Gary's Corner

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Last weekend was our best, attendance-wise, since New Plaza Cinema planted its flag at Macaulay Honors College two months ago. The energy and enthusiasm of six Q&As and multiple sold-out shows was palpable, and we really appreciate your support.

Two of last weekend’s most popular speakers will both return on Saturday, December 10: author Alan Light with Hallelujah- Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song and Dr. Gabriel Sara with Peaceful (De Son Vivant). Please consult our website that week for precise showtimes.

While continuing this weekend with our engagements of Hallelujah, the hypnotically mysterious Memoria and the definitive WW2 Jewish Partisans documentary Four Winters from filmmaker Julia Mintz, we’re adding two new titles:

• Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths: Two-time Oscar winning director (Birdman, The Revenant) Alejandro G. Inarritu has concocted his most ambitious film to date, the phantasmagorical journey of a Mexican journalist/ filmmaker — perhaps a stand-in for the director himself — whose personal crises take him on a border- and boundary-crossing journey through dreams, history and confounding reality. Comparisons to Fellini’s 8 1/2 are, I suspect, welcome but Inarritu has his own prodigious style and is haunted by his nation’s tragic history. The NY Times‘ A. O. Scott noted, “The houses, streets and monuments of Mexico City become dreamscapes of terror and wonder. The movement of bodies and the stillness of faces carry currents of uncanny feeling.” Sounds like a big-screen cinematic experience to get enveloped in on a holiday weekend…

• Memories of My Father: You may recall Spanish director Fernando Trueba’s Oscar-winning Belle Epoque from the mid 90s. His new film is set in the violent, 1970s Medellin, Colombia — a very different portrait of that metropolis than in Memoria, another New Plaza screening this weekend — and chronicles the life of a doctor and human rights activist devoted to both his own children and the city’s underprivileged classes. The UK Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw wrote, “This is a wonderfully sympathetic, deeply felt and tenderly funny drama with a novelistic attention to details and episodes.”

And COMING SOON…

For Christmas, the acclaimed British drama Living, inspired by Kurosawa’s classic Ikiru, with an Oscar-touted performance from the beloved Bill Nighy.

And in January, Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb, a new documentary focusing on two of America’s literary lions, both Upper West Siders, and still very much at work…

Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema