Films this week 10/9/2026 to 10/15/2026
by Gary Palmucci | 9th October 2026 | Gary's Corner
This weekend New Plaza Cinema will join numerous theatres around the city and the NY metropolitan area in presenting – direct from the Venice and New York Film Festivals – the new documentary NAZA by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, whose Oscar-winning No Other Land we screened here for several months last year.
This film’s approach is dramatically different from its predecessor: on a series of darkened Tel Aviv roofs, about two dozen Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers are interviewed, their faces and voices obscured but giving detailed, often wrenching accounts of military actions in Gaza over the two years following the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023. Gaza health officials have since reported that over 70,000 people, including thousands of children, have so far been killed in the war.
The focus in these interviews – ‘Naza’ is shorthand for collateral damage – is the Israeli military’s apparent willingness to inflict staggering civilian casualties while targeting enemy soldiers , the many ways in which this was carried out, and its effects on the men and women who executed the operations.
In her NY Times Critic’s Pick review last week, Manohla Dargis described the film as “tough to watch, and impossible to ignore.
“At the NY Film Festival’s opening night on September 25, I spoke with Manohla, a longtime friend; joining us was Naza’s US distributor, essentially a one-man operation who’s been booking the film in scores of art houses around the country. She hinted at the labor-intensive challenge of getting a precise balance of the facts and emotions into her review; if you read it after seeing Naza, I think you’ll agree how well she succeeded. In her final paragraph she notes,
“At one point in NAZA, the filmmakers cut to the image of Claude Lanzmann playing on TV. One of the giants of cinema, Lanzmann directed Shoah (1985), a staggering nine-and-a-half hour history of the Holocaust that largely comprises interviews, including with both victims and perpetrators… it seems that his image is being shown in conjunction with Holocaust Remembrance Day. It’s possible to see Lanzmann’s presence in this new documentary as a gesture of solidarity and a homage to another journalist-filmmaker. It’s also a reminder of the singular power of eyewitness testimony, and how the act of speaking about our lives is one way we collectively try to make sense of the past, present and future. We speak, and hope that others listen.”
New Plaza Cinema will be offering over a dozen screenings of Naza on this holiday weekend; many shows are already at or near capacity – as always, we recommend advance, online ticket purchases, and early arrival.
Also on this weekend’s program:
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Make Me Famous – after over three years of exhibition here, the ’80s downtown art scene doc reached a new attendance high in August; filmmakers Brian Vincent and Heather Spore will be back, with the inevitable special guests.
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The Art of Adventure – in 1957, renowned wildlife artist Robert Bateman and biologist Bristol Foster embarked on a global expedition in a Land Rover called ‘The Grizzly Torque,’ setting in motion a powerful chronicle of environmental activism. Filmmaker Alison Reid will join us for an after-discussion moderated by Wendy Hapgood, co-founder and COO of Wild Tomorrow.
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Also, on Sunday, October 18, a special 1215 pm screening of Mike Nichols’ classic The Graduate, hosted by my colleagues Dan Cahill and Abbe Harris.
This is likely its last theatrical screening for a while, prior to a planned 60th anniversary reissue next year….