Gary's Corner

As the holiday season seemingly hurtles toward us, New Plaza Cinema this weekend will be offering ‘final screenings’ of the Leonard Cohen documentary Hallelujah (with an encore Q&A by author Alan Light) and Peaceful, aka De son vivant (likewise, with oncologist Dr Gabriel Sara).

Filmmaker Julia Mintz will also return for a Q&A on Sunday’s screening of Four Winters, with its final presentations scheduled for next weekend.

Three other new titles will join our lineup at Macaulay Honors College:

• Casablanca – What with our exuberant Talk Back last Sunday and last week’s NY Times article about the just-opened Neue Galerie exhibit, we just couldn’t resist doing a couple of shows of the Bogie-Bergman classic as its 80th anniversary year draws to a close. It’s the perfect movie to see this holiday month with an enraptured audience, and I’ll be joining Max Alvarez for a discussion after Saturday’s matinee.
• Decision to Leave – Korean cinematic maestro Park Chan-Wook’s latest tour de force just landed on the NY Times’ Manohla Dargis’ ten-best list, which she celebrates as “a delirious riff on Vertigo, Hitchcock’s aching 1958 drama about a male detective’s obsession with a mystery woman.” The version that we’re screening this weekend features a newly-recorded intro from the director.
• Tantura – A NY Times “Critic’s Pick,” in its review last week this scorching new documentary wrestles with newly-examined evidence of an alleged 1948 massacre by the Israeli Army in a captured Palestinian village. Filmmaker Alon Schwarz digs deeply into hours of filmed and oral testimony from soldiers, judges and historians, creating a must-see investigation that’s in this year’s Oscar hunt.

Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema