tell about their recent San Francisco premiere.  

Last weekend’s big uptick in attendance for Pedro Almodovar’s “mini-double,” Strange Way of Life and The Human Voice, prompted us to add a couple more screenings, as well as of our seemingly inexhaustible entrancer, Celine Song’s Past Lives.  

The engagement of Nyad which we announced last week was postponed by distributor Netflix. We hope to screen it in early November. And coming next month, a re-release of the very popular documentary — out of circulation for many years, and not streaming — The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.
  
Finally, our monthly film classics series will celebrate film noir — since it’s “Noirvember” — with screenings on Sunday, November 12th and 19th. The titles will be announced here next week.