Gary's Corner

Another weekend, another jam-packed collection of films and personal appearances from New Plaza Cinema at Macaulay Honors College. Screenings on Saturday will feature return visitors Dr. Gabriel Sara with Peaceful (De Son Vivant), Oscar-campaigning filmmakers Julia Mintz (Four Winters) and Lisa Hurwitz (The Automat), as well as author and Rolling Stone music critic Alan Light to discuss Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song.

Alan’s book The Holy or the Broken – Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley and the Unholy Ascent of Hallelujah was a key inspiration for this documentary, one of the few to gross over $1 million in cinemas this year. It reveals the tortured, years-long genesis of Cohen’s indelible anthem and how it has made (and unmade) the careers of various artists and permeated multiple generations, cultures and social rituals – movies, TV, weddings, funerals…this will be a fascinating after-show conversation.

Another title new to this weekend’s lineup is the mesmerizing Memoria, which has been traveling the film festival and art house circuit this past year in a unique distribution pattern — theatre screens only. When distributor Neon recently asked us to bring it back to the Upper West Side, what else could we say? Master Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (“Joe” to his friends) cast Tilda Swinton as a British expat living in Colombia who hears a piercing, mysterious noise in the middle of the night, one that seems to exist for her ears alone and sets her off on a search through city and mountainous countryside to learn more. And who better to embody our seeker than Tilda?

In his NY Times “Critic’s Pick,”  A.O. Scott calls Memoria “an emotionally wrenching and intellectually fulfilling experience…you have to see it to believe it, and to see it you’ll have to go to a movie theatre.” Our JBL speakers — and your imaginations — will be put to the test on Sunday.

Also this weekend, we’ll be reprising Javier Bardem in The Good Boss, a crowd pleaser from our first month of Macaulay screenings. And in our ongoing series of independent docs on the American-Jewish experience, a special screening of Reconquistador!, in which, hundreds of years after his ancestors were exiled from Spain, comedian Daniel Lobell goes back to the country to perform his stand-up act and learn more about his Sephardic heritage. Mr. Lobell and his family will of course be on hand.

Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema