Films this week 11/29 to 12/5/2024
by Gary Palmucci | 29th November 2024 | Gary's Corner, Uncategorized
We’ll be adding extra screenings starting Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, of New Plaza Cinema holdovers including Saoirse Ronan in Blitz and The Outrun, Kate Winslet in Lee, Demi Moore in The Substance (final screening!), the ‘adult-animation’ Memoir of a Snail and Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, whose director Ric Burns will return for another Q&A following Saturday’s 1215 pm show.
Two other screenings this weekend will feature filmmaker Q&As. In Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, a best-documentary nominee at next week’s Gotham Awards, filmmaker Johann Grimonprez posits the 1960 assassination of Congolese president Patrice Lumumba as the launchpad for a richly-detailed mosaic of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary actions in Africa and other corners of the world, echoes of which still reverberate today.
In her NY Times review, Alissa Wilkinson rhapsodizes, “A great documentary shouldn’t merely be informative, or even tell a good story; it should also be a movie, harnessing every tool at the filmmaker’s disposal. In making Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, the director Johan Grimonprez used every instrument cinema affords. His documentary is rhythmic and propulsive, with reverberating sound and images juxtaposed against one another to lend more meaning. The result, in a word, is marvelous. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a furious and elliptical film, a piece of true history structured like a spider web and drenched in real urgency.” Mr. Grimonprez will join us for a Q&A after Saturday afternoon’s 315 pm show.
Writing on rogerebert.com, one of our best young film critics, Sheila O’Malley describes Sweetheart Deal, our other ‘featured’ documentary this weekend, as follows: “…on Seattle’s Aurora Avenue…(the city) in all its diversity and plenty, doesn’t exist at all. On Aurora, women work the strip, negotiating prices with drivers peering out of expensive cars. This is all captured by filmmakers Elisa Levine and the late Gabriel Miller with unflinching clarity… An obvious precedent was set by Mary Ellen Mark, whose groundbreaking, mid-80s Streetwise showed the life of Seattle street kids. Those abandoned feral runaway children trusted Mark to an almost shocking degree, and films like Streetwise – and Sweetheart Deal – are as much about the filmmakers as their subjects. How on Earth did Levine and Miller get these women to trust them so deeply?…The film is handled so sensitively that it never feels exploitative.”
Following Sunday’s 7 pm screening, we’ll be joined for a Q&A by Sweetheart Deal’s producer Peggy Case, film editors Karen KH Sim and Brittany Kaplan, and a ‘friend of the movie’ who is well-known to New Plaza audiences, Lisa Hurwitz, director of The Automat.
Like Lisa’s film, this one was a decade in the making, and is one of the year’s best, and most under-appreciated, documentaries.